Muscle memory: It's all in your head

Toward the end of last night’s Haganah class I hit a wall where I just couldn’t tolerate doing the repetitions of the gun disarm anymore. It wasn’t because my body was spent, it was because my mind was spent. I just couldn’t absorb any more information.  I reached a point where I was defeating the purpose of training because I was training incorrectly.
Muscle memory, muscle memory, muscle memory. This is the key to learning Haganah. The movements your body needs to make have to become so ingrained that you can execute them without thinking and without hesitation. To create muscle memory we focus on repetition of movement and more repetition and when we’re done with repetition we add in some more repetition. And even though what we are practicing is physical (grabbing, throwing, punching, twisting) it’s all being catalogued in the mind and requires concentration to burn the movements onto the hard drive that is our brain. So last night, as my movement became sloppy and I wasn’t focusing on the task, I was reinforcing incorrect movement into my muscle memory. Many instructors, be they piano teachers, golf coaches or Haganah black belts, say they prefer to teach students with no prior training. That’s because the student’s mind is a clean slate the proper muscle memory can be etched upon. If the student has had incorrect prior training, they must first unlearn those incorrect moves before learning the correct moves. So if you reach a point where your moves are becoming sloppy, you need to stop, take some deep breaths and refocus yourself, because the more you do it incorrectly the more you’re going to do it incorrectly.

Exercise and cognitive function

A story in today’s LA Times discusses the link between exercise and improvements in brain function. Taking combat fitness classes will not only improve my strength and speed, all that huffing, puffing and sweating should also increase my ability to learn and retain all of the Haganah moves.