DRMacIver's Notebook
Layers of being bad at things
Layers of being bad at things
Let me tell you about a very specific series of realisations.
First, an observation: I am bad at standing on one leg. Not awful, just bad. I can do it, but not for long, and I wobble.
For most of my life I just thought of this as an intrinsic fact about me. Not very good balance, bit uncoordinated, has flat feet, therefore bad at standing on one leg. It’s only natural.
Anyway, it turns out that if I clench my core muscles and the glute muscle of the leg I’m standing on, I instantly stabilise. I don’t completely stop wobbling, but I go from very unstable to pretty stable, with only a minor wobble.
This isn’t a me thing, that’s normal. Those are just the muscles you use to stabilise that position, so if you want to stand on one leg you need to engage them. But, apparently, if I just try to stand on one leg I don’t engage them enough.
This is an errors vs bugs thing. I’m not “bad at standing on one leg”. There is a specific defect in how I’m trying to stand on one leg, where I’m not doing one of the things required.
At some level I find this very counterintuitive. Aren’t muscles just supposed to… do the thing? Like when I’m walking, I don’t think about what muscles I’m using. And that’s not just because walking is easy. I also don’t think about what muscles I’m using when I’m lifting something heavy.Though I bet some weight lifter reading this just winced and went “Of course you’re supposed to pay attention to your muscles when lifting, you idiot.” You just do the thing and the muscles you need to do the thing automatically engage, right?
Apparently not, though, at least not for me when it comes to standing on one leg. Or with many other movements. I’ve been doing pilates recently, and it’s remarkably easy to do almost the right movement while using completely the wrong muscles to get the desired effect.
I do expect that people who are good at standing on one leg just do this automatically. There’s no conscious attention to those muscles, they just do the thing. This is the unconscious competence stage of the skill, and I’ve just entered the conscious incompetence stage of the skill, where I’m still bad at it but I know why I’m bad at it.
But there’s another interesting layer to this: When I stand on one leg this way it’s hard. I’m better at it, but I can’t necessarily do it for much longer. The limitation is no longer my balance, it’s pure muscle strength. Those muscles don’t like clenching that way. I’m sure this is just a practice thing and is pointing at some good exercises for me to be doing, but right now I’m weak in a way that means that even knowing how to do this I’m not actually that much better at it.
This is probably part of why I’m doing it wrong in the first place: Doing it right feels much worse. Of course, this is a vicious cycle where in doing it the “easy” way, I never learn to do it right, and as a result it never becomes easier because I never develop the strength to do it the right way.
The solution to this is to practice doing things the hard way, but I think it’s important to notice something: If I’d just practiced standing on one leg the way I was doing previously, the results would have been mediocre at best, because the way I was doing it was not engaging the right muscles and thus was not something that would have developed strength over time. In order for it to be useful to practice doing things the hard way, I first had to figure out what it was that wasn’t working.