"The mind is perhaps one of the greatest factors in gymnastics; if one can't control his mind, he can't control his body." (William Meade, USA)
While understanding the physics behind gymnastics, or the exact "how to's" of a particular trick is important the mind also plays a critical role in the sport. As stated in my previous post, physically I understood how to do an aerial, and was very close to doing so but would always put my hands down without any reason, other than mental fear.
This article is very interesting, while not directly related to gymnastics it does relate being a successful scientist or engineer to athletics which I thought was very interesting!! As Physics, Math and Mental Gymnastics states, "it turns out that becoming a successful physicist or engineer is in many ways similar to athletics."
Two points within this article are very similar to overcoming the mental fears involved in gymnastics. Both involve starting at the beginning, and practicing until it becomes like second nature. These ideas from the article are:
- Learn the basic rules first-and don't focus on trying to learn proofs or do the hardest problems.
- Repeat, repeat, repeat. Do similar types of problems over and over until they are second nature. Only after a topic becomes second nature calculationally do we consider reading the proofs or theorems in detail.
This is definitely a way I never would have thought to relate science and gymnastics but at least in my experience is pretty accurate. Both can be very intimidating, whether it's solving a complicated problem, or deciding its a good idea to flip on a beam, or go for some crazy new trick. The first step in either scenario is overcoming the mental fear!
2 comments:
So this was a very interesting article... I really like the idea of to learn "how" to do a problem and know it like second nature and then learn the "why". I don't necessarily believe that all things are taught this way like in class I feel like they give us proofs first then expect us to understand everything. What do you think?
I completely agree, which I think has made a lot of the classes I've had to take a lot harder. For some people I think the "why" is very important in order for them to care about what they are learning, however I like step by step processes. From my experience with Mines though the proofs and the "whys" are far more common than the step by steps. Though it does seem like they try to some progressions with classes, proofs seem to much more common for math and science classes.
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