The Muscle Memory Myth
November/01/2016 15:32
Perfect Practice Rules Supreme: Breaking the Muscle Memory Myth - by Jay Izienicki - Chief Instructor
Lock back. Strip out. Cycle. Cycle. Reload. Fire. If you have taken any firearms course of value you will have spent some time practicing and drilling this common malfunction clearance procedure. The idea is that when that critical moment comes and you need to fix your gun in a defensive situation you will be able to complete this with both speed and efficiency and without thinking (Jesper Lundbye Jensen 2005).
So the question I have is, why do students say “I’m good” or “I don’t need to practice this that much anymore” and cut corners or skip steps when learning weapon manipulation or shooting fundamentals? What could possibly go wrong with cutting a few corners? Let’s find out.
In the movie Any Given Sunday (Stone 1999) there is a great locker room scene where Al Pacino talks to his team about how football and life is a game of inches. It’s a moving scene that could motivated almost anyone. While reflecting on that speech, I realized its relevance to the lives of Law Enforcement Officers, and citizens alike, in the event of a defensive shooting with a criminal threat.
The reality is, a critical defensive encounter with a criminal threat will be the biggest battle of your life. It will most likely be the most stressful and traumatic event you will ever encounter. This experience will take you to a very dark place where you must use the skills you’ve learned and practiced in order to fight your way back into the light; and most likely take another person’s life. And the margin for error? It is so small. One half step too late or in the wrong direction and you don’t make it. One half second too slow or half inch off target and you miss, or worse you strike an innocent person. The implications are huge, so why cut yourself short in your training?
The inches and split seconds you will need to survive and win will be all around you in that moment. They will come from every draw stroke from the holster, sight alignment and every press of the trigger that you performed during practice (LF News article). When all the inches and split seconds are tallied, that total will be the difference between winning and losing or living and dying. As a gunfighter you have to fight for every inch and every split second because distance is your friend and time is life. The harsh reality is that in any fight, it is the person who is willing to die for those inches and split seconds that wins. General George Patton said it best, “you win where you fight and you never give back an inch” (Axelrod 1999) because that will be the difference in the final outcome.
Let’s talk about how we gain the inches and seconds when developing a motor skill such as in gun fighting. The most common term used in any athletic type training is “muscle memory”. Training so your muscles remember a skill or task so it becomes easier or faster. Truth be told, and I hope we all know this already, our muscles don’t have memories (Wolff 2010). Your ability to make things happen second nature and without conscious thought comes from your mind not your muscles. That is why we strongly advocate that you consistently train your mind. In order for you to master a new skill and reach this level of unconscious competent you will have to progress through three distinctive stages of motor skill learning (Brashers-Krug 1997):
Cognitive – This is when you are first introduced to a motor task. It is your early understanding of the skill to be learned. You focus on how to do the skill not actually practicing it. Learning is achieved by watching, thinking, analyzing and visualizing.
Associative – This is where you begin to practice the skills and associate what you have learned with the physical skills need to perform it. You won’t be able to perform it a high level but you have an understanding of how it is done. This is where most people stop because they think they’ve “got it down” because it makes sense.
Autonomous – This is what we consider unconscious competent. This level of skill is characterized by executing the skill automatically and with no conscious thought. You can perform the skill fluently and instinctively. You must train with the goal being to reach this level.
Believe it or not, there really is a method to our madness when we instruct students. There is a reason we make students do things exactly right each and every time (LF News article). There is a reason we drill look and assess before holstering, proper manipulation of the weapon, movement, proper fundamentals and other critical skills repeatedly in class. The goal is that these actions will become natural and you will improve both your movement and performance as you complete them over time (Tipton 2006). We are trying to ingrain the small steps into the subconscious so you can use your cognitive resources (thinking) for things that are more important – making the right decision, shoot or don’t shoot etc.
Here is the problem. We see students cutting corners all the time. They think “I got this” and don’t need to do a certain part of the processes we teach or they fail to do any practice on their own after the class is done. Yeah, you’ve got it down in the 20 or 30 times we did it in class but the reality is it may take hundreds of hours of practice and repetitions to make something become subconscious and for the brain and muscles to perform at a high level (Morley 2015). That means you have a long way to go if it’s new and an even longer way to go if you are relearning it because you were doing it wrong to start. Remember, you will not rise to the occasion you will fall to your lowest level of subconscious training.
There is much talk in the firearms industry recently about a biological process in your nervous system called Myelination. Simply put it’s the process of forming a myelin sheath around the axons of the body of a nerve to allow nerve impulses or action potential to move more quickly (MD 2014). How much faster? 30,000 times faster to be exact.
Without getting too technical, the thicker the myelin sheath that develops from regular use, the more space it takes up between the dendrites and terminal end of the axon. Think of it this way, if you put marshmallows on a 12” long string you could maybe fit 6-8 of them on the string. But if you put small beads on the string it could easily take hundreds. Each bead or marshmallow represents a step in the process of moving action potential along the neural pathway from the brain to the muscles. Clearly there are more steps in one versus the other and fewer steps translates into speed (Taylor 2014). Don’t run off and eat a bunch of marshmallows just yet, there is more to it than that.
Now that we know how the impulses get to the muscles lets cover the mental processing needed to create the action potential, or impulse, to make things happen during your critical defensive encounter. Through perfect practice, we are able to execute sequences of familiar movements automatically, without having to think about each movement (Koenig 1995). Essentially a single movement, consisting of hundreds of smaller movements, is broken into chunks of motor memory that allow us to skip over the smaller steps and complete the task by using only the large chunks. This is called a “torque profile”. Over constant repetitions we are able to complete the task with less cognitive resources (thinking) and use them instead to make calculations and adjustments as the environment changes. What? Indulge me as I try and make the connection in a way that most of us can understand.
Let’s use your draw process as an example (LF News article). There are 4 distinct steps to go from the holster to on target and firing. However, there are hundreds of smaller steps between each of the larger ones. This is where the game of split seconds really pays off. Most of these smaller steps are subconscious if you have been perfectly training regularly. Your mind does not have to use any cognitive resources to make the smaller action happen because you have done it over and over again until it becomes subconscious. This means that the torque profile you have created ensures that your brain begins to make connections (McClelland 1995) between the 4 major steps thus eliminating all the superfluous ones.
Ultimately, by making these large process connections you are freeing up your cognitive resources to determine things like sight alignment, distance to target, target movement and speed, background, center of mass, or imminent threat instead of how to do every step of the draw. The things that you end up thinking about and processing ultimately consume and distract your cognitive resources and that translates to time. The less you have to process or think about the greater your speed – split seconds and inches.
How does cutting those corners really matter? Think of the draw process as a super highway in your mind and the 4 major draw steps as intersections on that highway controlled with stop lights. At the end of the neural superhighway is an off ramp that leads to your physical action. This off ramp is the nervous system and the myelination we talked about earlier and it creates the roadway. The quickest way to the end is to have all 4 lights green and no traffic – the result of perfect practice. You have trained the traffic off the highway and trained all the stops lights green – it’s smooth sailing. So you think.
All of those corners you cut in class or during practice, what happened to them? Well, your failure to make those steps subconscious means they are now stop signs that pop up on your superhighway under stress. Your brain has to stop, even if for a split second and think its way through the stop sign. Then the next corner you cut puts up another stop sign. Your brain never even got up to speed and it has to stop and think its way through yet another stop sign. You can now see the cumulative effect.
Here is the kicker, if your brain becomes overloaded with the cognitive processes in this rapidly evolving, high stress defensive encounter it can, and will, retreat back to your primitive brain where caveman decision like “hungry, must eat food” and “thirsty, must drink water” are made. This is where your primal instincts of Fight, Flight and Freeze reside (LF News article). This is the last place you want decisions made when you are in this type of situation. But the greater the load you put on your cognitive processing, due to lack of perfect training, the more likely you are to have your brain “run home to momma” and let the caveman decide your next course of action for you. You do not want that but your attacker most certainly does. It becomes their advantage over you and it will be turned into your victimization.
When you apply John Boyds OODA cycle (Boyd 1976) to the encounter we can see how perfect practice of a motor skill and not cutting corners can truly be the difference between living and dying. If we add up the time to observe the threat, orient toward it, decide what action we are going to take against it and then take action we can see a lot happens in a short period of time. The combination of building a robust neural pathway through myelination and an improved torque profile truly does give us the split seconds and inches we need to not only survive but win an encounter with a criminal threat.
It’s your success. You’ve got to rise and grind for it through practice. You have to give up your time, your peace and your sleep for it. This is how you gain the inches and split seconds. Practice perfectly each and every time you go to the range or do dry fire so your torque profile improves and you create your action potential more rapidly. Perform crisp and consistent repetitions to increase myelination so your movements are fast (Tipton 2006). You can’t cut corners.
In my youth there was a football strength coach that would tell our team “I can show you the exercises and teach you the proper techniques so you can get stronger and faster, and ultimately succeed. But the one thing I can’t do is do the exercises for you. That is your responsibility. Success or failure is on you.” This is so true when it comes to what we teach in our classes. We teach you all the steps, techniques, procedures, drills and skills necessary to be safe and succeed but we can’t do them for you, that’s your responsibility. You must practice in order to make permanent. But practice does not make perfect. As Vince Lombardi said, “Perfect practice makes perfect” (Jr 2004).
Be safe, train in reality and do it often. See you on the range.
Stay in the fight.
Jay Izienicki, Chief Instructor - Latent Force
References
Axelrod, Alan. 1999. Patton on Leadership: Strategic Lessons For Corporate Warfare. Prentice Hall.
Boyd, John R. 1976. "Destruction and Creation." Project on Government Oversight - Archives. September 3. pogoarchives.org.
Brashers-Krug, Reza Shadmehr and Thomas. 1997. "Functional Stages in the Formation of Human Long-Term Motor Memory." The Journal of Neuroscience. January 1. http://www.jneurosci.org/.
Jesper Lundbye Jensen, Peter C. D. Marstrand, Jens B. Nielsen. 2005. "Motor skill training and strength training are associated with different plastic changes in the central nervous system." American Physiological Society. October 1. http://jap.physiology.org/.
Jr, Vince Lombardi. 2004. The Lombardi Rules: 26 Lessons from Vince Lombardi the Wolrd's Greatest Coach. McGraw-Hill Education.
Koenig, Stephen Michael Kosslyn and Olivier. 1995. Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience. Free Press.
McClelland, J.L. 1995. "A Connectionist Perspective on Knowledge and Development." Stanford University. https://psychology.stanford.edu/.
MD, Daniel J. Siegel. 2014. Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain. Penguin.
Morley, Kenny. 2015. Repeating Great Performances with Muscle Memory. June 8. http://sportscience.utah.edu.
1999. Any Given Sunday. Directed by Oliver Stone.
Taylor, Ashley P. 2014. "Myelin’s Role in Motor Learning." The Scientist. October 16. http://www.the-scientist.com.
Tipton, Charles M. 2006. Advanced Exercise Physiology. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.
Wolff, Ben. 2010. What is Muscle Memory? hhtp://vimeo.com/8435192.