Switching between a 20" and 36" is not so subtle. My list of subtle changes:
- crank length
- tire pressure
- tire style
- seat height
- seat angle
- riding surface
Not sure mounting on either foot qualifies as a subtle change. I think it’s worthwhile.
Yeah, I guess you’re right. Remembering to mix it up once a while is a good thing. Recently, Ive been too focused on distance and short cranks. Been riding the 89s on the 700c, got to the point of being comfortable with it. Then went back to the 29/Knard, and all the sudden my Knard felt heavy. It took me a couple good days of ride to get back to the rhythm again. The brain and the muscle had to be retweaked to get it working efficiently again. Same goes with changing cranks from 127s to 150s. Felt miserable on the change. Especially bad on the middle of the trail ride. Again, it takes a few hours of brain to make muscle memory adjustments.
Last night was good. Got over my frustration. Plenty of practice back on the 150s learning new tricks and hops on the 29er. Soon I’ll be back on my beloved 26er again and dedicating myself to more muni with long cranks.
I need to ride my other unicycles more. In recent years it’s been almost exclusively the geared 36" for Road rides, and the Muni for dirt. Then the occasional playing around on the 20" Freestyle and much more rarely the other unis.
But back in the day when I did lots of performing, I rode them all regularly. I could jump from one to the other to the other and adjust after a few seconds. The biggest transition was always going from my 45" Big Wheel back to a 20" and trying to pedal smoothly.
I think doing the switching keeps your brain “flexible” in terms of reconciling those changes with the necessary mechanics of staying up on the uni. The same goes for switching crank lengths. Get stuck on a certain size for a long time, and making that switch is a much more difficult adjustment. I tried riding my new Muni in the 127 holes (instead of the 150s), on stuff that wasn’t steep, and it wore me out in minutes! While I would consider that size a little short for a 26" on dirt, I should still be able to do it. It’s just that I haven’t been riding anything with 125s in a long time.
This I don’t agree with. I had been riding with shorter cranks for a few months, coz I wanted a bit more speed and then when changing back to longer cranks, I found how much easier free-mounting had become. To me moving back to longer cranks certainly made balancing heaps better than before I changed to shorter cranks.
Yes, initially when you’re first learning and on basics it does indeed help(as I said previously), anything helps because your muscle memory is fresh and new. But when you take it up a notch and specialize in a certain discipline and learn on a deeper level, stick it out on the same cranks and wheel size for a good while for that in depth discipline.
The good thing about research is that it assesses multiple people and finds what works for most people. It’s possible that either A. you dont respond the same way as the majority of people do.
I believe the subtlety of change is important. Changing to something completely different does not help your brain work out how to do the similar skill.
I also think yes this method of training would give the greatest gains to complete noobs, but that is because they have the sharpest learning curve anyway. It still would benefit skilled riders however the change of unicycle would need to be subtle so that they were not learning an entirely different skills by switching to something really different.
There has been a lot of research on variable vs blocked practice. Subjects training shooting 20 hoops from the basketball free throw line or shooting 20 hoops from variable distances and positions around the hoop.
Those who do the variable distances and positions start off slowly but retain the skill, outperforming the free throw line group when they come back to test free throws 2 weeks later.
Those who just stood in the same spot for all throws get good at the arm movement during the session but require less processing to do it, those who had variable positions had to rethink EVERY time they shot based on where they were position and how far away from the hoop therefore their brain processed it better and retained it.
I think this occurs using slightly different Unicycle setups also. Your brain gets better at processing what it has to do and figuring it out for itself therefore improving its ability to think on the fly.
I think the same thing happens with street riders who do tricks on slightly variable surfaces compared to riders who only do flatland.
Street riders are quite happy to knock out tricks on weird angled, curved, bumped surfaces and get good at coping with anything. Riders who ONLY do flat generally find it hard to deal with even small oddities in riding surface.
I find that frequently riding different size and style unis (and on different terrain), has a profound, positive effect on all my riding. When I ride only one for a while, I don’t make as much progress. For me, changing it up all the time has really stepped up my game.
I’m with those who think that practicing with your brain turned off isn’t really practicing. It can even send your skill acquisition backwards, because you can imprint bad habits on yourself, from low concentration in general to improper movement or parts of movements. But that’s true with or without variation, and variation isn’t the only way to keep the mind alive enough to maximize learning potential.
In strength training, the “grease the groove” method beloved of Russian weightlifters uses very brief periods of extremely high-quality practice, with full focus. These are repeated frequently, say every hour for four or five hours, resulting in a lot of practice, just spread out. But it has been with top-quality focus, as you both start and end relatively fresh. You simply aren’t working long enough to get very tired even with a very heavy weight. However, the weight does make it imperative that you concentrate.
For example, instead of 3 sets of 8 reps at, say, 50 to 75% of your maximum weight for a total of 24, you might do 6 sets of 4 reps at 80% or better of your maximum weight for a total of 24, or 8 sets of 3. Those are just arbitrary numbers to illustrate.
I believe essentially the same mental processes are at work in the cited study. Though it’s ostensibly about variation, variation itself is largely about forcing active attention. But variation isn’t the only way to stimulate it. In fact, the focus required to do something like attain a perfect movement lifting heavy weights is surprisingly high. Compare to riding on a flat stretch of pavement versus riding a rough trail: concentration matters. With either lifting a heavy weight or cycling, you try to find the perfect line, and have the “correction” of anything from ordinary failure to potential injury if you don’t.
So while variation stimulates the mind to help accelerate learning, forced concentration is at least a major key underlying its learning benefits, and high levels of focus can be applied to increasing skills in even seemingly very repetitious things. There’s practice, in other words … and then there’s practice.
A question we might ask is whether switching things up will help us learn if we merely do extra things half-assed. Or when we’re too tired to focus even if we wanted to. It might be better to concentrate on bringing concentration to the table, even if only for brief periods.
“A scientist said so” is the modern version of “The priest said so.” It’s human nature to find reasons to turn away from the effort of thinking. Sometimes we forget that even science is provisional. A single study is an interesting thing, but it’s just a start. And a scientist is also vulnerable to confusing correlation with causation and thus coming to a false conclusion. I think a little bit of that might be happening when attributing the progress cited solely to reconsolidation. As I brought up in my previous post, variation may work, but reconsolidation may not be the only (or perhaps even primary) reason it works.
The provided link did, at least, say that the study needed confirmation.
Dingfelder, it’s nice to have you on the forum. As you progress on the unicycle, I hope you can share with us how your theories hold up to experience.
Yesterday I had a milestone day riding. Recently I’ve been working on wheel walking, and yesterday was the first time I was able to transition in and out of the wheel walk…and I did it multiple times. Anyway, learning wheel walking felt a lot like learning to ride as a beginner, particularly in regard to me being a slow learner. I really had to work at it!
While I was practicing wheel walking, I developed a half-baked theory of learning. It goes like this:
When we practice, we start fresh, and during the workout, we get worn out. For me, getting worn out makes it harder to do most things. For example, while learning to wheel walk, I practiced, many times over and over, mounting directly into the wheel walk. Each time I mounted, I was more tired. However, each time I mounted, I had gained some experience mounting. So, the challenge in learning was for the improvements in technique to mitigate the losses from my progressive exhaustion.
If someone practices a technique until they attain a particular level of tiredness, then stop…the danger there is that they are always relying on greater physical effort to perform the technique. If I had to define the essence of improvement on the unicycle, it would be the ability to perform the same trick or technique using less energy.
Applying this theory to my practice produces a typical outcome: I start somewhat okay, then I struggle while I get tired, then I regather my focus, then I get my second wind. But the second wind is not so much a second wind of energy, it is more a matter of deep concentration on technique while using less energy.
Practicing in this way increases your chances of falling, for sure. That’s why, when I have something hard to learn, grass is my go-to surface.
Another extension of the theory is to start a practice session with the techniques I am the worst at. Then move onto the things that are moderately hard. Then end with the easier stuff. My recent workouts followed that pattern. I started with at least 30 minutes of focus on just the wheel walking. Then I rode figure 8’s on the basketball court (forward, backward, sif, sib). I ended the workout on some short steep dirt hills. These hills probably took more energy than the WW or the figure 8’s, but my technique for hill climbing is more mature, and I can do it even when worn-out.
I owe a lot of my success, particularly when I was a beginner, from practicing through exhaustion/burnout.
Thanks. It’ll be a long time on that. My experience lies with martial arts, magic, my own schooling, a bit with weight-lifting, and teaching people martial arts and computers. Outside of those specific things I can only speak generally, and who knows, I may never learn to ride a unicycle.
The grease-the-groove protocol echoes my experience and worked for me, so I’m pretty fond of it. It was popularized here in the U.S. by Pavel Tsatsouline in books such as “The Naked Warrior.” His site is dragondoor.com. He’s the guy who repopularized kettlebells in the west after their absence from the scene for most of the century.
So it’s definitely not just my theory. But its emphasis echoes a lot of what I’ve found to be true in learning virtually any subject.
If you go to the page for that book, I’m #27 I think, the big long review. Warning, it’s a rave review and makes me sound like a shill. And the book is way over-priced, always has been. I think it’s the most important fitness book, as well as book about learning, that I’ve ever read though. Get it from a library if you can, because the price is a joke. But I do recommend people try to track it down, or at least read some articles about it to get a grasp of its principles. There are a lot of articles on that site. The T-Nation site also has articles discussing GTG(grease the groove).
A lot of martial arts classes start out by exhausting you. I think it puts in you the position to excel, but later, by clearing out the kinks in both body and mind. Once you’ve really exhausted yourself, you’re less likely to brook any nonsense or false consciousness from your own ego, and have worked through a lot of the muscle knots and misalignments of your body structure that have accumulated during the day, so you can begin to think and move normally.
Most of us, most of the time, don’t.
Hmm not convinced (I have been practising martial arts -karate, Aïkido, yoseikan budo, and now TaïJitsu- for over 50 years)
though I will agree that proper behaviour is a strange mix obtained through both thinking and disconnecting your brain (flow?) you sure need to get “warm” but not “exhausted” (+ I have noticed that people that are tired tend to do inappropriate actions).
pushing yourself to exhaustion while training can, for sure, be done (to enhance your stamina) but should be managed with caution.
I don’t disagree with you there. Or agree with some that exhaustion is the “ground floor” at which you can really begin to learn.
I do think it has other benefits, though, from winnowing out the less-motivated (a motive all but gone in today’s commercial environment) to making sure students get in shape to increasing mental toughness.
And it undeniably can take you out of yourself. I think a lot of us bring the world in with us when we come to the training hall, and it can take a good while to shake it, if we even manage at all. It’s hard to learn while distracted. But that’s a great time to get punched in the face.
I personally don’t believe learning is optimal in an unfocused mind. If anything, bad habits can set in when you’re unfocused which can impede progress, result in falls or muscle strains, or even taking a hit you could have avoided.
But I don’t think most experienced teachers would have their students try to work on learning new or especially high-level material while exhausted. Some teachers don’t even do any exercise during class, figuring that’s what you do on your own time, and class is for learning. There’s a lot to be said for not paying 40 bucks an hour to jump rope.
A lot depends on the length of the class, too. These days, many classes are only an hour long. More traditional classes used to last more on the order of three hours, or even take up most of a day, giving you the chance to exhaust yourself but also recover. You could be wrung out now and feeling fresh and relaxed an hour later.
At any rate, while I don’t think exhaustion contributes directly to learning, getting a damned hard physical work-out is not without other virtues. Especially in the west these days, we tend to need our hands held a lot. Many people come to martial arts classes mostly for the fitness training and don’t even practice or work out much when they’re not in class.