https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B003T0G9E4/
To my surprise this has huge overlap with The Rock Warrior’s Way.
The one novel part is on changing habits. Instructing yourself (with your mental voice) in real-time is not an effective way to control your body. Instead, recommends:
- Repeat the motion and try to observe as much as possible what you are currently doing
- Pick a goal (eg hitting the corner of the court) and set an intention to get closer to that goal
- Repeat the motion more and try to capture how it feels when you approach the goal
So less explicit instruction and more exposing some sort of gradient descent mechanism.
This feels a little simplistic by itself, but I think it’s grasping at something important, edges of which:
- Conscious, verbal thought is too slow to control complex movements directly but…
- …consciously directing attention to important aspects of the movement is powerful
- Verbal instruction is more useful for directing attention than for directing movement
- Setting up a posture now that I will need later helps, because later on I can just think ‘do that’ instead of having to retrieve the details
- Watching someone move and trying to recreate the feeling sometimes works, even though I don’t explicitly know what changed
- Showing someone a video of themselves moving is useful feedback even without any instruction