Working in Movement

Remember the scene in the original Star Wars movie where Luke Skywalker is learning to use his Lightsaber? He’s not doing well, getting hit with small laser blasts from a training device because he can’t anticipate them before they give him a zap. But then Jedi mentor Obi-wan obstructs Luke’s vision and tells him to trust the force. This, of course, makes all the difference, and Luke looks like a pro parrying the laser blasts with his trusty lightsaber. This training comes in handy later in those cool lightsaber fights and in blowing the Death Star to smithereens.

It’s all fiction: after all, there’s no such thing as the Force. Or is there?

Some athletes seem to have something like it with their ability to anticipate their opponents actions or knowing where team mates will be and delivering the ball to them at precisely the right time. Most recently, LeBron James of the upstart Cleveland Cavaliers of the National Basketball Association, seems to know exactly where team mates will be before giving them inspiring assist passes.

LeBron and other talented athletes aren’t using the Force, but they do seem to have something called field sense. Wayne Gretzky, Joe Montana, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson. Those guys could beat you, not so much with raw athletic talent, as much as a savvy way of knowing  where opponents were, what they were doing, and most importantly, what they were going to do next.

The bad news for the rest of us is that this field sense has been thought to be innate, not teachable. You have it or you don’t. But Peter Vint and Damian Farrow don’t believe that. And they are doing something about it, even using methods that Obi-wan would probably approve of.

Vint is a researcher with the U.S. Olympic committee. Farrow is a scientist at the Australian Institute of Sports. Wired magazine takes a look at what these guys are up to in Wayne Gretzky-style Field Sense May be Teachable.

Farrow started out with his own faltering tennis game. Not especially blessed with quickness, he decided to learn how to anticipate his opponent’s shots. He figured some stuff out, but quickly decided he couldn’t think about all the stuff he’d learned and play tennis at the same time. He suspected that any learning needed to be unconscious to work in the heat of a match.

So he set to work figuring out what expert tennis players were seeing that the rest of us weren’t. And here’s where the similarities with Obi-wan’s methods pop up:

To understand what experts were seeing, Farrow meticulously dismantled the mechanics of the serve. He recruited two groups of players — novices and experts — and outfitted each with earmuffs and occlusion goggles, clear glasses that turn opaque when an assistant on the sidelines flips an electronic switch. He then put the athletes on court opposite an expert server. As the server’s arm went back for the shot, Farrow would black out the goggles, leaving players to swing blindly at the incoming ball.

Farrow used a variety of timing with the vision-obstructing googles. Sometimes he’s blank out the vision just after the ball came over the net toward the googled player, see how that player would react. Other times it was during various stages of the opponents serve.

Not surprisingly, the later the vision was blanked, the more accurately the players could react to the incoming serve. But

What separated the pros from everyone else was the ability to pull directional information out of the early stages of a swing and therefore to predict a split second earlier where to head

Remember that learning this court sense needed to be an unconscious process. So Farrow told players not to worry about where the serve would be coming from, but to focus on estimating its speed. This indirectly tuned the players into cues that their brains could use to figure out where the ball would be going and to adjust themselves accordingly.

Clever, and a bit reminiscent of the stuff in Tim Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis.

There are other examples in the article of Vint and Darrow working with other sports like volleyball and Australian-style football. Vint even suggests perception training for fencing.

I’m assuming it’s with regular sabers, not the ones made out of light.