I learned to swim on my own as a little kid. 30 years later, I decided to join swimming classes; I saw that swimming is extraordinarily complex. There are too many things to learn at the same time for someone to be able to pay attention and learn proper form for all of them. Inevitably, you'll learn proper form for one thing, and incorrect for many others, then, with one good habit in the bag, you can start focusing on the next one, then the next one, then the next one. From time to time, you will fall back to the old habits for some certain part of the motion, so you'll need to revisit it, and debug it again.
Tom Brady, who many people consider the greatest quarterback in the history of American football, still has a throwing coach (Tom House [1]), and he's still debugging his throwing motion. After 20+ years of throwing in a professional league.
So, for sure, unlearning habits is difficult, but learning only proper form from the start is probably an exceedingly rare exception. I think for most people the process of learning will involve learning incorrect form first, and attempting to fix this later.
A much harder thing for adults is to re-learn something they already know in a different way. For example, I thought I knew how to swim until I took private lessons with an instructor. I spent most of the time 'unlearning' the wrong techniques. The muscle memory was just engraved. I know guys don't ask for directions, but if you want results, pro help can really pay off.
Because habits are hard to break. The kids who grow up with correct (new) strokes dont have to unlearn the old strokes. I still do oldschool breaststroke, not the new vertical kick. The new kids hoping for the olympics dont even recognize what i do. Soon it will become the new norm.
A lot of people hold this belief that knowing how to do X with an "incorrect form" is worse than not knowing at all, if you want to progress at doing X.
In programming we have debugging. You have a program that does X, but with some bugs. You later improve the program by removing the bugs.
Why can't we do this in "real life" as well? You learn how to add multi-digit numbers from right to left. You then later relearn that by going from left to right. You learn to swim with your head above the water, then later learn to keep your head in the water, and turn it every two strokes to get a quick breath.
In fact, I read about this concept of "debugging" bad habits exactly in the context of juggling. Seymour Papert covers this in Mindstorms [1], p 111. He explains that the most common "bug" that prevents people from performing 3-ball juggling is following one ball with the eyes. Once you are aware of that, you the fix is quite easy: keep your eyes pointed at the apex of the ball's trajectory. In a later chapter he goes on to say that other things can be "debugged" as well; one example is relearning skiing to replace a v-type position to a parallel ski position.
I've never able to swim. 2 weeks ago I set myself a challenge to be able to swim in 7 days. By the end of the first day, I was able to tread water. By the end of 7 days of swimming, I was able to do a full lap of the pool[1]. My technique wasn't great but I'm still happy with my progress.
Looking back, there are definitely things that I could have done to learn even faster. This has made me curious about how other people learn new skills.
What do you find most difficult when learning a new skill? Are there any recurring things that help you learn new skills faster? Would love to hear your thoughts!
Most sporting skill is from repetition leading to muscle memory so you are able to do the skill consistantly every time. There are lots of examples of pros with "bad" form that still exceeded in their sport just because they had become accustomed to this "bad" form.
Even more, it confuses unconsciously learned skills and skills learned by repetition. Repetition is not always the best or the only way to learn those skills that get mastered at an unconscious level (though it's definitely an important way to achieve unconscious mastery at some things). These sorts of skills often involve physical activity, movement, writing and coordination generally. If a person begins with "poor form" in such a skill, repeating the activity only makes the poor form more ingrained.
Alternative method include something directly guiding student physically and practicing in such a way that you get immediate feedback if you are wrong.
No. It never gets a habit. It is torture, and you have to look up the commands every time you do it, because you do it infrequently enough not to learn by heart.
Ever read Zen In The Art of Archery[1]? In it, the author talks about how, when learning a brand new physical practice like archery, at first you just dive in and start doing it without knowing the fundamentals and, truly, how difficult it is. So you're kind of blessed by naivete. But as soon as you choose to learn it the right way, you're immediately sent back to basics and are faced with the fact that you know nothing and are likely the worst you'll ever be at this. But that's a necessary part of the journey.
This happened to me in golf. I was naturally decent at it without ever taking a lesson or watching a video about how to swing. That only got me so far. Now I'm taking lessons and relearning everything. I feel worse at the sport today than I was two years ago. But if I acknowledge the truth in that and push forward, I'll ultimately be much better than I could have been.
Same process with meditation. I've been practicing for 11+ years and right now my practice is pretty challenging. But that comes with the process.
I tried that once, but already back then my muscle memory wasn't having it. Now I'm too old to put down the required hours to relearn and get back up to speed.
For me the trick is to know which side it was on when I threw it, and doing the exact same throw each time. You have to practice the same move again and again. Throw and catch throw and catch, like practicing music scales.
If you're doing the same throw and the same catch each time, it just becomes muscle memory (again, like playing an instrument) and you can get a good success rate.
I have a data point/anecdote! I like to play certain sports. After about a year of intense focus and determination, you can get good at pretty much any sport. What I've noticed though is that on a good day, I'm messing up about 15% of the time. If I mess up significantly more than that, I get discouraged and want to go home and try again the next day. If I'm not messing up enough, I feel like I'm overfitting a particular technique and should probably be messing up more to become more well-rounded.
Obviously a modicum of training is always needed in most contexts, the here is that if you have an innate ability to, say, swim (which I don't by the way) you can pick it up after a few hours in the water (I've seen toddlers do it), and that's only because you have a web of neural pathways that makes you particularly apt to this specific task. Lacking that wiring you're left flailing in the water wondering why you had such a stupid idea as to get in the water in the first place.
This is exactly why I switch hobbies every few months. You spend so much time learning to do the thing before you actually try it. Like kayaking, or rock climbing, then you figure out that once you know what you are doing it just becomes repetitive. I wish there was a to just jump past the learning curve to experience things before you learn how to do them.
I would say sloppily, never had any lessons.
I have trained myself some time ago, but I ended up returning to the sloppy way, I ended up finding it faster (maybe its not but its how it works for me)
Bad habits are often linked to repetitive injuries in the long run. This is something that you don't really notice several months in, but will bite you when you start to play a lot.
If you really want to self-teach, I would suggest at least take some classes in the beginning to properly form your posture.
Tom Brady, who many people consider the greatest quarterback in the history of American football, still has a throwing coach (Tom House [1]), and he's still debugging his throwing motion. After 20+ years of throwing in a professional league.
So, for sure, unlearning habits is difficult, but learning only proper form from the start is probably an exceedingly rare exception. I think for most people the process of learning will involve learning incorrect form first, and attempting to fix this later.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_House
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