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"Oh man, I can't feel my toes! I don't have any toes!" -Donkey from Shrek

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"Oh man, I can't feel my toes! I don't have any toes!" -Donkey from Shrek

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A few years ago I got into the bad habit of sleeping with my arm outstretched under my pillow. Many nights my body would thankfully wake me up and I would feel the tingling, 'sleeping' sensation in my arm. I raised my shoulder and bent my elbow to move out from under the pillow, but suddenly realized I had no Idea where my hand was! My hand had fallen asleep to the point where I had no sensation in my wrist and fingers.

Somesthesia is the sensation of touch, pain, heat, and limb awareness/position in our bodies. There are two types of receptors that fulfill this sensation, however the proprioceptors are the most relevant to my story because they provide the sensation of where or body parts are in relation to each other. Because of the pressure on a nerve in arm (due to the crooked position of my arm when I fell asleep), my proprioceptors were lagging behind in their duties to notify my brain where my hand was in relation to the rest of my body.

Here's Donkey himself!

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Thinking back to my swimming days (yet again), I vividly remember my coaches teaching my teammates and I how to use internal imagery. Before big meets, they would emphasize its importance as a supplement to our physical training. They encouraged us to concentrate on the entirety of the race in great detail. How would the water feel around you as each stroke powerfully propels you forward? What would the waves and splashes sound like underwater? I would imagine my form throughout the entire race, from the starting block to the finish. I would imagine how the perfect, tight, water-dynamic streamline would feel like. Using imagery, in my opinion, is a way to test how present you can truly live in a moment.

In more recent years, I have found that imagery can be very useful for things other than athletics as well! At times when I get anxious, I have learned through that using imagery can be a very useful to mentally remove yourself from a stressful situation and to recenter yourself. I often think about spending time with my family. I imagine what my grandma's food smells like in the oven, and what the conversations in the air sound like. I imagine what it feels like to pet my grandparents fluffy dogs and my moms cats, and the happiness that always accompanies me when I am with my grandparents and my mom.

Sometimes I imagine myself sitting alongside a beach. I imagine what the sand feels like between my toes and how the smell of fresh sea salt fills the air. I often listen to ocean waves in bed at night because I find their harmonious melodies calming. Using imagery as a tool for mental health and mindfulness is an excellent way to naturally calm nerves. It helps me focus on the details in life that can keep me grounded and present.

Since I already have my swimming meme in another post, heres a pretty picture of a beach that would be great to meditate on!

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For this story, I was trying to brain storm what a good example of a schema is in my life and I immediately thought of food... but after rereading the schema theory of motor development, I realized that it had to be a class of movements, not just something as simple as listing off every food item that fits into the dessert category.

Years ago I used to swim at West high school and I vividly remember the crazy amount of jumping exercises our coaches had us doing before we would get in the pool. We would jump up steps as well is jumping rope, both double and single legged. We would do squat jumps, high jumps, sideways jumps, tuck jumps box jumps, frog jumps, and streamline jumps.The amount of jumping we were doing was hysterical.

Jumping means to "push oneself off a surface and into the air by using the muscles in one's legs and feet" (Google definition, 2018). This is a schema to me because there are countless different types of jumps you can do but the general movement/mechanics and muscle groups being used are the same. The way you prepare your body for take off is the same for one jump as it would be for any other jump. Though your upper body may be positioned differently or your direction may change, your legs are still performing the same, simple movement.

I am currently training for the Steve Jumping olympic trials:

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Mummifying an ankle.. aka taping an ankle

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Mummifying an ankle.. aka taping an ankle

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When I was learning how to tape an ankle before I got into the athletic training program here at UW, my first completed ankle wrap was far form beautiful. Things weren't tight enough, there were wrinkles everywhere, and the prewrap rolled half way across the room.

As the semester long lab went on, I noticed improvements. For example one day I no longer dropped the prewrap and I only had half the amount of wrinkles! With each lab I went too, I became increasingly more familiar with the 'feel' of the tape and the angles that worked to my advantage while taping. It seemed as though once I caught on to the flow of how and where to apply the tape, a light bulb came on in my head. After a few weeks I no longer took more than 10 minutes to wrap an ankle, in fact I can wrap ankles in half that amount of time now!

Looking at my progress throughout the spring semester, over the summer, and going into football camp here in a few days, it appears that ankle taping in the short term can be represented on a positively accelerating curve and an oglane curve in the long run. For me personally, I am still learning and am very new to the program. With the help of wonderful leaders, I have gotten really good at taping ankles and I would say that my learning curve has been accelerating positively! At first it seemed as though I was not making progress, but as the weeks went on, it is clear that once I clearly got the hang of it, my improvement has not slowed down!

However, compared to the head athletic trainers at the McClain center, I am as slow as a turtle. I would classify ankle taping as a Ogive/S-shaped curve in the long run. It is very difficult to make progress at first, hence a leveled line, but once you catch on to the skill, your progress goes through the roof. As you get better at ankle taping, the line begins to level off again, because there is an increasingly smaller window for improvement, once you reach perfection that is... (aka I'm talking about the AT's here at UW Madison, they are phenomenal).

In the picture below, the man is applying a 'horseshoe' medially to laterally. All components of your typical ankle taping are designed to secure the calcaneus and prevent inversion ankle sprains.

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Before enrolling in Dr. W's clinical anatomy class last spring, I did not know what it took to memorize and understand hundreds of words. I decided to make notecards to help me gain a better understanding of the information. I had tried using various study methods, such as drawing pictures or looking at a diagram, but I soon realized that there was no better way for me to learn the actions, origins, and insertions, than flash cards. Before I knew it, I had flown through my first pack of notecards and had to go and buy another pack not just once, but TWICE, because of the incredible amount of terms we needed to know.

When I first wrote everything on the cards, I kept practicing them in the same blocked pattern that I wrote them in. I would say their actions, origins, and insertions in the same order every time. After awhile I realized that I was not necessarily correlating the right answer to the term anymore but rather to the sequencing pattern I had developed in my brain. I knew that certain muscles cards were going to come before others, and that I had just memorized the order.

To test this blocked pattern of mine, I decided to randomize my practice by shuffling the deck of cards before every run through. Everytime I had to forget the order of the terms from the previous round of study in order to reconstruct and apply my knowledge to the terms in any given order. After doing this, I realized that I in fact did not know the information as well as I thought I did. Thankfully I caught this in time before my first exam, so I was able to make the most out of my future studying through random practice instead of a blocked practice.

For some reason I see pictures of this dog everywhere and I think that the captions are hilarious!

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Within the past year or so I have grown to love yoga for various reasons such as the alignment, relaxation, and strength that comes from the practice. When I was thinking of what to write about on my padlet, I asked myself whether  yoga a considered a skill or an ability. At first I thought it was surely just a skill, but with further examination, I came to realize that yes yoga itself is a skill because it can be modified with practice, but flexibility on the other hand is more of an ability in my opinion. While most people have goals revolving around flexibility in yoga, I realized that I have have had great flexibility since day one!

There is not a sufficient amount of improvement I could make in my flexibility to deem it a skill, but rather it is an ability. Yoga, the practice, on the other hand is something that takes large doses of concentration, practice, and patience. Thinking back to my first yoga class at the Nat my freshman year, I can't help but laugh a little bit at how much I used to shake the ENTIRE time. I took a break form yoga for awhile until this summer. I dedicated a lot of time to the practice at a yoga studio on campus after work on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Over the past few months I have truly seen my physical and emotional being transform into someone with better balance, strength, coordination and meditation skills. I am now able to do exercises I had never dreamed of being able to do, even in my wildest dreams. I can hold positions for double the amount of time I could when I was first learning yoga.

No one is born with the ability to do yoga, it takes time and a very mindful amount of practice. Flexibility on the other hand is something that I do believe I have been genetically equipped with since day one.

Never underestimate the difficulty level of yoga! It will catch you by surprise, I promis!

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When I first started working at Barriques, a local coffee shop, I had to dedicate an absurd amount of concentration to each component of the drink just to make sure it tasted right. Making a latte is far more complicated than you would think!

How much milk do you need to pour so you don't run out or have extra? How long should the espresso shot pour for? How hard should I tamp the grounds (a tamp is when the barista compresses the grounds within the portafilter before it starts brewing)? What is the correct ratio of syrup or chocolate to coffee that needs to be added? Which part goes in the cup first? How in the world do I know if my milk is foamed enough? All of these questions ran through my head with every drink I made for the first few months.

After I mastered the fundamentals of crafting the 'perfect' latte, my next challenge was latte art. I watched my manager pour art numerous times and even proceeded to spend hours watching youtube videos on this mysterious talent. Everyday I would play with the components of the drink and practice pouring latte art.There were times my cup overflowed all of the counter, times where I anticlimactically ran out of milk half way through the pour, and times when I had an overload of foam consistent with the fluffiest cappuccino you could imagine. After trial and error over the course of a few months, I soon mastered the skill.
It wasn't until recently when we had a very large turnover at work that I realized my actions of how to create latte art were now apart of my procedural memory. It was very apparent that I knew what to do, but I couldn't find the words to describe (declarative) exactly what I was doing to the new employees. I showed them drink after drink, rambling various instructions that seemed to be of little help to the newbies. I came to realize that after a year of successfully doing latte art, this skill was now a non conscious task for me. I assured them that it just takes practice and the best way to learn is to go through many drinks of trial and error.

Here is a picture of my own latte art!

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My mother, a former UW Swimmer, had me in the water as soon as a doctor deemed it safe. The sport stuck with me and became a major part of my journey growing up as well. Swimming competitively for 10 years, there were days I was in the pool before the sun rose in the morning and again in the evening after the sun set. I often would swim more miles in the pool than I came close to walking on land.

During a typical practice, some sets were fast, some were slow, some wer repetitive, and some wer extravagantly complicated. In practice there was a lot of emphasis of doing things the RIGHT way and staying away of poor form even when the lactic acid overwhelmingly crept in.

Despite all of the blood, sweat, and tears in practice, race day can bring on complications of its own. Adrenaline can either work to your advantage or it can lead to compromising accuracy in exchange for speed. If the accuracy of your form deteriorates, yes you may be able to spin your arms faster...however, this compromise is in no swimmers best interest. You may be able to spin your arms faster, but more times than not, overall speed in a race must come after effective, efficient, accurate form is achieved. When form is compromised, the athlete can move their arms faster, but each stoke becomes less and less efficient in propelling the athlete through the water.

When you think spinning your arms out of control will make you so much faster, yet in reality......