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Holy Moly Who's That Tong Spinning Artist at our Local Fast Food Restaurant?

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Holy Moly Who's That Tong Spinning Artist at our Local Fast Food Restaurant?

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Is what I image every person coming into the Neenah Location of Tom's Drive-In was asking when they saw my sweet tong skills in the backline making burgers. At Tom's, every store has a window into the backline so that customers can be sure that we aren't up to any shady spit-in-burger business.  The window also serves the secondary function of us being able to pass all the food from the backline to the frontline.  Let me just run you through some mental imagery of what my tong routine looked like:
Act I: Basic Forward backward finger spin.  Tongs draped over my index finger at the connected end, I'd deftly perform a rapid write flick to initiate the first spin, rotating the tongs away from myself.  After a few rotations I'd expertly time the insertion of my middle finger into the spin, stopping the tongs in their tracks, and another wrist spin would initiate the spin in the opposite direction with almost no pause.  "WHOA" onlookers would say, "Did the tongs just reverse direction!?" "I don't even know what I just witnessed" another would muse. (They did reverse direction)
Act II: Tap onto the counter into a double freespin in the air.  Without time for onlookers to gather their wits, I'd quickly strike the stainless steel countertop with the tongs, and flick them into the air into a perfect double blackflip, landing safely back in my right hand.
Act III: Rotational toss to left hand. My right thumb would press down on the left tong, with my right index finger pressing up on the right tong. Simultaneously I would toss the tongs from right to left hand, giving the illusion of a traveling sideways pirouette to onlookers.  If the customers were sitting down, they are now on their feet.
Act IV: Single backflip toss from left to right hand.  Just what it sounds like.  The room is silent.
Final Act:  Meeting the tongs midair with my right hand immediately stops the rightward trajectory and redirects it to the left.  The tongs deftly close on an angus beef patty, placing it on a bun.  The burger is wrapped and spun in a counterclockwise direction on the awaiting counter separating front from backline.  The gathered crowd erupts into applause.

That pretty much sums up every shift at Tom's Drive-In, so you can imagine my dismay when I eventually quit (for reasons we won't go into) and entered the workforce elsewhere.  I'd practiced each part of my routine individually, perfecting the flicks, stops, turns, rotations, and tosses one by one.  Eventually I was able to translate it into a whole movement without pauses, and practiced the routine as a whole.  But HOW am I going to fill the void of my tong spinning?  What could possibly be related in terms of hand-eye coordination and throwing something up with one hand, catching it with the other, and all in an organized pattern?  Oh, right, juggling.
I remember trying to learn to juggle when I was younger, definitely before my experience at Tom's drive-in. I even remember the set of juggling balls I had, perhaps because of how many times I had to pick them up off of the ground. It suffices to say that I quit without actually being able to juggle. However after my experience at Tom's, I came back to juggling (different balls) and I quite literally picked up a basic 3 ball juggle in one day. A few more days brought me to do it with general competency. Now I'd feel comfortable performing with dangerous things such as, say, bruise-able fruit. Since tong spinning and tossing had some similar component parts to juggling, I believe there was some positive transfer occurring. Since it was a bi-manual task involving coordination and an object being tossed, there was likely also similar processing requirements occurring across tasks, further facilitating positive transfer. Perhaps one day I will be applauded on a daily basis for my juggling skills.

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The title is something that I definitely didn't adhere to when I first started lifting.  I definitely bought into the male stereotype of trying to have a large upper body and arms, for which unfortunately my legs suffered.  My fitness journey started in my first year of college, and now 4 years later I have gone from  6'4" and 137lbs to 6'4" and 180 lbs.  I'm incredibly proud of my continuing progress, and I attribute some of my greatest recent success to the sterotypical king of weighted exercises: the squat.
When you first start squatting you think that you know what you're doing.  You're relatively sure that you know what a flat back is, and that yours is probably flat.  It doesn't feel like your knees hurt too much, and you're probably getting low enough.  Then you hit the gym with an experienced lifter and realize that you have no idea what's going on with your body.  So your friend begins to give you cues:  Chest up, flat back, weight in heels, drive through the floor, knees not over toes, tight core, make sure knees aren't falling in, engage the back, shoulders lower at the same rate as knees, breathe.  Now you've done a few sets with weight on your back and you're even more confused than before, as well as feeling like you'll never walk again; a wheelchair probably wouldn't be a bad investment.  But then you start to pay attention to what your friend is saying, do some research on your own, and begin to perfect your squat.
In terms of a more complex movement such as a squat or other compound lift, I definitely agree with Ackerman and Fitts & Posner's ideas of the three stages of learning.  When I was beginning to squat, I was definitely more focused on cognitively being able to remember what the cues were and what they mean, and practicing each cue individually thinking about it as I did the movement.  As I became better at actually remembering the cues, I began to enter the associative stage of learning, associating when one cue should begin and another end during the squat, and how to tie them all together.  I began to associate the movement rather than individual parts as more of a whole movement.  Finally, entering the autonomous stage has allowed my body to naturally adopt the correct posture and alignment when performing a squat, so that I am more able to focus on mentally steeling my mind, and controlling my breathing.  Every now and again I'll feel my mind and body go a bit lax in a squat, perhaps becoming too comfortable with the way I've always done it with lighter weight, which usually ends up in a small injury.  For that reason I believe I am always on the cusp between autonomous and associative learning, as I am always finding small cues or tweaks to make, focus on, then adopt into my natural movement pattern.

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The Underground Ballroom Dancing Culture

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The Underground Ballroom Dancing Culture

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I was not one to join clubs all throughout middle and highschool. Unlike many of the padlet's you will receive telling of sports motor skills learned at a young age, all my mine are beyond college. At UW Fox Valley, where I attended for two years, I joined their ballroom dancing team. Did I know how to dance at all? No. Did I particularly have a deep interest in learning how to dance? No. Did I want to meet girls? Yes. Looking back, we had frankly a pretty impressively sized ballroom dance team for the size of the school, and from the first meeting I began to attend each and every Friday lesson. My focus became less about meeting girls and more about actually learning the dances, which leads me to another instance of motor learning that has occurred in my life.  However, coincidentally, I did meet my girlfriend of 3 years now in that ballroom dance club.
I was the person when confronted with dance at a social school dance to either shy away, or perform variations of the popular dance moves "taking a can of soup off the shelf and putting it in the cart" and "point at random places in the room in a seemingly incoherent manner." It would be safe to say that I had no rhythm, therefore I would consider augmented feedback to be HIGHLY critical to me learning ballroom dance in the early stages.  Adam (our instructor) would always count us into the music, which would have been nearly impossible for me alone due to not being able to distinguish between a 4 and 3 count song, let alone when we were supposed to start dancing to the music.  The beginning steps were awkward and misplaced.  When someone says "box step" you would think that I'd know what a box is by the time I'm in college.  My feet seemed to disagree.  Throughout the entire beginning process we were constantly given augmented feedback from Adam and our peers, and as a result we progressed rapidly.  After even a month (4 practices) I was able to perform a few moves of American Foxtrot, Hustle, and ChaCha.  After a few months we were at the point where we formed a small friend group and practiced every Tuesday/Thursday with the absence of a teacher.  At this point I believe augmented feedback was no longer a requirement, but did enhance our acquisition of the dances every time we had our Friday practice.
Alicia and I came to Madison our Junior year, and continued to dance on the Badger Ballroom Dance Team (BBDT).  Having a change of venue and teams really opened our eyes to just how good you could become at ballroom dance.  However to our dismay, we just weren't progressing as fast as in the beginning, more and more practice was needed for increasingly less motor gains.  We were at the mercy of a negatively accelerated learning curve.  Another phenomenon we noticed was the contrast between the American style of dances we learned at UW Fox Valley and the International style of BBDT.  There are very subtle differences for most dances, the most prominent being that there is much knee bending occuring in American style, and very minimized knee bending in International.  This definitely led to some perception-action coupling negative transfer.  We hear cha-cha music, we begin to dance the cha-cha doing new international moves, however since we've practiced every cha-cha move prior with bent knees we end up throwing in some knee bends into the international move.  Whoops.  Now when we've tried to go back to American style dancing we have trouble bending the knees!  Pictured below is Alicia and I at a competition last year.

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Ride ride ride your bike, gently down the road

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Ride ride ride your bike, gently down the road

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When I was a kid, I remember seemingly endless summer days of biking around with friends. You'd call them up on their home phone, be surprised when they rather than their parents answered, and ask if they could play.  Eventually you'd amass essentially the entire cast of Little Rascals, all on small mountain bikes with begrudgingly worn helmets (our parents made us, we swear).  Bike to one park, to a friends house, for a 50 cent ice cream cone, back to your house for dinner, to another friends house for night games, then sleep over and bike home in the morning.  There was one summer where I think I literally biked to the local pool at least 5/7 days of the week.  I just now Google mapped that, and that's a 4.2 mile one way trip.  I'm now frankly impressed with the mileage I put on that bike.
They say once you learn to ride a bike you never forget.  As a young adult now I am still avidly riding a bike, and I particularly find it interesting not that I remember how to ride a bike, but at the large amount of skills I'm still perfecting.  I find that some skills others practiced as a kid, I just didn't feel it necessary to engage in.  I am not able to ride my bike with no handlebars, at least not with certainty or any sort of feeling of comfort.  I'm not able to do that impressive (in my mind) mount/dismount where one leg is swung over the bike so you're essentially side saddle riding.  Until recently I didn't feel comfortable taking sharps turns at a high speed.
This year I moved houses and now have essentially all of my classes in the NAT. Since talking about bilateral transfer in class, I've begun to notice how this concept relates to different aspects of my biking. I always have my right foot in my pedal cage as I take off, deftly flipping the left pedal around to insert my left foot . When I first got the cages, it was a quite the struggle to get my left foot in the cage, as I'd futilely kick a few times at the pedal without looking, try to glance down at my foot to see what in the world was going on, and eventually my foot would meander into the cage.  Considering I have almost never had to flip my right foot into the cage while riding (since I always start with my right foot), I decided to try it for the purpose of this project.  Bilateral transfer works!  I didn't regress to a practically pre-embryonic state of rapidly kicking at an inanimate pedal for 5 blocks, but rather it took me roughly 3 attempts at the beginning lowered to 1-2 towards the end of a short bike ride.
In the past I have always been afraid to take relatively sharp turns at high speed.  This semester, due to the way my house is situated and the NAT being the home to almost all of my classes, I've been subjected to a particular right turn each and every time I bike to the NAT.  I decided to try to take the turn faster and faster, without veering off course or taking it extremely wide.  I've been able to go from around 10mph at the beginning to over 17mph now!  I recently took a bike ride and after I took a particularly sharp LEFT turn, I realized wait, that was LEFT.  I haven't been practicing sharp left turns at all this semester, but here I was taking it like a pro.

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Camp Onaway.  To you, that name only represents a supposed camp, presumably in the summer based on the title, that I have attended somewhere.  To me, it's the camp I have attended every year since 6th grade, grown immensely as a leader and individual, and now help plan and lead.  And by golly, it's also the setting for my first motor learning example!  Dial back the knob to 2006, I'm a fresh and cocky sixth grader, now much older than those puny elementary school punks.  The location is Onaway island, a 6.5 acre island situated in one of Waupaca's Chain'O'Lakes.  The setting is inside the green roofed rec hall, standing on scuffed wooden boards filled with character, and facing off with my latest challenger.  I had just discovered ping pong.
Ping pong, big woop. I honestly don't know what it was that allured me to this seemingly innocuous sport (and it was a sport, I sweat like mad), but it's safe to say without engaging in hyperbole that I was in that rec hall playing ping pong at least a little every day of camp that year.  You could say the same for every subsequent year.  One week out of the year I got to smash a 40mm plastic ball filled with flammable gas across the table at some other kid.  I didn't have a ping pong table at home, I almost never played at any friends house, never joined a community club, and I didn't watch technique videos on the internet.  The strange thing was, every single year I was consistently getting better.  So much so, that in my final year as a camper, senior year of highschool, I swept the whole ping pong tournament and took the medal.  It was one of the only medals I have from that 120 kid camp, and certainly my most cherished.
This part of my life was the first example that jumped into my mind when you were explaining the motor learning scrapbook. In terms of the most effective distribution and amount of practice that is hypothesized to be optimal based on the studies presented in class, it now occurs to me that I had almost the perfect practice schedule. First, my practice was spread out over 7 days, practicing multiple times throughout the day (not for hours straight), and having to take breaks between games to let the other kids have a crack at it. This is consistent with the idea that breaks should be taken throughout learning, and not massed into one lump of practice. My serve variety was one of my most powerful assets. A serve can essentially be considered a procedural skill, as it involves the toss, timing, swing and follow-through. Ping pong serves is almost the definition of overlearning, as you have to successfully get the ball over the net once... then each and every time after that. Therefore the hundreds of successful serves made at camp definitely pushed me into a severely over trained state - in a good way. My retention of the skill of ping pong was clearly high and mediated by the intervals in which I practiced over the years.  Pictured below is Onaway Island.