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When I was younger, my little sister and I did not have the best relationship. I was fairly active, and always wanted to play outside and expend energy, whereas she would much rather stay in and read a book or solve Sudoku puzzles. Despite this, when she and I would be engaging in the same activity as one another, we were both very competitive. However, some of these "competitions" seemed very one-sided. While my younger self might think that I was just superior or the competition was "bull crap", I now understand that a lot of this disparity can be attributed to Individual Differences.

Individual differences can occur due to any number of variables, including age, weight, gender, size, and countless more. The main one that I want to talk about is the one that I experienced the most with my sister, which is gender. When I learned in this class that females tend to outperform males on fine motor skills and rapid manipulation whereas males tended to excel at physical skills, a lot of my childhood started to make sense. I would often beat my sister at games like kickball or races, but she would constantly come out on top in games such as slapjack, and was able to make quicker and more accurate movements better than I could, such as learning piano at a faster rate than I could. Individual differences display an unfair but intriguing part of the world, and it proved very cool to learn about them, especially because it helps show on how to work to one's strengths, despite being inferior due to individual differences.

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For some reason this year, I decided that I was going to try out for the college cheerleading team here on campus. I had no prior experience with stunting or cheering, and really had no idea what I was getting myself into. Despite my apparent lack of skill and experience, I was able to quickly adapt and learn the skills required for cheer due to General Movement Programs.

A general movement program, or GMP for short, is a grouping of movements within one's mind that allows application to various related tasks. For example, with cheer, I was able to use my prior experience lifting weights from movements such as a overhead press to adapt to stunting with a flyer held above my head. GMPs are especially useful because as experienced by me, the movements don't have to be exactly the same for some kind of transfer or improvement to occur. The GMP theory also covers some adaptability that an individual can make to any application of a specific GMP. The three of these described by Richard Schmidt, the creator of the GMP theory are overall force, overall duration, and muscle selection. For me personally, I made modifications to force often as I had to put more force into getting height for more advanced stunts. I also very often modified the duration of movements because cheer often required shorter periods of activity than traditional weightlifting, but more explosive and fast activity during those shorter periods. Due to the help of GMPs, I was able to adapt to the skills required for stunting much quicker than others, and GMPs continue to allow improvement and adaptability throughout life.

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Due to my incessant nature of attempting to accomplish super difficult tasks for no reason whatsoever, I've recently decided that one of my short term goals is to solve a Rubik's cube. "But that's not that hard it's just a bunch of algorithms and stuff" I already hear you saying. And you might be right. Which is why I've decided to learn to solve a Rubik's cube blind.

When I first decided to undertake this task, I knew that a lot of memory and mental persistence was going to be required. Upon researching how to actually solve the cube blind (given the fact that I already knew how to solve the cube with my vision) I found that a lot of the same principles apply to solving the cube blind, but a different methodology is required. What I mean by that is that basically when given a scrambled cube, one must know the order of swaps necessary to complete the cube. For example one might swap the upper right to upper left, the top left corner to the bottom right corner and so on. Due to this, a complete list of moves will look something like R L2 R2 L' R' U2 R' U2 or something of the sort. Because of this complicated yet sequential process, the main skill required is procedural memory.

Procedural memory is the ability to remember a series of things in a sequence, in this case, the series of turns of the cube required to solve it. Procedural memory is often contrasted with semantic memory, which is less ordered and more factual. In this example, procedural memory helps keep track of the list of moves that a solver would need to make in order to solve the cube without physically looking at it. I have yet to complete a rubik's cube completely blind, but with the help of my procedural memory (and lots of practice) i'm sure that I will accomplish this soon.

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As an aspiring high school swimmer, I took every advantage I could find in order to be the best I could at my sport in order to support my team. I lifted weights, practiced extensively, and ate well in order to stay in peak condition for race day.

However, one of the most important tweaks that I ever made was improving my reaction time. When I first started racing, I was very slow off the blocks, which often left a lot of time to be desired. But by tweaking my reaction time, I was able to get a solid start every single time, and improved a lot throughout my swimming career, and I was able to do this because of anticipation.

Anticipation is the principle that by predicting when and where an event will happen, you are able to react to the event almost instantly. With starts off the blocks in swimming, it is obvious what event will happen (the buzzer signalling the start of the race) but it is not always obvious when the event will occur. This distinction is often known as temporal anticipation, whereas spacial anticipation is lack of knowledge of where an event will occur, and event anticipation is lack of knowledge of what event will occur. Temporal anticipation can be both a good and a bad thing, but for me, the added preparedness of being ready for the start was mostly positive. However, before perfecting my starts, I experienced one of the common problems associated with anticipation: If you predict the event incorrectly, you can be left worse off than if you had not anticipated the event erroneously. Due to my lack of experience, this led to a couple of false starts that looked somewhat like the GIF below. However, despite its sometimes negative effects, anticipation is a powerful tool that when used correctly can benefit a user greatly, much like how anticipation saved me a ton of time off my starts on the swim team.

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If these posts have shown you anything, it's probably that A: I like to do a lot of random stuff and try to get good at it and B: I really really want to be a jack of all trades, no matter how hard it might be. Despite being a 240lb guy mainly focused on lifting weights, I recently decided that it would be fun to learn some tricking in order to improve my flexibility and hone my inner ninja.

However, what I've found is that with tricking, a lot of the skills that i'm trying to learn aren't solely physical. Don't get me wrong, a tiny 12 year old girl might have an easier time with gymnastic-like skills than I do physically, there are certain mental blocks are in place due to me never experiencing certain "tricking sensations" like going over my head and upside down. Because of this, a lot of my training for tricking doesn't rely on physical training (although obviously that is still important), but more on mental practice.

Mental practice is the idea that you can actively improve in a skill without actively doing it. While this sounds somewhat like some psychic nonsense, it actually makes perfect sense, especially when experienced. In order to implement mental practice, you actively focus on improving throughout the skill or movement. This is often done through imagery and visualization. Two types of imagery are often used in mental practice: Internal, which is imagining the sensations from a 1st person point of view, and external, which is examining what you would look like from an outside point of view. The beauty of mental practice is you can make minute changes in your mind, and apply them physically. For example, I recently have been learning to do a front handspring, which is the first movement shown in the GIF below. Due to my size, I was finding it very difficult to get around and land on my feet. But one night I was laying in bed, thinking about what I could do different or better tomorrow, and I realized that I could kick harder with my leg to get around quicker. I rehearsed this in my mind before attempting the front handspring and lo and behold, it was much easier to land. Mental practice is a very cool and effective way to improve in a skill without physically doing them, and I will continue to use mental practice throughout the rest of my life.

NOTE: I know that tricking is somewhat similar to the lecture and slides example of gymnastics, but I HAD to include this example mainly due to how directly and dramatically this concept effected my life, especially considering how recent this was (literally past few weeks). Anyways, I was hoping to avoid a potential deduction due to that, and just wanted to say how cool it was to directly apply a class concept and see immediate results! :)