Written by: Marc Bekoff Ph.D.
This is a very timely guest essay by Bruce Gottlieb, a somatic therapist and up-close-and-personal observer of far too many ski and cycling crashes.1 This year's recently completed Tour de France in which there were a number of repeated crashes by the same cyclists made me revisit some ideas i've been thinking about for some time. When we train physically we are getting our bodies strong so they will perform as desired when the time comes. When we practice, we are better prepared. I remember being at a bicycle camp of two Olympic medalists and they had us practice bumping into one another on the right side, on the left side, and using my front wheel to bump the rear wheel of the bike in front of me and then having my rear wheel hit by the person behind me. We also practiced falling on grass. This practice prepared my body to proprioceptively feel and respond to what I call sub-optimal events. Then, when they would happen in real time, not only was the sensation familiar so I wouldn’t have a startled response, I even had the ability to have a positive corrective response. I call this “appropriately reactive” instead of “overly reactive” which has potential to cause one of those sub-optimal/over-reactive responses. Training for those sub-optimal moments is essential preparation because life and racing do not always cooperate with our best-laid plans. How many people do you know who had multiple car accidents, especially of the same variety? People who have been rear-ended in a car frequently have had this experience more than once. I worked with one gentleman who had four roll over accidents, and how about that one friend who always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I suspect you can also see yourself somewhere in the “repeat” accident arena. When I worked with ski racers, I was amazed by my observations of what happened when they fell in practice. Around 80% of those who fell would fall again somewhere between the gate above or the gate below the previous fall. I became curious about this observation because it seemed to be more than random chance coincidences that so many different people shared the same basic experience. As a point of reference, professional bike racers who fall during a stage race have the propensity to fall again during the same race, sometimes during the same stage. Both the ski racer and bicycle racer also shared the same post-fall behavior; they would jump back up on their feet almost immediately and try to move on with what they were doing before the fall. I asked myself, were these ski racers and bike racers falling due to psychological reasons, and were drivers in involved in repeat accidents repeating similar patterns for psychological reasons, or was there something physiological happening, or perhaps both? If you study any form of somatic therapy you know when our body suffers a trauma it is highly likely we will have some kind of physiological constriction of muscle and fascia. Our amygdala will have an “automatic” response to a similar trigger and set off the autonomic nervous system (ANS) into a self-protective response. Will this reaction be a conscious response and an unconscious response, a psychological issue and a physiological issue, a psychological response that produces an automatic inhibition, or a physiological response that sets the ANS in motion to produce a physiological autonomic self-protective response? When our body becomes constricted due to a trauma, we need to help it restore its natural flowing rhythm. Specifically, when we fall several things happen in our bodies, and for professional athletes this is typically amplified because on top of the normal response, they lose trust in their body’s ability to perform as it has and as it needs to intuitively. Professional athletes do not want to think about what their bodies need to do. Rather they need to trust their bodies to intuitively do what their muscles have been trained to do. When they fall, however, they introduce the ANS into the mix and this can disrupt the previous “physiological flow.” Let’s analyze what happens when we fall. We typically go through the following sequence. 1. a loss of orientation to gravity due to the surprised quickness of what made us fall 2. loss of balance 3. rapid failed attempts to re-orient 4. tension and bracing in the body 5. preparation for impact 6. shame, fear terror (depending) 7. impact 8. disorientation 9. injury assessment 10. the brain lags behind the event that happened in a nano-second, and the body already has stored the trigger and what it believes to be a good self-protective response. In some cases due to the shame and/or embarrassment of falling or due to being a professional athlete and needing to stay in the game, or whatever the reason, most, if not all of people, tend to jump up, declare they’re OK, and keep going as if nothing happened. This is a beautiful demonstration of psychological resilience that will help keep them in the game.However we need more than our psychological resilience to maintain race performance perfection. After we fall each of the above 10 items needs to be restored in our body so it will be in synch with our minds and with our resilience. It’s not as simple as mind over matter, because in this case, what happened to our body matters, and our body can and will develop its own response system. In this article I will not go into detail about how to restore each of the above lost pieces, but rather I give an example of the importance of restoring the body’s natural abilities. Returning to ski racers on practice runs, I describe the steps I had each racer take after a fall, and the difference it made to the percentage of those who crashed on the next training run. Special thanks to Psychology Today for be our guest contributor writer
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