As a triathlete, I’m always reading about how important it is to use proper form in running, swimming and biking. And of course similar advice is routinely handed out in every other sport as well. But all this advice needs to be taken with a big ol’ grain of salt (see previous post on same theme). Here’s why:
In mathematics there’s something called the “traveling salesman problem,” which is really very simple. Imagine 4 cities spread out on a map, various distances away from each other. The question is, what route should you take so that you visit each of those cities, yet travel the least distance possible?
When there are only four cities, it’s easy to solve. But once you start to expand the number of cities, it quickly gets very difficult – with only 25 cities, there are so many possible routes that a computer measuring one million per second would still take 9.8 billion years to search through them all. (I get this from Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield, Frontiers of Complexity [1995], a thrilling and mind-blowing book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in such things).
Mathmaticians call this kind of problem an NP Problem – one that is not solveable in “polynomial time.” There are a number of real world and mathematical problems that manifest this quality of seeming relatively simple to solve, yet which quickly spiral into unmanageable dimensions as you add more factors. (Among them is the problem of factoring very large numbers, which is what modern encryption is based on and why it is currently unbreakable through brute force mathematical attacks. It’s easy to multiply a bunch of prime numbers together and get the product, but it turns out it’s next to impossible to reverse the process.)
Anyway, I think about this whenever someone starts lecturing about “proper form.” Imagine that you are engineer trying to figure out the most efficient way to move human limbs through water for swimming, or across the ground for running, or through space for kicking, batting, throwing, or whacking golf balls. You have to take into account the particularities of the specific human body you are looking at:
- The size (and possibly strength, flexibility and density) of each bone that is involved in that movement (for many movements, that would be every major bone in the body)
- The strength, flexibility and elasticity of each muscle involved.
- You may also need to factor in differences in muscle composition, such as the proportion of fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibers
- Perhaps other more diffuse differences in metabolism, which could also affect what is the optimum way for a particular person to perform an activity.
I bet that finding the optimum form for a particular person would be an NP problem – a problem with so many variables that no computer could find the best form for you in your lifetime – let alone a single solution that fits everbody (every body).
The way we each tackle this problem seems to be through an approach of evolutionary learning – we flail around more or less randomly (as babies), and eventually through trial and error and the feedback of getting what we want (grabbing a toy when we’re young, getting the ball through the hoop, say, when we’re older), we hone our movements into more and more efficient forms. One way we do this is by trying something, and then adjusting it in different directions to see if our results improve.
But another thing that Coveney and Highfield talk about is that you can picture the set of all possible solutions to an NP Problem as a topographical landscape. As you try moving in different directions – adjusting things – you see if you move up hill (toward better solutions) rather than downhill (toward worse ones). Then, you keep making adjustments until you have gone as high as you can. The problem is that you might reach the top of a local peak, while there is a much higher peak – a more efficient solution for you – that lies somewhere else in the “solution space.” And to take advantage of that you'd have to radically restructure and rebuild your stroke from the ground up. (One person who made the leap and did exactly that is Tiger Woods - an amazing thing.)
So all that is why talk about “proper form” should be taken skeptically. For your own biomechanics (and biochemistry), there may be one or many completely different forms that will work better than what you are now doing. That coach who’s yelling at you to change the way you’re doing things is basing that on (best case) nothing more than an approximation of what has been found to be more or less effective by a lot of other people, or (worst case) the current fashion for how things should be done, perhaps based on what has worked for a few elite (and not necessarily typical) athletes.
Of course, there are some basic parameters of physics in every activity. Also, if you’re a total newbie at something, you’re probably best off listening to a coach to provide some structure to your early flailing. If you’re reasonably accomplished, the coach will probably just be helping you to try different adjustments in what you’re already doing to see if you can eke out some improvements.
The difficult case would come if you are accomplished at something, self-taught, or a “natural,” and some coach tells you that you’re doing it “all wrong” and tries to get you to completely restructure your form. Then you have to decide whether to stick with your own body’s evolved solution, or leave that mountaintop and try to find another, higher peak through the textbook solution. You just can't be sure the peak really is higher.
If you look at successful runners or other athletes or others like pianists, you’ll see a tremendous variety of forms. There would probably be even more if various trends and fashions didn’t regularly sweep through instruction, standardizing the way people are trained.
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