Badminton post: Good kinetic chain form and the forehand drive

I watched a kid doing training today and observed the way he hit the shuttle when he was doing forehand drives or other non-full-power forehand shots.

Basically, the correct motion is to do a sort of a "push", your arm coming forward and your wrist flying back (relative to the elbow) and then coming forward. It might feel as if you're "slicing" the shuttle from under it, but if you time it right it actually won't slice. Another key point is that a little bit of downward motion with the forearm is OK. The racket still has some upward trajectory because of the wrist, so in combination there is hardly any slicing. That's why it often looks like good players are almost slicing the shuttle. 

Of course if you have less time, you're going to need to tighten up the wrist, and there will be a lot less backstroke, especially at the wrist level. So it won't be this "looser", larger, and more powerful, stroke. That goes with any stroke -- for a properly executed stroke with "good kinetic chain form", a quicker, less powerful stroke corresponds with more tightness along the kinetic chain, but still the same idea holds: propagation of momentum and energy from the base (closed end of the kinetic chain), along the joints (leg drive, hip rotation, torso rotation, shoulder rotation, elbow flexing, wrist flexing or wrist pronation) to the end effector (the racket). 

The following is a page from my OneNote on badminton technique: 

Try not to execute any stroke with an "open kinetic chain". If you have to, at least make sure to generate enough of a "base" so that your shot feels good.

 

You must first prioritize this quality above power. Because this is actually where power comes from. It must come from the base of your kinetic chain and propagate outward (and yes, this means you need to work on proper footing and footwork too). By forcing yourself to do it properly, you will learn to plan your movement to accommodate this.

 

This is one of the biggest differences between trained players vs players with bad habits.

 

 

 

Exercise: Focusing on accuracy

What helped me was just purely focusing my attention on making sure the shot was executed with good kinetic form. Practice forehand drives and forehand lifts without worrying about your power output. Instead, focus on the quality of the shot (i.e. how it bounces off your racket without slicing) and the accuracy of the shot.

 

This is what Ice meant when he said to focus on the accuracy of the shot first. It's not necessarily about where the shot goes, but more that when you focus on accuracy instead of power, you'll think about your body and how it feels in relation to the shuttle and the racket. You'll have to think and prepare for how you want to hit the shot, because accuracy doesn't come without thought. On the other hand, power often comes without thought -- it comes via instinct, strength, muscle, emotion. But… that's only true for very very basic things, not with complex movements like badminton. In badminton, power comes from proper form + time (see below) much like a lot of things. By taking your mind off of power, you forget your instinct and patterns and go into a "learning mode" where you are perceptive about your own sphere of control and the feedback and adjust accordingly.

 

Cue/Check

When you do it right, you'll feel that you're executing the shot with your body, not your wrist or elbow or fingers or wherever. You won't feel unnecessary tension and pain in your joints or muscles because you're trying to force a fast, powerful shot that doesn't exist and reinforcing the lack of kinetic planning and bad habits.

 

Corollary: Power is proportional to time

The interesting corollary to all of this is that if you're holding constant shot quality and accuracy (which is the most important) by executing the same consistent and optimal form, power becomes proportional to time. The only variable you have to play with is how much time you have to execute the shot.

 

And since the amount of time you have from the shot coming off of the opponent's racket and the shot being available to you is bounded by some figure, the only variables you can control are how quickly you're able to mentally process the shot, how prepared you are for the shot, and where you decide to take the shot.

Earning more time: Keeping your racket in position
Let's just discuss the preparation part because that's the easiest to fix. When coaches and others say "keep your racket up", this is what they mean. You will know when you're not doing it right because when you execute the stroke, it will feel as if you're fighting the inertia of the stroke. Remember Stroke: Kinetic Chain? You will feel "rushed" in having to put your racket into position against inertia, fight and cancel out the velocity that was generated while you rushed to raise your racket into position, then perform the stroke. However this requires extra movement because of that extra backwards velocity, so you're going to have to perform a longer stroke (power is proportional to time). That means either you eke out a terrible quality shot that goes outside or just perform a weak shot.

 

So what do you do? Just keep that racket "in position"! And by "in positiion", I mean keep it in a position where you'll have to move it very minimally to get it into the right spot. And that means you actually need to pay attention to where you think the shuttle is going to come very fast where you'll have little time to line up a shot. Think about all the shots you may have to perform, and either imagine or actually experiment whether it's possible to do a shot that is:

1. Quick enough
2. Proper form (kinetic chain is properly engaged with maximal energy transfer)

Focus units

 Watched this video the other day. It's all about focus, and how to manage it -- kind of a game changer, even though I had supposedly learned this lesson before. I read Deep Work and all that, so I should know all about treating your mind as a resource, and managing it efficiently, effectively, blah blah.

 But you know... we forget lessons all the time. That's what practice is for, to drill known concepts into "muscle memory", unconscious processing, habit (that's why they're called drills, I guess) (also on another note... practice doesn't always make perfect). The Power of Habit anyone? And that's what churches are for. It's not enough to tell people once, even if they totally agree with your message during a fiery revival and have some sort of awakening/revelation. That shit happens to me all the time* and it lasts two weeks at best. Not religious revelations, although sometimes it feels spiritual.. 

Anyways, back to focus. The main thing I took from this video, aside from remembering how focus works, was why I had trouble actually implementing the lesson. You see, if I know one thing about myself it's my neuroticism and small working memory. That's two things. And that's a terrible combination with my tendency to worry about missing or failing at anything, so I try to take everything on. That's three. Further I attribute every failure to personal weakness, so I either get dejected or reject the feedback and attempt to delude myself or blame the problem, the situation, or others. Okay, four things and a half. On top of that, I refuse to reach out for help or advice because technically that's also personal weakness. Five things and a half. Also, I sometimes like to gimp myself by insisting I do things, but without using X. Just for fun and generality. Six. 

So when you put 2 and 1 and 1.5 and 1 and .5 together, you get a guy trying to juggle 4 balls and a knife and a torch with one arm, terrible form, while constantly worrying and beating himself up with the other arm or just throwing a tantrum when he drops the ball, causing even more balls to drop, yet still insisting that he can juggle them all while taking on even more balls and doing the same thing over and over. Definition of insanity much? 

Watching this video made me realize that I'm allowed to let myself focus on juggling one ball at a time, and in fact that's pretty much the only way I'm going to get things done. It reminded me how much I actually love focusing, if only I would let myself. It did this my making me face the hard truth that actually I'm finite, and suck just like everyone else and I should just allow myself the pleasure of focusing on something rather than somethings and quit setting physically unattainable nth dimensional bars for myself. Yes, we all suck. If some people look like they suck less it's actually because they accepted the suck and figured out how to make the best out of it. Probably. I mean I'd hate to think that it's just me who sucks.

*More like once every few months, but you get my point

Mathematics is just a form of mental gymnastics

Our neural networks often generate these little "concepts". (See motivating example in addenda)

 

The powerful thing here, is that we can write such concepts down, or otherwise name or remember it. And once we've written it or remembered it, we can do things with it that we normally can't do when it is but a fleeting pattern of signals in our neural network.

 

As a still-quite-abstract example, sometimes we retrieve a mathematical idea from a very "fuzzy" intuitive idea, or some "hunch" that we have. We just know that some mathematical description of it ought to exist, and eventually we're able to write it down and "capture it" to some sufficient degree. This is done in the exact same way a painter captures a feeling or concept in a painting.. in the sense that the image of the painting in our minds can be processed in a way that evokes the concept or emotion in our deeper mind. The simplest way to do it is by naming, which is basically the bundling together of several intuitive thoughts, feelings, experiences into one without any additional structure. Of course we usually do something more than naming, using other pre-established names and relations to build something with structure, and in effect "reducing" the thing-in-our-minds into just these other, already labelled, "known" things arranged in some combinatorial way. 

 

Anyways, once we've captured a concept as described, we can apply other little concepts to it, create more structures. In this way we build and build. Essentially we are "hacking" our own minds, conceiving of new ways to think about the same things in different ways, about different things in the same ways. Further, we often "extend" our neural network by using external memory (e.g. paper and pencil) and external processing (e.g. computers, grad students).

 

This idea of forcing our brains to do different things… this "hacking" thing…. Seems profound. It's like us trying to transcend our own minds, become greater than it by telling it how to think. But by definition… we can never transcend our own minds, right? 

 

..Or can we? We might consider that indeed, we're not just using our minds, but other things: paper, pencil, computers, and… time.

 

The summative mathematical results of our mathematical work across all memory, external or otherwise, and time… may indeed surpass anything any mind by itself would have done, ever.

I mean, that's a nice fantasy. But what do you call math that you do entirely in your head, and learn via experience over time? What if, say, a man thinks up of an addition system all on his own, just over time?

 

Well… that man still made an effort to remember stuff in his head, effectively "writing". The point is that he still used your executive function to make sure his brain "burned in" certain things, certain "gymnastics". That's when you're doing math -- you're becoming aware, conscious, and basically manipulating your unconscious mind to make it do what you want. It often involves taking bits and pieces of the thoughts from the unconscious brain, naming them and storing the labels into the conscious brain, then using them to take control of what the unconscious brain computes for you. Usually, the unconscious brain is purely functional -- like an artificial neural network, it arranges itself in the optimal way in response to reinforcing stimuli. But when one does mathematics, one might say it becomes more than just a means to an end, but a means in itself. This idea, in fact, reflects in mathematics itself at several levels: On the actual doing of mathematics level, there's often theory that just is. It doesn't really "operate" on anything, and it's more like am abstract painting than anything else, just sort of describing this object. It's sort of the part of math where you build definitions, write axioms. And then there's mathematics that "says stuff". Theorems, lemmas, applications. And on the outside-of-math level, there's mathematics that's really "pure" and doesn't seem to be inspired by or say much about much of anything. And then there's mathematics that really came to be as an abstraction of real things and experiences.

 

You might say that the conscious brain is not as powerful, but with the help of the unconscious brain and by making it "its bitch", it can do some pretty impressive stuff, something the unconscious brain by itself wouldn't have really bothered to figure out on its own.

Of course, this is sometimes less true than other times. It's like native people who speak a language vs a foreigner who learned it "by the book". As foreigners, the native people, it might appear, "know" the grammar rules! But anyone who is even slightly introspective about how they speak their native tongue knows that that's just not how it works. We will often be surprised that certain rules even exist, despite the fact that we magically seem to always follow them (e.g. order of adjectives in English).

And indeed, there are structures in our deep unconscious minds that make it so (hence why we don't observe the rules consciously), although they may not actually be represented by literal graph-theoretic components strung together in some logical structure that the grammar books seem to imply.

In fact brain research hints at the contrary (brain surgery experiment), which is that logically modular "functions" seem to be more topologically distributed rather than actually topologically compartmentalized in the brain. And indeed, this may just be a better, faster way to do things, and the componentization is just a side effect of the deep structure of how the function really works.

 

So do we say that the native speaks "does grammar"? Not really, not in the same way that the foreigner "does grammar".

 

And it's true, it's quite beautiful in a way how native speakers can speak their language so well and so effortlessly. The foreigners might be slower, limited. But oftentimes we will be surprised at how eloquent the truly well-studied foreigners are. There's a running joke on social media sites about how people who say apologize saying "sorry, English is not my native tongue" often speak English better than half the native English speakers on the site!

 

And there is an advantage to knowing conscious, compartmentalized, formal rules of grammar. And that's provability, communicability, and extensibility. That is, with provability, we can extend, scale. And we can communicate and share proofs with other minds, because the elementary objects of the proofs are, purportedly, basic concepts we can all work with and understand.

 

With only our pure, unconscious neural networks, we can only do so much. It's true that we often overthink, theorize, and generally forget to get out of our heads and just simply do the task, but at the same time we're not going to be launching spaceships based on the advice of some seasoned veteran who "knows his rockets real well". Because first of all, such a veteran isn't going to exist…. I mean, how much "trial and error" are you gonna have when it comes to building rockets (which is what you need for the training phase of the unconscious mind)

 

I mean, raw experience and ingrained skill are great for most human tasks…  maybe even all human endeavors and jobs/skills made up before some time period (hunting, farming, building). But even the slightly more complex stuff require some theory. And of course, once you're talking theory, you're talking about the conscious mind. Executive function. Rules. Logic. Legos.

 

And the two minds used together in this way, in what we call "mathematics", is truly powerful. And that's what mathematics, at its core, is really all about. Using your head real smart.

But I doubt mathematics is the only way to use your head real smart. It sure is an interesting way to do it, and it definitely seems to be the most executive-dominant method of the bunch.

Badminton Experiment, and Breadth-first search

Apply previous lesson: don't settle on the solutions that you like too easily. Imagine it's like BFS and DFS on a tree.

First a framework to keep in mind: the goal is to "learn" and"master" something. Essentially what you're doing is trying to "memorize" a solution in a solution space. We all know it's not enough to "know" what the best way to play badminton is. It's not enough to accidentally even do it and feel it once. What we're seeking is MASTERY, which has basically everything to do with MEMORY. And that's *fast*, immediately accessible memory, not some slow isomorphic representation in our minds (i.e. the ability to talk about it).

And often, we have to "cut" and partition our space in sequence to "drill down" to the solution, because often the solution must be expressed and decomposed as a series of conjunctions. This means that one common way to learn is to "learn" one or few conjunctions at a time. We all know human mental capacities are limited and sometimes we just can't do multiple things at once. In fact the very definition of "multiple" might just be those things that the mind can't handle at once.

 

Anyways, back to it. DFS is like setting a bunch of goals and attempting to satisfy them all at once, trying to immediately assume the final solution and practice that. If it doesn't work, back up and try something different. BFS is instead incrementally exploring your solution space and solving little bits and pieces at a time; not necessarily rushing and making assumptions on what the final solution is going to look like and trying to train that, but rather poking around, committing correct pieces to muscle memory and proceeding slowly and consistently.

 

Example: Badminton, statistical problem at work (exploration of intuitive concepts like "bumps and streams" instead of trying to jump into immediate abstraction)

 

Particularly, when playing badminton it's really tempting to attempt to emulate the pros without really understand what's going on, and copy everything immediately. So we might try to forcefully pronate the arm. Or do some sort of exaggerated split step motion. Or get really low to the ground and make exagerrated step motions. And we might try to practice some kind of inefficient exagerrated chassé stuff. All of these I have done.

 

The problem is exactly that: we are trying to do things without understanding them, so we are likely to make mistakes. That's because all of the solutions that the pros implemented have deep reasons and come from deep, layered reasoning cemented over years of practice. It's like seasoning on a cast iron... You can copy it but you better make sure you're seasoning correctly and slowly and thoroughly.

 

At the very least, we should pay attention to our bodies, and use our brains. If it simply doesn't make sense to chassé when you could just step or run, don't do it!

 

That's the great thing about BFS and exploration, taking it slow. You'll come to understand, layer by layer, level by level, why a particular method is good, because you've explored the alternatives. For example: with flat drives, we understood that a "pushing" motion was appropriate and proved it physically to some extent. Even if we didn't literally explore alternatives (we did, like the exaggerated backstroke method... seeing a pattern here), the very nature of analyzing motion is a process of elimination of alternatives**. In other words, understanding the bits and pieces and habits and skills that make up our final solution *in context* helps us recognize WHY we do things, thereby creating a stronger mental relevance in our minds.

 

But what about if you have a mentor? Or some kind of guide, that tells you how to master something? Basically this is more like BFS (simply because it's not like DFS where you try to master everything in one go. Although maybe for some skills this might actually BE the way to go) except at each step you know exactly what to do and what to train. And you know exactly which skills to train first (i.e. how to partition your solution space, and which partition to go to and engrain into memory, I.e. "muscle-memorize").

Is this always the best way though? Perhaps for the sake of time. Perhaps for the sake of advancing the field (you cannot have students rediscovering the wheel all the time)

But yes, a master can teach a student all of the correct routes, never letting the student fall into bad habits, wrong paths and traps. But does a student understand the fundamentals the way the master does? No, because of experience: the master UNDERSTANDS what arithmetic is simply because of all the time he's had to deal with edge cases and scenarios which force him to understand beyond the abstraction, and the student simply knows 1+1=2, quick mafs.

But does a master compare to the creator when it comes to the fundamentals? Likely not. The creator understands even more intimately the pain that he had to go through in developing his art. He truly understands fundamentally why you would even want to have a system of arithmetic since he was around before it even existed. He understands every "why" of why the fundamentals have to be the way they are. In this way, the fundamentals he has created are a part of his being because they are so entrenched; entrenched by all the reasoning and failed alternatives that make it obvious why the fundamentals are the way they are.

It's like actually understand the area because you've explored the roads vs just reading a map. It doesn't feel the same: making a right because Google maps says so (student) vs making a right because you want to go to Walmart and not the neighborhood up ahead, according to the map (master) vs making a right because you actually have explored this area and been to that neighborhood and it's really not friendly (creator).

Another analogy (there's so many) is like the user, the superuser/scripter, and developer.

As you can see this is a fundamental principle of human knowledge and learning and it explains a lot. It might even explain why Rodney Mullen is so great and nobody now is as great (because he created the fundamentals and was around during it's developmebt... Well also skaters don't practice fundamentals very properly)

 

 

Aaanyways. Back to badminton. Sure, you could have a coach train you in all the right ways. You will get to the end faster, and by virtue of real world experience you will also realize why the right ways are the right ways... To some extent. Of course, the more stringent and linear the training regimen you're ironically less likely to understand the "why" of things, which may prevent you from truly mastering things. [Also maybe badminton isn't really complete yet, and there's more weird things you can make up that don't necessarily follow the rules (but that's a maybe).]

 

That's why I want to try "coaching" myself. Use videos. Watch videos. Annotate. Watch pros. Do physics. Experiment, explore, then train.

This is a true BFS approach.

 

 

 

**[Why? Because selection of an optima can be seen as de-selection of non-optima. For analogy, remember how proved theorems work in computation. You can always do a brute force search, but if you know certain theorems you can narrow down the search greatly. As a side note, Dr. Williams said that sometimes it's just not worth it). And even the proof of that theorem eventually breaks down to physics, and the laws of physics breaks down to elimination (deduction) of un-truths.

Aaaaanyways. ]

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Definitely, by observing, accepting, and understanding my own mind, I've improved in writing, and thinking, as well. I understand my limited memory, so often as the ideas come I jot down quick notes. Instead of trying to do everything in one linear go and having to rush (and writing terribly in consequence), I let myself write more nonlinearly, and structure my sequence of words so they are more meaningful and more properly cemented into paper and mind, so as to build a stronger foundation for the next point.

 

Dovetailing off of that point, I've also understood the importance of organization, tidiness, and things I formerly disregarded. Like making your writing pretty, putting subtitles, references. Organizing your workspace. All this stuff I thought was useless because I didn't pay attention to the chaos storm going on within my mind, slowing me down.

 

 

You need to go step by step. Sure, if you have a lot of discipline and you know that your "lesson plan" is correct, you can do a DFS and learn quickly. But otherwise, you are going to have to explore.

 

To explore properly, you need data. That means listening to your mind, listening to your body, listening to your emotions -- because that is the data that goes most unrecognized. We tend to focus on only the outside world and the results. When badminton isn't going well, we focus harder on what's going on on the outside and try to force your body to go in a certain way, stare harder at opponents moves to "pay attention". We seldom think about how our body's momentum feels, about how there seems to be inefficient energy loss up our kinetic chain, about our insecure and turbulent mind that fails to recognize that our strategy and tactics are incorrect. When we fix this, wake up from our tunnel vision and start PAYING ATTENTION, suddenly the court is simple to you, just a problem that you control with your body. It becomes little more than a control theory problem, no longer a confusing mess of I-don't-know-whats-going-on. Instead you will see it for what it is: controller (your body, your mind) and feedback (the environment). Dead simple. From here, your game brain will take over.

The problem is, to get to this state, again, you have to let yourself get to it. Oftentimes you're just too caught up, too much absorbed in feeling frustrated, that you fail to admit that what you're doing isn't working, because if you're wrong then what worth do you have, right?

 

Body badminton

 

Focus on self

Looking outwards and taking advice

 I've often found it difficult to take advice from people. I used to think I was pretty open minded, and when I decide to be I really am.

I actively avoid looking outwards for advice, asking others for help. Why? Most likely it's a fear of realizing that I "suck" at things, a need to be great at everything all the time. I've come to understand myself a little bit more now and I realize that I'm hard on myself a lot of the time. 

Another symptom that supports this theory is that I tend to "rush" or "force" short-term solutions to things instead of really learning. I'm not observant of my own capabilities, preferring instead to focus purely on the outcomes, trying to make something work, at least to the extent that I can delude myself into thinking that I'm good at this. I've done this with school, with work, with relationships. I cover up problems and don't listen to my own mind, my own body. It's also a source of great stress... things are real difficult when you're not actually getting any better, improving, but still have to convince myself that you're awesome. My neurotic personality is likely associated with it, since my way of solving a problem is by thinking about something over and over, worrying, pacing around. 

Those times that I "let go" and accept the limits of my capabilities, things just get... better. My headspace seems a lot clearer. It's not that my problems magically disappear, but the problems are put into context. And as it turns out, the solutions often lie not with me but with the outside world, with others -- there are so many things I was doing sub-optimally that became drastically better after some simple changes. Yes, I suck, but it's not too difficult to not suck after all. It's a matter of opening up. 

It's difficult to admit that you're not complete. But I imagine that once you get into the habit of truly learning new things, new mindsets and attitudes that you couldn't have possibly thought of in your lifetime, there is a paradigm shift. It's not this simple "get problem, process really hard on your own, output solution" anymore. You're now part of a community of human beings, this larger organism. Problems aren't a limiting, "you've got to solve it now" kind of scarcity-mindset-inducing, urgency-inducing sort of thing. Instead, they're just... things. Opportunities? Curiosities?