Why Muscle Memory is Irrelevant

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Welcome back to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. We are coming to you live from Manchester, Connecticut. We've got Gray Thomas and Adam Omiecinski here joining me. And today we're going to dive into a controversial topic, and that is muscle memory. So guys, welcome, great to have you on.

Thank you, welcome to Manchester, the big city.

Enjoying, uh, getting the whole tour, great.

Yeah, absolutely, home of the Huskies.

I'm gonna read this out and then I think we can just dive right in. So this all kind of came about through a post on Transforming Basketball. We did one on muscle memory, and I think this is Something that we really wanted to clarify and really just dive into today.

So this is a comment we had on social media.

Here we go.

Referring to recalling the right moment in the game, that's never the point of muscle memory. It's to be as consistent to reach the same result through a learned movement pattern. Muscle memory in simplicity is taught as brain and neural pathway adaptation. You can train muscles to recruit the right amount of neurons to fire in the right sequence.

I agree you should do different movements at the point is mute as you can't do the same movement twice, but you can replicate the movement pattern for the same outcome. It's just wrong saying muscle memory is a myth. All physical skills performed at an elite level are due to muscle memory.

So where do we want to start? A lot to unpack in there.

Yeah, in terms of like Due to muscle memory, I would be curious to know specifically what is being remembered, if it's a particular optimal movement in the sense of the absolute way, the ideal way something should be accomplished or moved in a particular manner.

And then if that's the case, what is the context? Is it context independent? Because if that's the case, that can't really come to fruition as we see it at the highest level that it's played. An example I like to use is a recent game winner from Kevin Durant.

He had muscle memory where he raised up to shoot over the defender. His shot was either going to be blocked or majorly deterred. He did a pump fake, rotated his elbow into the left, came back and raised over the defender to shoot the shot.

So the question is, did he practice that specific maneuver multiple times and was able to pull that out of the muscle memory file cabinet, or was the ideal solution supposed to just be applied? Uh, context independent. So I think when you really start untangling it like that, you get into what's known as the storage problem.

I have a lot of issues with it, so that's just my beginning.

Adam, you want to build on that?

I guess what stands out to me is just the simple fixed idea of muscle memory. Like, it's just this single entity, like, okay, I apply this, it comes, you know. What Gray was gonna delve into much deeper than you or I can is like the storage issue here.

Whereas it's, it's removing context. And I guess in a sense, muscles are remembering is what I would prefer to say. But again, it's all contextual and it's always an evolving process. It's never static. It's never a single entity is what I'm just gonna repeat from what I said in the first sentence.

I think memory's just a complete misnomer and misunderstood and kind of gets, it's this all-encompassing term. In the sense of, I would rather look at it as either movement refinement, right? In the sense of you're either educating your intention of what you're trying to do with the movement or attention, or it's that process of calibration that we see in direct learning.

You know, instead of this very specific thing that you're pulling out and can just execute at any given time, refinement I think is a better way to look at it where you're going back and you're trying to do these different things and you get better at it.

like a sculptor trying to make something smoother, that's totally understandable. But we're still talking about a static thing here instead of like biological movement in context.

I think it's interesting Stuart Armstrong spoke about this recently on, on a podcast where I think what this comes down to is coaches have these bundles of beliefs. That was the term Stuart used, as opposed to an actual theoretical framework. And for me, the root issue here is that if we were to, you know, ask 99% of coaches beginners, NBA coaches, whatever, how human movement occurs, I think we'd probably hear muscle memory mentioned.

I think it's like a belief that coaches have as to how players, how humans move, right?

Yeah.

And therefore it's so entrenched because we're, we're basically coming in and saying it's not relevant, that's not how the human body moves to a certain degree. And we'll come back to it later when we get to attractors and all of that. But, um, it's challenging.

I think I just started watching Keith David's presentation from the symposium in Australia, and at the very beginning he spoke about how, you know, the shift through ecological dynamics over the last 20 years has been from skill acquisition to skill adaptation. And the problem is, you know, obviously we use the term skill acquisition, but it's kind of linked to this point on muscle memory where we're not trying to acquire this movement that's ingrained, that's encoded in a player to be brought out at the right time.

I guess like the only thing that's popping in my head right now after that discussion, and I think Gray really touched on a nice point there where it's about a tuning, it's about like the word that comes to mind for me is it's a constant calibration because we are never the same.

Otherwise, if we walked in, like say for instance, you just, it would be the same exact shot, but it's not. If you, if you shoot your first 3 is much different than your second and third 3. Because you're tuning into the information. Your system's like, oh, okay, this is what I do here.

It's, it's no different than when we first get out of bed. Do we get out of bed and we start sprinting? No, we have to calibrate to this shift in gravity, and our body gets more sensitive to it as we engage in these activities more and more.

And those are all great points. And I think when you speak of attunement, uh, it got me thinking. I think muscle memory is also inflated with automaticity in the sense of people really want to make moves. When they say muscle memory, right, like you want your movement patterns to be quick and thoughtless in that sense, right?

Well, I don't think that's anything we would disagree with in the sense of we want it to be quick and thoughtless in the sense of not making a predetermined plan or motion and really being attuned to the information in the environment. So I don't think they would disagree in the sense of if they understood it on those terms, but people are obsessed with automaticity in terms of habit formation, muscle memory, and all these different things.

And really what I think the overarching goal on either side, how you wanna look at it, is you want to increase your player's level of decision-making in the right context. And I think that ecological dynamics gives you a framework for that that is more flexible, uh, to the ever-shifting context.

Whereas muscle memory is going to, at some point, you're going to either have to explain where that memory is occurring, how many muscle memory movement patterns are being stored, the access to those, the implementation of those. Once you start unraveling that thread, that theoretical thread, I think muscle memory runs up into a wall.

Yeah, and I think it's— that's it. It's— if muscle memory really was a plausible theory, how could it be that a human body could store all these movements? It's just impossible because every movement, as we know, is going to be different. I think on, on some of the comments, something we saw a lot was this reference to neuroscience.

Yeah.

And talking about things like synapses, neurons firing, myelinization was another one. So I think this could be a good chance to kind of talk about the alternative and why we don't consider that within an ecological approach.

Yeah. What you got, Adam?

Oh, what I got?

Yeah.

Oh geez, I, to be honest with you, I don't feel qualified to discuss the neurology.

That's totally fair. In that sense, you know, I think like one, neurology is a— neurobiology is a pretty nuanced, intricate, deep, dense field to even get on the surface level, let alone understand the nuances. And Hebbian learning, you know, that neurons that fire together wire together, that's a very, very common phrase.

But it, it gets to this other ideological kind of departure point between ecological dynamics and traditional information And essentially the idea is that there has to be some type of isomorphism. What's happening in the environment has to correlate to some type of specific representation or activity in the brain.

And that's not really what we're seeing in the sense of there's not a one-to-one isomorphism in the neurons firing when I see a chair as to when there is a chair. There's always going— our brains are always active. They're active when we're sleeping.

So, so many different neurons and all these different synapses firing and different things. So the idea with traditional information processing is that you could do this isomorphism. And when I say that, I mean a one-to-one mapping of external reality to internal reality. And the varying constraints at both of those levels never really match up on that level.

So I think that is a big kind of departure point too, is I say that colloquially, we— and on the information processing side, we get really hamstrung of trying to— this thing matches this thing externally to internally when really it's complicated, it's complex, it's nonlinear.

We aren't always going to know influences on learning or expression of a particular behavior. So I think what ecological dynamics does, given the underpinning theory, it kind of unlocks that desire and constraint of trying to find the thing that matches the thing that you do, right?

Especially in the brain. And people get really, really obsessed with that in terms of The brain as a computer or a control center when really that's not a particularly salient metaphor. And there's tons of papers on that. We can link them in the show notes.

But really attunement is what we're trying to work through here. And that is expressed highly differently, something in the sense of like highly automatic or a highly controlled neuronal system controlling joints, tendons, muscles, the torque of those joints, the angular rotation of those things.

When you really get down to it, what are you controlling? And I think that is the initial question that if you could have someone sit down in good faith and try to answer, that they, like many other theories, would struggle to answer. So what are we controlling?

I don't want to build on that because I can't do anything better than that, Gray.

It's okay.

For me though, it's just— I think it's interesting seeing a lot of the comments that we're getting on social media, and I think a lot of coaches feel like maybe we've just decided to wake up one day and do a post like that.

without actually understanding like how nuanced this is, how complex it is, and how many years of our lives we've all dedicated to learning this. Like this one on our Facebook group, it was, Alex, this is nonsense. I believe you've misinterpreted your academic sources.

How does using as many different movements as possible without repeating those different movements over and over again help a player acquire a skill? And I think this is like, you know, it's reiterating the this is such a complex field. And I think it's, it's frustrating for us at times because coaches don't see like how much we are studying, because we feel like we're in a very privileged position and we're ensuring that any information we share is evidence-based.

And, you know, we don't— we would not want to influence all the thousands of coaches that we're influencing with information that, you know, is not empirically verified and it's just our opinion. So it's tough. And what I still think the roots of this is, it's that acquisition piece.

I think along with ditching muscle memory, we have to ditch this idea of acquiring something. I think maybe even in the future, we've got to use skill adaptation more than skill acquisition.

Here's something I'd like to ask the people too, in the sense of, do you feel like you have acquired every mistake or character flaw or behavior that you've done over your entire lifetime? Do you feel like that is a part of you that is, is always in you?

You know, are you, are you tethered to these things, you know, to move beyond movement and to talk about— most people would say absolutely not. Are you every single bad thought that you've ever had? Is that acquired and now a part of you and stuck in the system forever?

No, it's your level of engagement with those things and how you express them in a variety of different contexts, right? So the acquisition piece I think is huge here, and I think it is the biggest uphill battle. And the other thing too is about comments like that.

Yeah.

They're expecting you to educate them fully as well. Now, outside of the scope of what you're already doing in practical application and in practice, in clinics and different things like that, now they're asking for a lecture or to break down every type of critique or thought.

And that's beyond the scope of what like one person can do. You know, I would rather someone come with specifics and say, hey, I read that Turvey and Kugler book and you know what? Doesn't make sense to me. And I'll tell you why, instead of, Hey, what you're saying, I disagree with.

Make it make sense to me in the way that I view the world. And that— those are 2 different tasks, and I think that's very difficult for you to have to take on in isolation. So.

I think just as we wrap up here, guys, I think there's key kind of takeaways for coaches are to disprove this idea of muscle memory. I think the easiest thing for them would probably be just referencing ecological dynamics and maybe talking about some concepts within that, such as self-organization, perception-action coupling.

Would you guys agree those are the easiest stuff Yeah.

I mean, honestly, I, I want to take it beyond what we're talking about with sports or our own coaching practice and just start examining, like, questioning some of these beliefs. I mean, that's how I believe all 3 of us got here. And I mean, I'm doing it on a daily basis.

Just before we even started this, this podcast, I was sitting here, I'm like, wow, there are so many, so many non-obvious things that could be just influencing my behavior and my belief system all the time.

Yeah.

Over and over again that I didn't even— I wasn't even aware of. There was so many subtle things that go into these decisions that I make day in and day out. It's not simple. There's no linear relationship to my behavior whatsoever. So I just have to adapt and just tweak things here and there.

And that just comes down to questioning our beliefs and understanding I'm never going to know everything, and I'm okay with that uncertainty.

Absolutely. And I think the other question that I think would help Kind of challenge your own belief system is, okay, what if I am wrong and this is right? How does that change my practice? Does that— just because you are practicing a particular way or you have this belief system and you come across this and say, say you accept it, it doesn't mean that you have to start from the beginning.

You actually have a really, really wonderful foundation. If anything, it opens up your creativity and it can get you more time on task with your players. It'll give you more specific coaching for your players. And it will be more well-rounded, holistic approach in general.

So I guess my overarching question or challenge is, what do you have to lose by being open-minded to it and following down that path earnestly instead of pushing back as soon as you see it?

I think that's a great point to end the episode on. Really enjoyed this one. Thanks, guys.

Absolutely. Thanks, Alex.

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