Topic: Muscle tension

[Old Meister]

Tensing up your muscles in anticipation of the shot, whether shooting or blocking, does not make you faster. What it does is makes conflicting muscles work against each other so that the desired move is inhibited slightly until one of the muscle groups relaxes. You might say it is like pulling back a bow and then releasing the string which is a clean build-up of power and a clean release of it, a spring. But the problem is our muscles and ligature are not a purely mechanical phenomenon. Nerve signals coupled with the source of commands come into play. That release might not be as complete as you imagine. A simple game of trying to pluck a coin out of the palm of a friend will demonstrate this. Your hand is posed above his hand. Try to tense and pluck the coin and then try starting with a relaxed arm but trying just the same. The concept is the same on a shot starting in a static position. The tensed shot 'feels' like it is faster and harder but a relaxed arm fore goes the muscle fight and ultimately delivers a deceptively faster shot. Also on defending, to tense is to freeze. To stay loose is to react.
This is not to say that you should never shoot a shot with a tensed form as it does create it's own perception to your opponent where by then a relaxed shot takes on a whole different character in it's execution. This is just food for thought, open to scrutiny, opinions are welcome.

[bbtuna]

well written and very very true

[bbtuna]

i have been collecting well written foos stuff I have found written, plus some of my own, for some time

I have begun to assemble it and hope to make it available some way some time within...i don't know, the next year?

anyway, I try and acknowledge when, who, and where I got the quotes from

I would like to include this ... if that is okay with you

[bbtuna]

if you give me your name, I will include that otherwise I will just use your Old Meister handle

[B,inSA]

great food fer thought, thank you. i shall practice these variables. also Ol' M , how can i easily figure out my "tells"? i mean i know its common sense but fer me its just a reaction or my set up is kinda predictable. its like my shot % is higher from the 2 man row cause im accurate and people dont see it coming.

[chance37]

A little advice read the book The Inner Game of Tennis......I know you may think what does it have to do with foosball.......JUST READ IT.........awesome book.......you can learn more from it than hours of practice and watching of videos guaranteed.....

[Old Meister]

By 'tells' I assume you mean telegraphing and you feel everyone knows where you are going before you shoot. While that really gets into your own emotional makeup it does have something to do with this subject, muscle tension. Think about this, when you practice you go over a shot time and time again until you feel you really have it going. What are you really doing? You try to hit a specific  shot and feel it when it is right. When that happens you mentally pat yourself on the back. Over and over you practice it sometimes telling yourself your smoking! It's easy, you should be able to do this all the time. So you play some of your buddies and yep, you got it going, you have a good night just smoking them. Then comes a tournament, guess what, you have to play somebody who is good, really good and it is going to be hard to beat them. Then guess what? You can't seem to hit that shot no matter how hard you try. Why? What happens is when we learn something repetitive we first learn it consciously and as we get it going it is turned over to muscle memory and the subconscious. That subconscious is something else! You can effortlessly be the hottest player there while everyone else struggles. It can react faster and more accurately than your conscious self ever thought of. And that is the problem, when things get dicey we try to take control, that is over-ride the conscious with the subconscious. And when we do that the carefully programmed shot response is interfered with. I don't know if you have ever experienced the "peak performance state" or "dead stroke" or the "runners high". What I'm talking about is there is a state that a well practiced competitor sometimes experiences a state where everything falls into place and hard things become easy, simple. Speed becomes effortless even though it doesn't seem fast to you. Everything is relaxed and perfectly controlled without effort. You seem to be a bystander watching yourself perform. What this is is pure subconscious play, your not MAKING anything happen, your letting it happen. I'll talk more about this later but right now I have to go somewhere.

[B,inSA]

i think i might have experienced that "peak performance state" last night. we were playing doubles and everyone knows i like to be goalie and just smokem home from the back, but i had a partner who's only skill was goal-keeping.so i was 5 and 3 man and whenever the ball came across to me there was rarely a set-up. id say 80% of the time i just let the ball roll into its own set up , and man i was scoring like i never thought i could. and it was like i was watching myself- definately. i would score over and over and it was so sweet everytime that my buddies (whom can sometimes be haters on someone who is on a roll) were just in amazement.as i was. and whats even crazier about what you're tellin me is usually one or two times a night we will play for a dollar or a beer, you know something very very small. but i think i try and "consciously" will it. im not worried about the dollar or the beer, but something happens to where i try to hard. anyhoo, Ol' M i really appreciate the advice, especially since its hitting so close to home.

[Old Meister]

I'm not done with this, just so you understand what I'm talking about and learn how to get there. This 'peak performance state',wouldn't it be nice to have it at will? Since foosball I have competed in archery and then pool. I was once ranked 6th in the world in archery, 4th in the nation and won the North American field archery championships in 1990. In order to do this I had to learn something about mental toughness and mental mastery. In pool I always felt I was pretty good and have beaten some top players in the area. But then I decided to become a student of the game and was surprised to see my game fall apart. The more I learned the worse I got. I then bought a book called "Pleasures of small motions". This wonderful book dispelled a lot of myths about the mental game. The thing about somehow shedding the tension while in competition, what? If you can't do it you're a loser? Not so! Use it! The name of the book,"Pleasures of small motions" refers to what a person enjoys about the game. In pool it is about the correct angle with the correct speed and the correct spin along with the correct plan. That's alot but certainly doable and it is fun to do. The real message is it doesn't matter who your playing because the game's requirements remain the same. Just enjoy going through what you need to do to enjoy the game. It's fun! Just do it the best you can. Now, the best you can IS the best you can. You can do no better so why beat yourself up if you don't do any better than the best you can? Higher expectations of yourself than you can deliver are counter productive. Realistic acknowledgment of your skills are a good thing. You stay within your zone and you know what to work on to get better. Now, when you get into a situation that is tense and you need your skills, as I stated before, your conscious mind tries to make things happen where as you subconscious is really the top performer. How do you not do that? Here's the gem from the book I mentioned. Cadence. Wha? Cadence! Making things happen on a beat. Yeah, I hear the doubters. When you are practicing that killer shot of yours, set it up to a silently counted beat. 1234-1234-1234,,, on your own choosing pick on what count of the beat to execute. At first it will be awkward but as you practice you will start to enjoy the explosion of the shot on the count. As the practice becomes an automatic you will feel like you have a weapon locked and ready. You see the cadence frees you from the conscious trigger. Only you know the cadence. You plan your shot and you execute on a level that is comfortable, relaxed and deadly. I hope some of you find this helpful. Imagine that confident pro trying to figure out what the hell he just ran into.

[B,inSA]

Well said Ol' M, as you know from my posts, i have a very active gameroom which is/was centered around a pool table. i fear no man in pool, for the same reasons/situations that you stated above.im trying real hard to practice these states of mind in foos, but its difficult. when the pressure is "on" its really on. but when its casual foos, i just regulate. and not just lucky regulation. what im tryin to do is what is executed. crazy....

[Old Meister]

You've probably heard of visualization in relation to sports and it is key to planning a shot. I always tried to visualize the shape of the blur of the ball. Each shot has it's own shape whether it is a hook, square, or a loop or even a little snag. So basically you're drawing that blur shape on the table with the man and ball.
I personally didn't go to a static setup very often. I could do it and knew it was an effective style of play and that was where the game had gone due to the percentage of success. But for me I loved to make my opponent wonder where the next shot was coming from. On the pass from the 5 to the 3, I would then take the ball across in front of the goal dancing with a front pin and then come around it to a back pin and go across again just a quick check on my opponents first moves in response to  ball position. It's amazing how much you can pick up with just that little maneuver. I then probably would bring it over to my close guy and tap it and rock it just to take him out of the center defense long enough to let me go back to the center man and execute a shot where he again uses his natural tendacies. I just didn't see the point in stopping and letting him gather himself mentally. I always hated lazy goalies who didn't react enough. So much of my game was designed around them reacting. It was those goalies that I would set up shots against. And I'd try to make them eat it long a couple times before I might play the rest of the options. One thing about the long shot,  again going back to the original post, with a relaxed arm and hand you can start that shot incrementally. What I mean is you actually let the shot build as you execute it. You don't try to hit 100mph on the first centimeter of your move, only the second 2/3 of the move.  That shot will smoke on the completion if it is allowed to build and the thing is you can shoot all the options with  the same build up. It really is deceptive to your opponent. The thing about doing this is it copies what the eccentric wheel of a compound bow does. When you pull back a compound bow you feel all the poundage right away but then at full draw you only feel about a 1/3 or even 1/4. So then on the shot that arrow in influenced less then more and more on the shot and leaves the bow just smoking in relation to an equal poundage recurve which puts all the power on the first part of the stroke of the bow. So using that visualization think about the ball and what it does on a shot. If so much lateral movement is put on the ball so quickly it separates from the man for one thing and another thing your opponent picks up on that speed with his subconscious and reacts. A softer beginning maintains contact between the ball and man and is deceptive as it still can go long but seems like it is going somewhere else in that initial millisecond and that is all it takes. To confuse the subconscious reactions of your opponent is to win the battle.

[bbtuna]

very insightful...good, good, very good...you obviously have personally worked through a lot of this in your head...I find it difficult to get my conscious mind to shut down and let the "natural" side take over...I never made the connection before that when I am out of my comfort zone that my mind takes over but I can definately see that...

thanks, good stuff

[grandmaster]

I agree OM, go subconcious and you are unstoppable.