You can learn an astonishing amount from dogs. You could do worse than to learn your social cues from dogs – be really excited to see the people you love, take a hint and bug off if someone growls or snaps at you, don’t hold grudges and act just as excited to see the same people every single day even if they just left five minutes ago.
One of the interesting things about dogs is that they are pure association machines. If you spend any amount of time observing your dogs you will notice this. Even people with a rudimentary understanding of dogs know that they learn by association. It’s not that they have been shown sufficient epistemological evidence that if they sit in a certain position they will be rewarded with a treat, but they’ve intuited the association between sitting a certain way and getting rewarded by your happiness and a treat.
But this association magic and calculation goes much deeper than that. For example, one of my dogs, Zoey, is as food motivated as you’ll ever find a dog. You can hardly be in the kitchen doing anything without her coming to investigate and see if there is any potential for spillage. Unless – and this is key – you are doing a certain combination of things that she has associated with no potential for reward. She now knows, for example, that the specific set of sounds of me getting out the kitchen scale, opening the cupboard and getting flour, and clinking glass on the counter means I am working on something (feeding sourdough starter) that never results in snacks for her. So she stays in whatever comfortable nook she’s in. This calculation and matching with previous associations is constant, and if I do something out of the norm you’ll hear her little feet hit the wood floors.
Humans, too, are association machines although I would argue that our association is much more clouded by cognitive burden – how we think about what we think.
One of the big drivers of motor learning is association.
What is the cause of hitting a baseball with a baseball bat?
Well it’s virtually impossible to determine and denote a causal link. Without even looking too closely you can see a massive variety of ways to hit a baseball.
So the body learns by association. “When this, this, and this sort of happen in a similar way we connect. Got it.”
This is, in a nutshell, why specificity is important to sports training and to a lesser degree fitness training in general. If the associations didn’t matter at all, you could train a deadlift to get better at hitting a baseball. But if motor learning were not based on association, there would only be one precise way to hit a baseball and you’d have to train that exactly.
Which is impossible, because the amount of variability required in even the most basic movement is almost incalculable.
Generally speaking, the more refined you are at performing a movement the less variability there is in it – you’re able to reproduce almost the same movement every single time. Unwanted or uncontrolled variability is seen in unhealthy population such as in the walking gait of people with MS. On the other hand, being able to withstand greater variability and maintain the desired movement pattern with fewer errors is a hallmark of someone who has highly refined movement. Tiger Woods could shoot a better golf game from a moving ship than I ever could under perfect conditions.
The rub is – if we want to reduce variability as much as possible – why would we ever do anything other than the exact movements we want to get better at?
The short answer is – because you have to. The longer answer is that you have to, and it’ll make you better at doing the movements you care about – through the associations it builds.
Why do you have to? Without getting deep into what is a substantially more complex topic than I can do justice to here, but there seems to be a pretty clear association between overspecializing in sport or athletic movement patterns and resulting pain or injury. You might think of it as overuse, I think of it more in terms of what isn’t used. If you’re always doing one thing, it means you’re hardly ever doing a lot of other things. It’s good to know that pull-ups hurt and you’ve overused them, but it doesn’t tell you anything about what you can do to resolve it. Knowing that you may have underused the pushing and extension functions of the upper arms gives you a lot more to work with. So increasing movement variability is a way to move where you can – when you can’t move where you want to.
The other big reason is that all of those variable associations are used as information that can be recalled later to accomplish the movement you want with less error. Think back to Zoey and her basket of associations that result in kitchen snacks. She knows that the cupboard, glass clink, plastic scale noise on the counter doesn’t result in tasty spillage – but if she hears the crinkle of a popcorn or chip bag she will come running, because she knows from previous unrelated situations that it usually means snacks! Suffice to say you have to move very, very carefully in the kitchen if you don’t want to disturb Zozo.
There may be no straight causal line you can draw from stand-up paddleboarding to hitting a baseball, but there may be some useful association information in that task. Does it mean it should be a big part of a baseball player’s training? Absolutely not I just made that up and it’s way too non-specific – but it might not hurt if they enjoy doing it as a recovery mode.
I told you that you can learn a lot from dogs.
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