Tension vs. Control

I’m reading a paper about motor learning. (“Motor” here refers to how we move our limbs and things about, not an engine in a car or a bus.) Anyway, there are people who study the damndest things about how we learn to tie our shoes or brush our teeth or learn to play the bassoon. This particular paper deals with how people who are learning something new tend to tense all the muscles involved—not just the ones you need to, say, swing a tennis racket for a backhand stroke, but all the damn muscles in your arm, even the ones that slow down your backhand.

As it turns out, people do this instinctively because the additional tension from the other muscles helps to keep the racket “on target”. The additional tension actually leads to better control and it even helps you learn the correct movements faster. But, as the person learns and practices and becomes more skillful, that tension gradually decreases. They no longer need the extra muscles to keep things aligned properly and to diminish the errors in movement. Efficiency becomes more important over time.

So the tension is something we need in the short term. And now it doesn’t really make a lot of sense when I think back to the experiences where people have told me, “OK, good, now just relax” after the first 2 minutes because doing that would actually slow down my progress. (And I, of course, have given the same unhelpful advice to others. Dammit...)

Maybe we can let the tension be for a while—just a little while as we get used to the new movements. It doesn’t have to feel relaxing or easy at first.