Thread by @stevemagness

If you think Simone Biles is “weak” then you don’t understand sport, competition, or “toughness”

That’s it. You’re giving away your ignorance.

What Simone experienced was a disconnection of perception and action.

When you are flipping in air and lose all sense of where you are and what you’re body is doing, it’s not good. It’s downright dangerous.

The best comparison for the lay person is vertigo.

Go spin around in circles then try and walk. That’s a disconnection between perception and action.

In sport, the fluid ingrained movement disappears. Your body almost reverts to how it tackled the task when a beginner

In a lot of ways it’s similar to the yips in baseball and golf. An ingrained movement you don’t have to think about becomes something you now have no control over. The brain and body seem on different pages.

So realize when you say “tough it out” it’s nonsensical. It shows you don’t understand performance.

Trying to force yourself through a perception/action disconnection makes the matter worse.

What causes the phenomenon? A lot of theories, as it's hard to study.

But one theory is that it's a protective mechanism. When faced with extreme pressure, the brain interprets it as trauma and chooses to dissociate.

The point being... it occurs suddenly, and you lose the ability to do the thing that you've done thousands of times.

Imagine if all of the sudden you picked up a pencil and couldn't write anymore... That's what it feels like. The panic/freak out that follows exacerbates things.

It's as if there is a block in your brain where you can't get feedback from your muscles, limbs, etc. so you have no idea what they are doing.

Again, a disconnection between perception and action.

The worst thing you can do in that moment is... force your way through.

Why? When we experience this disconnection, our brain tries to zoom in, to rely on step-by-step movement, like what you did when you were a kid learning to first throw, write, etc.

Forcing pushes us further into over-thinking, step-by-step movements.

What you have to do is figure out how to zoom back out, get your ingrained motor patterns working again, and re-establish the bond between perception/action.

So all you people telling @Simone_Biles to push through are wrong.

You are wrong based on the latest science and psychology. What you are suggesting would actually make things worse.

For those looking to understand what happened to Simone Biles and why her choice demonstrates toughness, I went in depth on the psychology and science here:

thegrowtheq.com/if-you-think-s…