Skill Acquisition

Mark Brown

December 16, 2021

Skill acquisition is a fascinating topic because it is both a straight ahead concept and a wandering target. It is something that must be done to improve but doesn’t always progress in a linear fashion. It can be particularly maddening in mentally and physically. Acquiring skills is how a person with less talent becomes more level with a person who is more naturally talented and how a person who is naturally talented takes his game up to a higher level. I can think of a couple examples from skills I have learned from the endeavors I have actually tried to improve at that have perplexed me. This isn’t going to be just about skill acquisition in the gym, but an overall look at it’s puzzling nature through personal examples.

The best way to learn something is by doing it. Learning of what to do or not to do from someone else’s prior experiences is nice but they don’t have the same type of sticking power as stepping in the same pile of crap as them does. That’s how I see it at least. I have only three activities I in life I have ever really tried to get better at: Strength training, golf, and cooking. That is not listed in any particular order. Acquiring the necessary skills to improve in those three things are quite different. Golf is the most maddening discipline of the three and strength training and cooking are much closer in terms of linear progression. All three require practice and continued book learning to really get better over time but the main difference is that skill acquisition in golf is far from linear in my experience. A late addition to those 3 is the thing that someone is reading right now. It’s been a near 12-13 years since I really devoted any time to writing so this blog project I’ve taken on it forces me to re-acquire the communication and organization skills that got me through Drake University. I want to take from these 4 areas this discussion.

Golf is a sport I have played for almost 13 years now and would say I have been decent at for about 6 years now. It is a frustrating game in general because of how demanding it is physically and taxing mentally. Physical skills are largely developed at the driving range. Those are learning how to strike the ball, how to move the body, how to read greens and all of that kind of stuff. Learning the mental, emotional and strategic skills of golf is done on the course and can really only be done there. So progressing in the sport takes a long time, even for naturally talented people. As I have improved overall I have noticed certain parts of my game progressing and others slipping. The best example I can think of is that over the last couple years my biggest strengths are my driving off the tee and putting. I’ve largely been long enough and accurate enough to put myself in position for good scores then when I get on the green I can put it in the hole relatively quickly. Through the same time period I have seen my shot making skill decline. I’m not entirely sure why, either. It’s not like a I practice driving and putting any more than I do successfully hitting a 7 iron left handed out of the trees. I play right handed, for the record. I can’t mentally dance around the fact that I was better at hitting shots over trees or from severely sloped hills in the early part of my golf playing life. This year I saw some improvement in chipping especially after getting the Cleveland Golf’s full faced wedges in late May but it still goes hot and cold depending on the round. Golf proves that there is more to skill acquisition than practice, playing and muscle memory.

I have also learned how fragile learning skills in strength training can be over the last couple years. I have twice had to readjust from primarily dumbbell pressing to barbell pressing. The first time was last year moving to lifting in the garage and the second was this year when returning to the garage from lifting in the gym for a few months. I learned that dumbbells don’t quite transfer over to bench press all the way. That makes sense since I doesn’t bench press the same way I dumbbell press. It was much more pronounced before. Skill acquisition has become more important over the last two years because I have gotten many specialty bars and have had to learn how to use them. I had to learn how to grip and get the most out of my bench press when transitioning to the Ohio Power Bar. That took a few weeks to get it dialed in and it confused the hell out of me. Only thing I can think of is that the combination of the thicker bar and difference in length of the bar is the reason why finding my hand placement took so long to figure out. The American Cambered Bar has taken some time to feel quite strong with it. It is an absolute ego killer, especially at the start. The deadlift bar’s flexibility is interesting to learn because it can help be an audible and physical cue doing the lift. The log took the least time to get my mind around because the front rack position for it is entirely different from that of a bar. The Safety Squat Yoke Bar (SSY) took me a long time to learn the movement patten on. It concentrates the weight of the bar on the yoke part of the bar, which is heavily padded on the back of the neck with hands down in front of the chest. That makes it a very, very different lift than a straight bar squat. It requires much more core stabilization in the core to do a free squat. This bar makes a lot of different squat varieties doable in ways no other bar does. There is a high skill wall to overcome though. The Rogue cambered bar is the last bar I bought, even though I’d been thinking about it since before last year. It’s squat bar for low bar squatters like me. Learning how to squat when the bar itself feels like it’s moving takes some time to figure out and in the meantime I am learning how to stabilize my core better. Same goes for when it’s used as a bench press bar. At 85 pounds, it’s also almost the weight of 2 bars so when I get it out, it’s with purpose. All of these specialized bars have required me to learn how to use them so I can train better and take advantage of all of the nuances they offer.

Programming lifts to maintain skills while getting stronger is part of what makes planning sessions a major challenge. If the goal is only to get stronger, I know I don’t even need to think about touching a barbell. I can do it with dumbbells alone. However, if I want to get better at strength training learning barbell lifts is necessary. Throw in specialty bars and programming not only gets harder to maintain skills but also gets more rewarding over time. The best example I can think of in my training is squats. I have 3 bars I squat with: The SSY Bar, Cambered Bar, and the Ohio Power Bar, a straight bar. I did a low bar straight bar squat during the summer specifically to maintain the skillset of straight bar squatting while outwardly trying to hit my hamstrings harder. I don’t compete but if the thought does ever cross my mind to do so a straight bar squat is the lift that counts so it has to be learned fully and practiced. The weight of the bar is displaced every place on the body the bar rests so in many respects it is the easiest of the variations because it is more controllable for me personally. The way the weight is focused on the back of the neck while squatting using the SSY Bar makes me have to concentrate energy into both breathing and stabilizing core that it makes it a very different lift. That alone makes it a lift that must be practiced a lot to become proficient at it. It has to be in the program if I want to maintain the skill of a SSY free squat. It wasn’t for a long time and I am currently attempting to re-learn it because I kind of forgot how to do it. I’ve been doing box squats with it for a long while now but that’s a different movement. The cambered bar doubles down on the lower back focus when squatting. It is an offset weighted straight bar squat. By moving where the weight is felt by the body down 14-16 inches it forces me to maintain a strong core and maintain a more vertical movement. It is more for quadricep development than hamstrings and I’ve noted it sometimes feels like a front squat. One of the big draws to the cambered bar squat for me is the hand placement. On a straight bar, I have trouble fully gripping the bar with both hands most of the time but that’s no such problem with the cambered bar. However, that does mean is takes strain off the shoulders, which is part of a competition squat lift. The last two bars I talked about exist to aid in the training of the first making them supplemental lifts. The key for programming having these three bars is weave them in and out of the program every few weeks for both skill management/improvement and muscle confusion purposes. Currently, I do my specialized bar squat in the garage on Tuesdays and a high bar squat in the gym at about 75-80% 1 rep max to maximize strength and skill development. That’s the price of having 3 bars for 2 lifts a week.

I learned how to cook around 13-14 years ago. When I decided to do it, I dove into fully and picked it up fairly quickly. I would say that it is most likely the one thing I am most naturally talented at. I have never been a recipe cook, even at the beginning, because I feel they hinder improvement in the area. Learning what ingredients do when paired with others in different applications or preparations is what cooking is all about. That is why I will never buy food that is already prepped for me. Cooking and prep skills are incredibly important and should be understood by everyone I believe. Over the years I have developed recipes and learned skills specifically to keep them in the back pocket for when they become necessary. Those include skills include sauce making, yeast bread baking, salsa and jam making, canning, and smoking meat. I can do just about everything in the kitchen. Baking bread, cakes and pies are the only things that I rely on recipes for because I’m not an instinctive baker and haven’t done it enough to really get the ratios down. I just don’t eat enough of them to justify making them.

Soon after I started cooking I began to gill quite a lot. First, I used my oldest brother’s, Mike, 22-inch kettle grill. That led to me buying a smoker, a barrel grill with a side firebox, about 10 years ago now. I’ve gotten pretty good at making barbecue, and those aren’t just my words. I’ve gotten quite a few compliments on it. My first couple efforts were pretty terrible. I still remember that first attempt. I immediately dove into the deep end by trying to learn how to smoke brisket, which I had heard was the hardest meat to crack. I proceeded to cook about 20 briskets over a 2 year period. Something I can’t fully explain happened after I got the smoker and started to really crank up the activity on it. I learned early on that smoking meat is two different skills: food preparation and fire management. Both skills are important but I consider the latter the more important one of the two based on the fact that it’s the element that defines barbecue. When I got the smoker, I learned that I couldn’t really start a fire in the smoker because I couldn’t get enough air to the heating charcoal so I used Mike’s grill to start the fire in a chimney starter then transferred the coals over to the side fire box or barrel. I also learned after taking Alton Brown’s advice that chunk style hardwood charcoal instead of briquettes because they burn hotter, faster and don’t have any binders, mostly petroleum based, to burn through. I found early on with the smoker that I could very easily make fires that maxed out the temperature gauge. Somewhere along the way I lost the ability to make that hot fire in the smoker. I don’t know when or where it happened but I can’t do it anymore. I’ve been grilling more lately than smoking so I’ve been attempting to get that hot fire ideal for grilling and have failed every time. No matte how many hot coals I have in the grill, it just doesn’t get there. What’s been gained, however, is an ability to build 225-300 degree fires without any real effort. For the purposes of smoking, that’s perfect ideal but it baffles me when I’m just grilling. I legitimately cannot explain the loss of the one skill and gain of the other.

Writing essays like this was much more commonplace at Drake than it was at North Polk. I’ve always said that high school teaches stuff and college teaches how to learn. I stand by that. I took enough storytelling and rhetoric classes at Drake to help me really formulate the difference between spoken language and written language. The ways words are used to communicate an idea sometimes differ greatly even though the meaning of those words didn’t change at all. A lot of the has to do with things that go beyond the words themselves. Things like body language, localities, tone, etc. To say reading and writing are top level fundamental skills sets is underselling how important they are. However, I found myself doing very little of the former and none of the latter in 12 or so years. I have books on my shelf at home and I have read about half of them. I read news articles and magazine-type pieces on my phone a bit but it’s not a skill I can say I practice a lot. The loss of emphasis on reading in the mainstream is something that worries me. Writing is something I haven’t seriously done since I turned in my papers on my history senior seminar classes at Drake in 2008. I learned enough to be able to do it again 13 years later but it’s taken some time to fully re-learn the skill of writing.

The English class part of writing isn’t that difficult to re-learn because it’s been practiced somewhat by reading. The hard part is what I learned while taking all of those journalism and storytelling classes at Drake: Editing. It’s not as simple as making a first draft, re-reading, second draft, re-reading, etc. Editing as one goes writing an essay like this makes the process take more time. Writing is not a fast process. I have noticed that I can put together essays quicker the more I do them because I’m able to find the exact words I am wanting to use faster. So in that way I am seeing improvement on that end to me. The other part of equation in writing, especially in this setting, is organization. When one is going through college, being well organized is the difference between performing well in class and not. I can think of at least a dozen instances off the top of my head that I screwed myself because I was unorganized. The biggest difference between classes and blogging is that I can change the due dates if I so choose. That doesn’t mean that choice is without consequence so I have to be properly organized. I need to have enough drafts nearing completion and essays actually done to so as to keep a consistent enough schedule of content on the blog. That pressure to continue writing so that I have enough done ahead is what turns writing into the grind that I feel. It’s a remarkably similar feeling to golf when on the course and lifting in the garage or gym, really. I do take it quite seriously. The days I’m not lifting I feel a pressure to get something written. It’s an enjoyable grind at the moment.

I hope I have been able to show how progression of skill acquisition can be less than linear. These were some of my strongest personal examples of how evasive it can be that I can give. Learning how to best get something done then practicing it repeatedly is required to get to place, mental or physical, one wants to go. Listening to how other people do things is important because it can give a fresh perspective but it cannot be the thing that defines improvement. Practice that skill is the only thing that gets one there. That doesn’t mean it’s going to go as planned.