When I was transitioning from backflipping onto a cushion to backflipping on flat ground (which I’m still slightly scared to do…), I was tempted to ‘just do it’ to overcome the fear. And while this did work at times, at some point I was told that it looked like I was just “throwing my body at it,” instead of being deliberate about the action.
In my last semester of high school, I spent a lot of time pursuing various side quests, like learning to play the guitar, do cool stuff with cards, or to backflip. And with each of these things, I have gained a newfound appreciation for developing a ‘mind-muscle connection’, both for how magically it manifests itself and how interesting the development process is.
I used to play soccer competitively, and every practice, I'd realize that as I warmed up, the world seemed to move slower and slower in my head. I would slowly start to have enough time to actually think through how the ball interacted with my feet, and where the other players were moving. And I felt a similar thing while learning to backflip. When I wasn’t overwhelmed with fear, I would actually feel the ‘jump, tuck, and land’ in the air, and I’d have enough control over the motion to modify parts of it.
This connection is invaluable, but can honestly be quite difficult to develop sometimes. For example, when I was learning to sing, I wasn’t able to change pitch accurately because I hadn’t fully developed a connection between my mind and my vocal cords. What I thought was higher would actually make the note lower. So I've started practicing scales and deliberately varying my pitch to better control the outcome, which I hope will yield better results. I think when we're learning to do something, this connection is the first thing that we need to develop.
I think a big part of this mind-muscle connection is being deliberately present and happy with what you’re doing. If you’re just ‘throwing yourself at something’ without actually being present while doing it, you’re probably going to do worse. It's difficult to explain, but having a clear mental picture of what's going on with a very organized thought process (jump, tuck, land!) will help ‘slow time down’ and make everything a lot easier (how slow time feels while you're doing something is a good litmus test for focus). The lesson here is to do things with full mental presence and the intent of improving, not because you’ve spent the last hour on Netflix or feel forced to (both of which I’ve done before, unfortunately).
As an aside, this idea has a pretty obvious connection to ‘vibe coding.’ I’ve never liked having Claude Code or Codex write large blocks of code for me, and I think it can remove the connection I have with what I’m building. Vibe coding can often feel like throwing yourself at something, but there are ways to go about it correctly if you’re actively being critical and truly understanding what’s going on. This is something I, too, need to learn to do correctly.
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