Learning how to do a backflip

The power of embodied learning

I can now do a backflip:

Ta-Da!

I’ve been trying to do a backflip since late October. Now, six months later, I can finally do one. It now almost feels quite easy. Sure, I could make it a lot prettier, but for the time being I’m just happy to be landing them.

Learning how to do a backflip has been a most humbling experience, it challenges you in ways that you rarely encounter as an adult. Lots of falling over, lots of false starts, lots of frustration, a lengthy plateau where you nearly have it but not quite good enough to take the safety-blocks away. Learning how to do a backflip is like learning how to walk or ride a bike: it puts you in the headspace of a small child.

There is a long period (except, if unlike me you did Gymnastics as a child,) in which it seems impossible, the psychological barrier between you and the skill seems so utterly complete that you can’t imagine ever being able to get over it. The only way to get over it, as it happens, is to land on your head a few times (on heavily padded crashmats—just to be crystal clear!) without getting seriously injured. Seeing that the fall is not so bad, it becomes possible to send it: after all, gymnastics is a sport in which the more aggressively you move, the safer you are: holding back and getting in your head is what causes most of the injuries.

The existence of the mild danger leads to a smart approach to life, as my coaches say: “Either send it all the way or don’t even try—take a break and come back in a bit when you are ready.” Either commit to the action or wait to act. It is so easy to get stuck in a state of half-assing, where you are distracted with this or that thing. The answer is to clear your mind; Be Decisive. That is not the same as being a perfectionist, after all, a great deal of the skill comes from knowing how to commit even when the conditions aren’t exactly perfect: When someone is trying to talk to you, they got the weaker trampettes out, when there is a draft coming from a different place to where you were expecting. Resilience is the reserve that allows you to be decisive when the moment counts.

There is a passage in Infinite Jest that talks about exactly this process (p.p. 115-117). Chu, one of the students at the Enfield Tennis Academy explains that “You proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus[sic], so there’s like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.”

His peer, top-rank student John Wayne, after correcting him on the spelling of ‘Plateaux’ explains that there are three types of quitter: “The Despairing quitter”, who mistakes the plateau for a peak and supposes that he could never move beyond it; “The Obsessive Quitter”, who burns himself out of the game; and the “complacent Quitter” who convinces himself that the game is not for him. To get good at anything you have to avoid falling into any one of those three archetypes. Don’t despair, Don’t Obsess and don’t just blindly accept your situation.

I was never a despairing quitter, and I haven’t burnt myself out of the game, but I did certainly become complacent for a while there. It was only when I tried to send it and failed and didn’t seriously hurt myself, that I obtained the confidence necessary to land the skill.

Each plateau is a point at which in order to seek higher mastery, you must re-adopt the wide-eyed curiosity of a beginner once again. You must break down the stories that you have told yourself about what you can and cannot do. The plateau is a call for you to fight to regain your ignorance.

Your nervous system is a remarkably plastic machine. If you reject the idea that you have already mastered its potentials, if you suppose that it could do more—and you encourage it regularly to try: you will be amazed what it is still capable of.

A backflip is perhaps the simplest proof of the idea,

If you enjoyed this post, I would recommend you read this one as well, which goes over similar themes in more detail: