Mirror Neurons and Basketball: How To Improve Twice As Fast (Podcast Episode 72)

Foreign podcast. I appreciate you guys who are tuned in today on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, Pandora, Google Podcast, wherever else maybe listening from. And of course, everybody who's watching right now on YouTube. Shout out to you guys if you're on YouTube. Make sure you drop a, like, subscribe if you're new. Got a new podcast coming every Sunday as well as different videos spaced out throughout the week. So if you want to become a better basketball player or if you're. I know I have a lot of trainers too, who, who watch my stuff if you want to become a better trainer. That's also my goal is to really just share the stuff that I learn. And almost, you know, people say the best way to learn something is a teacher, right? So a lot of times that's, that's kind of what this is. It's a way for me to become better by trying to help as many people as I can through my own experiences. Through me, just trying to learn more about, you know, becoming the best trainer I can be so that I can help the most amount of players that I can. So I appreciate you guys who are rocking with me who are tuned in. I was thinking about this a lot this week, and I was actually thinking about it specifically during a session on Friday. And there's a, there's a ball handling. Well, a passing drill is kind of ball handling and passing. I would throw passing into ball handling. I would kind of, I would, I would kind of merge the two. But we do a drill. A lot of my players, we do a drill pretty much every single workout. It's like a four pass series. We're working on four different passes you might have off of a ball screen. So the first one's like a pocket pass, the second one's a hook pass. The third one's gonna be behind the back balance pass, and third one's gonna be. Or the fourth one's gonna be a behind the back chest pass. And so we literally will just rep this out like, you know, without any sort of movement, just literally like rep after rep, like pound pocket pass, pound hook pass, all that, that stuff will run through it. And I was, I was saying to somebody who was there, I was like, you know, this is stuff that I watch my players do. Like sometimes I'll be the one passing it to them, but I'm never the one, like really doing. I might demonstrate it quickly if I'm working with a player who hasn't done it before or whatever, or if I want to make a point about something. But for the most part, I'm just watching it. Like, I'm just watching them do it. And for the majority of my players, like, you know, we'll get in and we'll run through that series in five minutes, right? They just get through it quickly. And. And. But I watched that pretty much every single day. And I was saying, like, you know, it's so weird because I feel like, you know, I was playing pickup the last, you know, over two times this past week, and both times I was, like, throwing those passes that they were working. Like, I wasn't working on those passes. But, like, I'm coming off a ball screen, I'm hitting people with that behind the back bounce pass for a three. And it's like, that's something that I don't ever. Like, I don't work on that. Like, I'm not the one who's actually physically in the gym every single day working on that pass. I'm pretty much just watching it. And, you know, again, I might teach it, I might teach, I might demonstrate it real quick, but I'm not really getting those reps up. It's my players who are getting the reps up. And yet I find myself going into these situations and actually executing that skill, even when it's only something I've ever watched. I've only watched somebody else do it for the most part, and it feels comfortable to do, right? And you'd think, like, oh, if you're not getting the reps, you probably don't be able to do it. But that was just something that I noticed this week. And this goes back to a conversation I had with my guy, Danny Cooper, on my podcast, like, probably two or three months ago at this point. And shout out to Danny, by the way. And we were talking about kind of in a similar vein, just like, you know, you watch this film, like, you'll go on. You spend so much time as a trainer, as a coach, you're watching all this film, and, you know, whether it's watching guys that you're trying to learn from in terms of, like, okay, how does this guy do this move? How does that get open? How does this guy do this off this screen? How does this guy, you know, execute coming off of a handoff or coming off of whatever, right? You're looking at these. These different players to learn how they do what they do, or you're looking at these different situations. See, okay, what's the most effective way to score when there's a defender here? Or how does this guy handle pressure or whatever? The case may be you spend so much time watching this sort of stuff that it almost becomes innate, right? And you almost. Like, the next time you find yourself in the situation when you're playing, you can execute that same thing that you watch just because you've watched it, right? And you almost have, like, a little two plus two moment where you're like, oh, yeah, like, that's what I'm supposed to do. And it's. It's hard to explain, but it's a real thing. And that's something that I kind of went back to again this past week. We had the guy. The conversation with Danny, and he was like, yeah, man, I literally feel the same exact way. I'll go watch all this film, and. And I'll study all these guys, and I'll go out and I'll do this stuff that I haven't actually practiced before just because I've watched it. And that got me thinking a little bit about the power of mental reps. The power of being able to watch stuff and being able to. Your brain is able to take that and emulate it to an extent. And I wanted to kind of dive into, like, is that a real thing, or is this just the placebo effect? Is this just me? You. You know, kind of randomly, like, just maybe I'm naturally good at. At that, at those couple things that I tried, or maybe Dan and I are both in the same boat with that. So I wanted to kind of dive into that a little bit and see, like, what is the science behind it. And when I did do a little bit of a dive into it, there's a lot. A lot. A lot of science behind why that's a real thing. And of course, that's one part of. I want you guys to understand that, but also I want to give you guys some tips that you can take so that you can get the most out of your workouts. Because. Because I think that understanding this concept of the power of mental reps, there's a lot that you're probably leaving on the table in your workouts because you're only thinking about the physical reps, right? You think, okay, when I go in, it's my turn to do this drill. I do that drill. But when I'm off, it's their turn to do it. And there's a lot more that you can take from other people's reps as well. And then also, when it comes to just like, I was talking about watching film, studying other players, studying yourself, there's so much value to be gained from that as well. So we'll talk about all that sort of stuff. But, you know, the first thing that I want to talk about is just a couple of definitions for you and a word or a definition we're going to go to a few times throughout this podcast is vicarious learning and observational learning. These are essentially the same thing. Some people would define them a little bit differently, but for the most part, for our purposes, we're essentially just going to use these interchangeably. And essentially all that vicarious learning is is learning through osmosis or learning through watching something happen. Watching through observing something, as opposed to hands on, you actually going out and doing it. Okay, so there's a lot of examples we can take, you know, to learn from this. Let's say, for example, you want to learn a dance, right? So you go on YouTube and you search up, you know, how to do the Dougie, right? And then you watch a YouTube video on that. And that's how you learn, right? That's an example of you learning through observational learning or vicarious learning, whichever term you want to use. It's a process that allows us to learn from others, right? And this is because, you know, we're able to. It's a very conscious process where you actually have to be kind of locked in mentally, because it's not just about watching, but it's also about feeling, you know, what's happening. It's also about having, you know, being able to be empathetic towards somebody, which just means being able to put yourself in their shoes, right? So you see somebody struggling through a workout, and they're, you know, know, doing a bunch of sprints at the end of their workout, and you kind of feel like, oh, wow, that's tough, right? That's. That's empathy right there. So your ability to empathize also goes along with your ability to learn vicariously just through watching the experiences of others, right? When we were in school as little kids, right, and we were learning how to. How to. How to write, you know, your teacher would up on the whiteboard, would draw the, okay, today we're going to learn how to, you know, write the letter R. And then she'd write the R. And then, you know, you'd see her do that, and then you would copy it on your piece of paper, right? That is vicarious learning or observational learning. You're learning through watching somebody else do it. That's the same thing. You essentially learned that when it came to talking, right? You saw your, you know, your parents talk, you Saw your siblings talk, you saw your friends talk, and kind of eventually you started to pick up how they talk, the things that they said to each other. The most of the stuff that you learned how to say, you didn't learn in school, right? You just learned from being a person, from just being around other people. And that is again, an example of vicarious learning where you're learning not directly through your own experience, but through watching other people learning from other people. And so then the question becomes, what form of learning is better? Right? We learn through directly doing something, right? Going back to that, that writing example, okay? Your teacher may have shown you how to write that letter, but then you had to Write it out 10 times your piece of paper so you could actually practice doing it. Okay. And the combination of those two things is how you actually learned how to write. You know, learning how to shoot a basketball, right? You might have somebody, you might watch somebody shoot it, or you might learn from a coach or from maybe you're an older sibling or older cousin or something. They maybe taught you how to do that, but then you're the one who actually went out every day and practice shooting. Okay? So typically for, for the majority of things in your life, it's been a combination of both observational learning, but also learning through directly doing it yourself. Okay? Okay. And so now that we have these two kind of distinct ways of learning, which way is more important for you as a basketball player? Right. If you want to become the most, you know, the best basketball player you can be, if you want to develop at the fastest rate possible, then which way of learning is more important? And fortunately, there's a lot of studies that have, have kind of gone into this. And so the first one was a study and it was actually using medical students, and it was called vicarious learning. During simulations, is it more effective than hands on training? And so essentially what I was looking at is that in a simulation of like. So think about like a training exercise, right? So like a drill. They were taking these medical students and they had, I think there was 200 of them. They split them up into two groups. And essentially what they were doing is they were trying to teach effective communication between doctors and patients. Okay. And so they took the. This group of undergrad medical students, and they essentially compared the difference between learning it in a simulation style, which was vicariously just by watching or observing somebody else, you know, another doctor and a patient kind of go through a conversation or go through a situation. You kind of were just observing, kind of vicariously learning what was the best way to go about communicating that situation compared to you actually being the doctor who was communicating with the patient. Okay, so you had that vicarious way of learning through the simulation, but you also had just the physical like performance, like you were the one who was actually doing it. And they also wanted to see if the order of that matters. So does it matter if we do the vicarious way first and then the actual hands on way, or, you know, if we do it the opposite way, does that affect the results of ultimately how good you become at that communication? And so they split those groups, those groups up into two. And they had one group who did the first 30 minutes were just observational, and then the third next 30 minutes were them actually doing it themselves. And the other group was just the opposite of that. Just flip flop those two things. And so in order to measure each participant and their knowledge of effective doctor patient communication, they measured the, their understanding of that before, in the middle and after the entire experiment. So they got a chance to see how each kind of phase, each 30 minute phase of learning affected their overall knowledge of effective communication. And the results showed that vicarious learning actually led to a greater knowledge of effective doctor patient communication than learning through hands on direct experience did. And the order in which you did this. So vicarious first and then director directing the vicarious, didn't really have any sort of major impact. But the results did show that when they looked at the, the split test, when they took that first group and they had just learned vicariously and they, they measured to see knowledge compared to the other group who had learned just by doing first, they saw that a group that learned vicariously through observation actually had a greater knowledge and gained a greater knowledge than the group that did it just by doing it themselves. So that in that sense, right there in that study, goes to show that the vicarious method of learning can actually be more effective than doing it yourself. And I probably went through five or six more studies going through this similar sort of stuff, talking about how vicarious learning or observational learning can truly help to accelerate the overall learning process by a lot, probably a lot more than you would think compared to just direct experience. But for now, I'll dive into what this actually means for you as a basketball player. And the moral of the story ultimately is that there's a lot to be gained by observation, right? There's a lot that you can learn through not just doing, not just going out and working out and getting shots up and going to practice, but by actually being mentally engaged the entire Time. There's so much more that you can get out of that. You can take a look at this in the context of practice, right? Observation in the context of just your practices. One thing to understand is that every rep is your rep. If you approach every rep as your rep, then you're going to gain so much more out of that practice, out of that workout mentally than you would if you just focus on your physical reps. You know, there was a, a video I posted on Instagram on my story a couple days ago and I'll post it again on YouTube here. And it was of two of the Baltimore Ravens rookies this year, Jason O. And it was Dalen Hayes, and they were going through just a, just a drill on like the sleds. And so they had Jason. No, it was his rep up to hit the sled and Dalen Hayes was behind him. It wasn't even his rep. He was off. But he still, as Jason was lining up to go through his rep, Dylan Hayes also lined up and just went through his rep on air at the same pace that that Jason Owen went through his. So now as Jason always getting his rep in Dale and Hayes is getting another mental rep in before he actually gets his physical rep. So now just take as we talked about, now he's combining that observational vicarious learning with the actual direct hands on experience that he's getting through his own reps. Okay? So just accelerate, accelerate the process he's going to make in practice by two because he's getting double the amount of reps. And you could potentially even argue that you can raise that by more than two, because again, we look at a study where the vicarious learning actually led to a greater gain of knowledge as compared to just direct experience. If you're actually focusing on getting that vicarious experience, then there's a good chance you're actually accelerating at a rate more than twice as fast. And so that was a really great example, I thought, of taking every single rep as your rep. Now that doesn't mean that you physically have to go through every single rep like Dale and Hayes did right there, but just being locked in and focused on the rep that somebody else is doing is such a crucial piece to you. Being able to take advantage of, you know, our ability. And we as humans have what's called mirror neurons, which essentially allows us to see something and then be able to mirror it. And just by seeing that thing, we're actually able to physically do it at a higher level than if we had not seen it. Okay, so by Dalen Hayes. Watching Jason Oy go through that rep and really being focused on it, he's actually going to be better when it comes to his rep because of those mirror neurons now firing and him creating those patterns in his brain. They're going to allow him to actually physically execute that skill at a higher level just because he's locked in. The best way for you to get better at a skill is by not only doing it, but also by watching it. So when you can combine those two things in practice, it makes it so that you can accelerate your development of that skill way, way faster.