Why We Don't Use Mirrors to Evaluate Our Own Lifts

[tfranc]

For more support on the idea - I have squatted in front of a mirror for years, and I've always had issues with my form in one way or another. I only recently began to squat without one and within about a week, so many things I was doing wrong corrected themselves with minimal effort. I was having chronic pain in my hips for months which made me absolutely dread squatting. By the end of the first week without a mirror, the pain had basically gone away. Mirrors fuck you up. They are evil.

[MBasic]

I think the other reasons you stated are far better than this one, primarily because sound travels much more slowly than light. So, if my visual perception from the mirror is too slow to be relevant, a coach's oral cue is even slower and therefore less relevant.

I'm not arguing that mirrors > coaches, just that the quoted logic is fallacious. There are plenty of reasons coaches are awesome and mirrors suck, but speed of perception is not one of them.

For example, if my coach is standing 3 feet away, and there is a mirror 3 feet in front of me, it will take 6 nanoseconds for me to perceive my reflection, not accounting for the time it takes my brain to process the information. It will take my coach 3 nanoseconds to perceive my fault, a second or two to verbally cue me, and 3 million nanoseconds (3 milliseconds) for his cue to reach my ears. Give or take.

the whole time discrepancy thing here is so overly anal, its ridiculous.

A coach is a real thinking person, I mirror is not, even tho 186,000 miles/sec. lol

When I help/coach/spot my wife or kid I cue them "knees out!!" or "Knees stay out!" right as they hit bottom in the squat.

Because I know right AFTER the ascent starts, and they hit the sticking point, THAT'S when their knees drift inward . . . taking into account they need that in advance, not after or while its happening.

[Michael Wolf]

Over 6 feet, light reaches you 6 milliseconds faster, this advantage is not large enough to matter.

Human reaction time to auditory cues is about 160 milliseconds.
Human reaction time to visual cues is longer, 190 milliseconds.
Source: Mental chronometry - Wikipedia

This was addressed in a show on PBS I saw about vision (sorry it was a few years ago, can't remember the name). They posed the question, "Why are starting guns used instead of starting lights if sound travels more slowly than light?' The answer given was that the auditory system is much quicker in the brain. Your eye is not a camera. Most of what you see is formed in your brain, not in your eye, and this process is relatively slow. Supposedly the gun vs light scenarios have been tested and runners are always quicker to respond to a starting gun than to a starting light.

This is interesting. In addition to the local relevance on this topic, it's also an interesting example of the general observation of how many assumptions are often baked into seemingly simple statements.

But this is probably irrelevant too -- the constraint is in recognizing the problem and choosing a cue in time.

When I help/coach/spot my wife or kid I cue them "knees out!!" or "Knees stay out!" right as they hit bottom in the squat.

Because I know right AFTER the ascent starts, and they hit the sticking point, THAT'S when their knees drift inward . . . taking into account they need that in advance, not after or while its happening.

These two things are also good points and I should have included them in my response last night. Cues given during a rep are very often anticipatory, not reactionary, based on the coach's experience with that lifter.

[Rob Thomson]

This was addressed in a show on PBS I saw about vision (sorry it was a few years ago, can't remember the name). They posed the question, "Why are starting guns used instead of starting lights if sound travels more slowly than light?' The answer given was that the auditory system is much quicker in the brain. Your eye is not a camera. Most of what you see is formed in your brain, not in your eye, and this process is relatively slow. Supposedly the gun vs light scenarios have been tested and runners are always quicker to respond to a starting gun than to a starting light.

This is fascinating. I wonder how much quicker the response was, as tested.

[cph]

You're able to perform your best when your mind is quiet and focused. Has anyone read The Inner Game of Tennis? The general idea is that you do not want your conscious mind to control your performance; you want it to be to instinctive (call it muscle memory, ingrained motor patterns, whatever). The mirror is a detriment to that. You shouldn't get in the habit of judging yourself while you're performing. Videotape your performance, diagnose your problems, then make a plan for how to correct them. (In other words, act like a coach.)

There's also a concept in sports psychology called "quiet eye." The idea is that you perform better when your eyes are still and focused on a single point. (For ball sports, etc., the point is your target. For us, it's an arbitrary fixed point.) I'm always impressed when I see how still great weightlifters' eyes are. It's like they're glossed over. They don't even move in the rack position of the clean. If you're looking in the mirror and trying to adjust, you won't keep your eyes still.

[Rob Thomson]

the whole time discrepancy thing here is so overly anal, its ridiculous.

A coach is a real thinking person, I mirror is not, even tho 186,000 miles/sec. lol

When I help/coach/spot my wife or kid I cue them "knees out!!" or "Knees stay out!" right as they hit bottom in the squat.

Because I know right AFTER the ascent starts, and they hit the sticking point, THAT'S when their knees drift inward . . . taking into account they need that in advance, not after or while its happening.

I agree, but I think you've missed my very anal, completely obscure point: these other arguments are superior to the time-of-perception discrepancy, if that is even a factor. This was my point, that the speed of perception is a weaker argument when compared to "coaches know how to cue, can see in three dimensions, mirrors only offer part of the picture, etc."

I was not arguing that because light travels faster, mirrors are better. I was pointing out that the implication that a coach's cue is somehow faster than light makes for a weak argument. Weak arguments should be avoided.

[Sam McLeod]

This was addressed in a show on PBS I saw about vision (sorry it was a few years ago, can't remember the name). They posed the question, "Why are starting guns used instead of starting lights if sound travels more slowly than light?' The answer given was that the auditory system is much quicker in the brain. Your eye is not a camera. Most of what you see is formed in your brain, not in your eye, and this process is relatively slow. Supposedly the gun vs light scenarios have been tested and runners are always quicker to respond to a starting gun than to a starting light.

While interesting it ignores more important confounding variables. Starting guns are used for foot races because the athletes are bent over on the blocks and it would be impractical to use a light, as well as the psychological effect at seeing and gun and hearing a gun fire near you (whether you perceive any real danger or not). I believe I read some study a few years ago that found elevated heart rate and attention when in the presence of a firearm, even without any chance of bodily harm. Other competitive races, like drag races, use a flag or lights to start the race, which I would say is for the sake of practicality and has nothing to do with the speed that light travels compared to sound waves.

I agree with other posters that speed of light and sound are of such little consequence to the topic it's just not applicable. More important variables like the the distraction of other movements in the mirror, looking away from where your eyes should be in the squat kills hip drive (easily the most common reason I miss a rep), and checking out my own sexy body are much better reasons to squat without a mirror.

Also, your post insinuates that auditory signals are not processed in your brain, but in your ear? In any case, the milliseconds that on average are different between the reactionary time of either stimulus is just an interesting subject, but does not apply to using a mirror or even competitive races. As well, if all of the athletes receive the stimulus at the same time, then why does it matter what the method of communication is?

[Michael Wolf]

I was pointing out that the implication that a coach's cue is somehow faster than light makes for a weak argument. Weak arguments should be avoided.

I agree with you, but it may be that I didn't describe what I meant with sufficient clarity. I'll try to do so now. Ignoring all the other good reasons why we agree mirrors aren't good, assuming the trainee can get a clear picture of what's happening - the coach obviously can't see what's happening faster than the trainee here. But the trainee has the additional burden of simultaneously trying to lift the weight, and that slows down processing speed by a lot. How much? I can't tell you, and I'd be surprised if a neuroscientist could either though maybe they can give a more educated conjecture with proposed mechanisms. What I can tell you - and if you've been under the bar yourself and coached people, you also know this - is that being under a heavy load makes you partially deaf and somewhat stupid. You can react to a shouted cue of 1-4 words that reminds you of something you already know. You can't, or can only very poorly and more slowly, do the following: see what's happening in a mirror, process it, figure out what cue to use inside your own head to correct it, then react to that cue.

I think this has more to do with the multiple challenging physical tasks you're simultaneously performing, leaving you unable to quickly and accurately cue yourself compared to reacting to a coach's cue, than the speed light vs sound or even of auditory vs visual processing, though those things may play some role as well.

But I do agree that even if this is not the case, there are other reasons mirrors generally aren't good for this purpose, outside of some few specific circumstances discussed in earlier pages.

[Elephant]

This was addressed in a show on PBS I saw about vision (sorry it was a few years ago, can't remember the name). They posed the question, "Why are starting guns used instead of starting lights if sound travels more slowly than light?' The answer given was that the auditory system is much quicker in the brain. Your eye is not a camera. Most of what you see is formed in your brain, not in your eye, and this process is relatively slow. Supposedly the gun vs light scenarios have been tested and runners are always quicker to respond to a starting gun than to a starting light.

For elite level sprints, there is a speaker in each runners starting blocks. Each speaker is connected to the starter's gun electrically. Therefore, there is only a small distance between the speaker and the runner and each runner is the same distance from the sound.

In track and field sprints, the sport's governing body, the IAAF, has a rule that if the athlete moves within 0.1 seconds after the gun has fired the athlete has false-started. This figure is based on tests that show the human brain cannot hear and process the information from the start sound in under 0.10 seconds.This rule is only applied at high-level meets where fully automated force or motion sensor devices are built into the starting blocks that are tied via computer with the starter's gun. False start - Wikipedia