Relaxation is the result of mastery. With thoughts about problem solving

Relaxation as a result of mastery, instead of a prerequisites

In many sports/ crafts that I have experienced, relaxation is considered by many the prerequisites of mastery:

• In playing piano, your fingers, wrists, arms and shoulders have to be relax or you will find it extremely hard to press the right keys fluently;
• In online games that require fast reactions, rookies hands are stiff and they press buttons with unnecessary strength and range of motion, which stops them from pressing right buttons at the right time smoothly;
• In jiujitsu, being reasonably relax helps you to perform efficient moves, saving your energy and gives you more choices in different situations in which you have to adapt and react quickly.

Mainstream arguments I have seen in the above fields are that relaxation is a prerequisite of getting good at these skills: “You have to relax or your chords sound horrible!”, “you have to relax to improve your techniques”. Yet most people have to go through a good amount of practice untill they become relaxed and start being good at those skills. Did they not understand how to relax their bodies when they were beginners? Everyone knows how to relax their bodies - just lie on a comfortable massage bed and you will be relax. The hard part is being relax while doing things that we are not good at.

And I would like to argue that relax should come after mastery.

When we first start to learning how to play piano, it feels like our fingers do not belong to us - it is almost an impossible task to control our fingers to work separately and yet cooperatively just to press the right keys without touching the wrong ones at the same time. Is it possibe to be relax at this stage? I am afraid not. It takes huge effort to tame your body to perform tasks that you are unfamiliar at. Being stiff is a sign of using unnecessary energy, which is totally normal when you don’t know the right muscles to use or unable to avoid using unnecessary muscles.

Being “relax” is the result of using “just right” amount of energy - using only the muscles that are needed at the moment. And this is impossible until you acquired the skills and can effortlessly control your body to perform the task - which means mastery. Here mastery doesn’t mean being a legendary pianist or a world champ in LOL or jiujitsu, it means you have mastered all the building blocks of your craft and you are ready for the journey of exploring the advanced usages of them, just like a baby finally learnt how to walk steadily - now he knows how to use his feet, so he can freely explore how to jump, how to run…this is an important milestone of learning.

That said, one should notice that it is impossible to be relax before mastery - if you are a beginner in piano can you are completely relax, you are not trying to tame your fingers! You are not trying to make them to do the correct movement! You will inevitably be stiff if you try to do so. And in jiujitsu trying to be relax and look like a seasoned black belt toying people as a white belt will be total bullshit, reality will hit you in your face. You have to try hard to understand every basic technique and know their limits, figure out when does strength work well and when does it not - You have to go through the stiff stage.

Relaxation should be a sign of mastery, and yet people mistook it as the cause of mastery.

Your brain is a muscle

It is a well-known¹ result that human brains are like muscles, they can be trained to become stronger, and they become weaker if lack training. And most great problem solvers tell people that anyone can get better in problem solving by practicing. So it is natural to ask, does relaxation do the same for problem solving? Is the mind of a mature problem solver more relax when solving problems, comparing to that of a naive one? Could relaxation of mind be a sign of mastery of problem solving skills?

There are too many times that I think “too hard” on a problem: I manipulated the mental pictures so hard that I felt my brain was “locked”.

Analogous to muscles, should our mind be relax when we are using the right “brain muscles” when solving problems? And what are those brain msucles? How could we deliberately practice so that we acquire the skills of using the right muscles faster?

I would be really interested if others share their experience, and do they feel the same way on how their mind works when solving problems.