The Science of Freestyle Football #1
Ever seen a person roll a football around his head like it is magnetically attached to him? Or a person who can stall the same ball on the sole of his foot while standing upside down? Wondered how in the world they can do it and you can’t?
Well friends, I have the answer!
You must have heard this quote at some point in your life (If you haven’t then I don’t know why you are even alive) —
Practice makes a man/woman perfect.
Indeed it does! If you keep on repeating something you will understand where you are going wrong and do it more correctly and flawlessly the next time. So repetition of a particular activity is bound to make you closer to perfection.
But why is that?
Ever wondered the logic behind that thing? What is the science behind it ?
The answer to why practice makes perfect is a simple term known as —
Muscle Memory
Muscle memory is the reason why freestyle footballers are able to do such astonishing tricks with a football so effortlessly.
So what is muscle memory actually? It is not the memory stored in your muscles, of course, but memories stored in your brain that are much like a cache of frequently enacted tasks for your muscles. These enable you to do something easily after repetition, no matter if you are doing it right or wrong.
Before I get into how it can be good or bad for you let us first understand its functionality on a molecular level.
When it is related to freestyle football, there is a certain procedure of doing a trick correct. If you do not follow that procedure the trick comes out to be unclean and also you will not be able to do it multiple times.
So, whenever you execute a trick you are using a number of your muscles in your body that you are not consciously aware of. When you start doing that trick you often feel tired or are not able to do it properly. This is because your muscle fibers are not active and not used to that kind of motor movement.
But as you start doing the trick your muscle starts developing more nuclei to assist those motor movements. Nuclei control protein synthesis and the more you have, the more protein you are able to turn into muscle. The first effect training has on your muscles is not actually growth; it’s to create more nuclei, which eventually facilitate the development of more tissue. These tissue then allow you to access the level you need to execute motor movements via different muscle groups in your body.
Researchers at the University of Oslo have recently shown these newly acquired nuclei are retained during muscle atrophy, caused by inactivity. The debate surrounding how long they stick around remains undecided: one PNAS study reported a period of 3 months, while the Journal of Physiology found evidence to suggest these new nuclei are never lost
This is why the people who have stopped training can make a comeback easily even after a long rest period. When they restart their training they are simply re-activating the asleep nuclei rather than forming new ones.
Now you know how the ‘muscle’ part of the muscle memory works. Next we understand how the ‘memory’ is retained in the brain.
As I said earlier that the muscles are just the actors, it is in actual the brain that directs and controls them to perform the functions required to execute an trick.
The memory is actually stored in the Perkinje cells of the cerebellum, where the brain encodes information and records whether certain movements are right or wrong. The brain then focuses more energy on that action and stores it in your long term memory. It is because of this storage that you are able to do a trick more naturally and effortlessly after trying it again and again for a certain period of time.
When you move you activate sensors called proprioceptors in your muscles, tendons, and joints that feed back to your central nervous system. “The body is learning to interpret all of these movements and senses,” says Dr Jim Richards, professor of bio-mechanics at the University of Central Lancashire. “From either the mechanoreceptors within the joint or the skin receptors as the skin stretches, all the information is being fed back to the brain in relation to success.”
You might not realize it, but the brain is constantly creating muscle memories, one movement at a time.
And that is what muscle memory is! But there is some more things you should know. Even though muscle memory is the godly entity that helps you become a better athlete, it can be the very devil that can hamper your growth your to a great extent.
Just because the motor movement has been logged into your brain doesn’t necessarily mean you are doing it right. If you have been trying the improper way of doing a trick and have been using that method for over a period of time, that method will stick with you and is extremely difficult to get rid off if you want to learn the correct way of executing that trick.
This is the reason that people who do not have very clean or stylish basics, are not able to perform long combos easily. They may be able to pull out no touch tricks, but if the method is incorrect they won’t be able to extend their record easily.
The only way to correct it is with hours spent doing it right.
Source —
So,that was it. This is how a freestyle footballer actually performs his tricks. Its all science!
If you liked what you read please click that little heart to show your appreciation. Hopefully I was able to provide you with some amount of knowledge.
Finally I am back writing in my field of expertise. You can read more about freestyle football on my publication The Freestyle Works.
Share it with people who would like to know the science behind freestyle football. And also talk to me down below if you want to add on something to this conversation.
