I am amazed at whoever first thought of doing a reconstruction like that...what was the inspiration? what evidence and confidence did they have that it was going to work?

I have no idea who pioneered it - AFAIK this is what they normally do for my case (was ~10 years ago)

BTW most achilles breaks are dealt with my putting them in a boot to force the broken bits together and hope that they heal in place - in my case we knew it was damaged but it later broke and my GPs misdiagnosed it so it was broken for ~6 months before we realised

BTW - if you ever find yourself in a situation like this - do the physio work, own doing it, no one's going to tell you to do it more than you, and a good physio will give you a plan to follow - in my case having access to a hot physio pool was the big thing, an hour a day every day effectively I crawled in and eventually walked away to the gym

When I went through PT a while ago for a shoulder injury, it became pretty clear that the sessions with the professional were only about 10% of the work. It's all on you to do the large majority of the work between sessions.

I had surgery to repair a shattered wrist; after the cast came off, the surgeon said he'd follow up in 3 months to start physio, but in the mean time as much as it hurts, I can't break it by stretching.

So I spent every waking moment looking for motions that I used to be able to do but which hurt when I started to do them, and slowly working those motions despite the pain.

At the followup to start physio, the surgeon did a quick range of motion check. His jaw literally dropped when I demonstrated that I had recovered 95% range of motion without pain, full flexibility. “You… don't have to come back.”

When I was young, my first real experience with this was seeing a black and white spiral optical illusion in a museum. I stared at it for a bit, and then my brain adjusted and when I looked away, it affected what I looked at.

I think my realization was that my brain didn't just do simple things, it did complex in many dimensions to adapt and fix things.

The same thing goes with your foot, and it goes way deeper than we realize. It's probably not that one muscle, it is ALL the muscles in the area working together to help you walk. I wouldn't be surprised if there are 50 muscles involved.

The brain seems to do 90% error correction. Once you learn how human vision actually works it seems miraculous that it works at all.

That's true of so many things isn't? At my graduation (EE as well as CS, is why it's relevant) I said to my dad that I'm still completely baffled by the simplest AM radio, forget WiFi.

I understand it (especially then), but it's just crazy isn't it, that it actually works? Discovering/theorising and then prototyping some of this fundamental stuff and seeing that for the first time must have been absolutely incredible.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591535

Yes - I'm learning singing at the moment and just the other day the teacher fed back - don't try to over-conceptualise what you're doing. Just do it, focus on the outcome, stay relaxed and the body will figure it out.

I've been through enough learning cycles to appreciate this but this was a real hurdle for me when I was young because my default was to rely on systems and rules. Ironically as a swimmer my biggest breakthroughs in speed and technique as a teenager were intuition borne out through thousands of hours of repetition but it took me many many more years and a very good piano teacher to conceptualise the art of not conceptualising.

Similar here. For a very long time, I thought that being good at something was knowing the system and rules, and applying them consciously every time. It's funny because I legit thought that that's what I was doing while playing video games or doing martial arts (the only things I was reasonably good at for quite awhile). It turns out the learning and doing processes are both deeply subconscious; very little goes on in the conscious mind during both.

There is a new shift in the understanding of coaching in sports called the Constraints-Led Approach (CLA). It's both super nerdy and practical (i.e., based on practitioners' empiric experience). Basically, it sees the body as a complex system of organs/tissues/cells that tries to solve movement problem under the pressure of different constraints. In a simple words, coaching then is the art of creating/manipulating constraints in order to optimize that search for the solution to the movement problem.

In a way, it's way deeper than "subconscious". A large portion of the science behind CLA is based on Nikolai Bernstein's works from the 1930-s (the guy who coined the term "biomechanics"). He wrote about the hierarchical model of motor control, where 5 different systems (that evolutionary are completely different) must work in synergy to solve the movement problem.

There is a great book that explains the science behind CLA called "How we learn to move" by Rob Gray.

Yes constraints are great. My piano teacher would basically just repeat to me like mantra:

- was it legato?

- were you playing free from tension?

- was your tone even?

- were you in time?

Very rarely would he actually ever tell me anything. And whenever I'd ask for more or feedback he'd just loop back to the questions and ask if I was actually listening to myself play. It was a very frustrating start but eventually it all clicked what he was doing was teaching me to understand my own constraints and then also understand what are the outcomes I am aiming to achieve - if I can't hear how even my own touch is how will I ever play evenly.

Was the most valuable coaching I ever got and was probably life changing for me in terms of levelling up my ability to learn new things.

Prior to meeting him I held the belief there was a "perfect way to play" the piano and would occasionally peruse books and videos on the subject. Of course, as my teacher was keen to point out, no body is the same so how can two anatomically different pianists play with the same technique?

If you have small hands so much of the repertoire will be different vs if you have rach hands

Great points! I've seen a couple of papers on CLA for music learning, but CLA is a subset of so-called "non-linear pedagogy", so maybe music education has its own "branch" of it, so to speak.

> I held the belief there was a "perfect way to play" the piano

Yes, CLA is actively debunking the myth of a "perfect technique" which is very popular in sports. Like a coach/teacher is one who knows the "perfect" way, and their job is to make students repeat an exercise over and over again, fixing deviations from "perfect" technique. This couldn't be more wrong according to CLA.

Already mentioned Bernstein introduced the concept of "repetition without repetition", which claims that repetition is important in learning but for a different reason. Each attempt of a movement will have slightly different "inputs" - constraints – and thus can't have a single "perfect" technique that will work for all variations of inputs. Each repetition will be slightly different (hence "without repetition"), and the goal of the proper learning process is to give the body enough "input data" to _discover_ the proper movement solution.

It's important to note that "constraints" is a wide term here, and there are few classes of constraints. Task and goal given to the student are constraints, so the size of the hand or level of fatigue. Even environment temperature, mental state, and light conditions are constraints.

Another important concept in CLA is action-perception coupling rooted in James Gibson's theory of perception. This one was mindblowing to me when I first read it. In essence, the brain perceives the world not as a set of geometric objects but as "actionable" items. What you can do directly influences how you see the world. That has direct implications for learning as well – mastering any skill (including playing a musical instrument) is coupled with perception, as your body has to react to how it sees/hears the result of its own movements.

But the core of CLA as an educational philosophy lays in acknowledging that the actual learning still has to happen inside your nervous system. You can't really "teach" a skill, only facilitate a discovery inside the student's body.

It's really fascinating how it all works in practice. One related concept in motor skill acquisition science is the Method of Error Amplification (MAE). Let's say, golf players make a fundamental error of not shifting weight onto the back foot after swinging. Instead of giving them verbal instruction "Shift weight to the back foot", coach might do the opposite – ask them to move weight to the *front foot*. This will increase the error, which will amplify the signal in the nervous system and the body will react to it as it now feels "more wrong" by itself. It's not super clear to which types of errors MAE is applicable, but the research on MAE is fascinating.

So much of this resonates and articulates fragmented anecdata I've accumulated via lots of learning.

I love the concept of increasing the error - it definitely helps. Makes me think of reductio ad absurbum for the body. Do it more wrong to prove the opposite.

I totally get the idea of the learning having to come from the self and have held the belief that is why taichi and yoga use very poetic metaphors to describe their movements. This was a solution our extremely smart predecessors came up with to be prescriptive without being prescriptive to teach motor skills.

Just like my singing teacher telling me to stop thinking and just be a parrot and copy the pitch (which worked almost instantly)

I will definitely be digging into CLA thanks for sharing!

This is fascinating, can you expand on the section about seeing the world as actionable items?

Yes, the core idea here is that our perceptual system wasn't evolutionarily designed to just scan the world around us and reconstruct it inside our heads. It evolved to keep us in contact with action-relevant properties of the world we're acting in. I.e. we're not just looking for the shapes/objects/textures, we're looking for the things we can action upon ("_affordances_") and that heavily depends on what actions you can perform.

We don't see the chair as a 3D object, we see it as an affordance to sit (along with a wide windowsill or gym ball). The wall is a barrier for an elderly person, but an affordance to the parcour performer. The pole dancer perceives the lamp post very differently from the non-pole dancer. An experienced tennis player sees the ball in mid-air as much bigger than the newbie player. Fatigued hiker perceives the hill as much steeper than full-of-energy hiker. If an athlete is more capable, objects like a baseball or tennis ball, or basketball hoop look bigger.

Gibson's theory on affordances started with his 1979 book "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception". My understanding is that it has some criticisms, but still considered as one of the leading theories in perception studies and is heavily used in the design community.

Developing that automaticity with a physical skill also unlocks the brain to do other parts that are conscious.

After a game, Lebron James can explain what happened in a play moment by moment for every player on the floor, and everything he was thinking and planning as the play developed. He’s done it in post game press conferences off the top of his head.

Granted he’s maybe the all time greatest, but it’s illustrative. He’s not thinking at all about how his body is going to do what it does. That’s completely automatic. He’s thinking a lot about the higher level strategy of the game.

Fully agree that mastery allows you to broaden out / think at a higher level. I guess that's the "meta"

I recently read a post about how Nadal gets an unfair stereotype of being brutish due to play style but from a young age in his post match interviews (in Spanish) we would refer to specific points in the match and give critical analysis for how he made adjustments etc.

Consistent with many technical sports such as Formula One motor racing. Ask a driver to talk about the race, during which they are driving a vehicle at levels normal humans could not approach, and they describe not the driving but the tactics and strategy within the physics window.

On rules and applying them I am always reminded of this quote from Bruce Lee:

"Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick."

As applicable to fighting as it is programming. You will see it in high level sports - athletes will do all kinds of unorthodox things from weird positions to eke out a result, because the result is all that matters.

Maybe not really the same thing, but for some reason it reminds me of learning to roll your Rs, when learning Spanish or Italian as an English speaker.

When you try too hard to make the sound it doesn't really work.

But then after a while it just happens as you don't think about and are just speaking with natives.

The human body is so wild with things like this.

What happened to your toe? Did you loose the capability to move it individually from the others?

No, turns out there are enough other muscles/tendons pulling on it I haven't really missed it, there's nothing obvious I can't do with it - I suspect the ones that pull it down are more important than the ones that pull it up

Wow, that sounds a tough thing to go through. Hope you are going in the right direction. I had a partial rupture of my achilles 12 years ago and it is still different and still feels like something I need to work around. But I have adapted.

Mostly, I've had issues with scar tissue - this is an operation where you want scar tissue forming in the right places, but not the wrong ones, so I've had a couple of minor ops which seems to have fixed it - mostly now it feels tight (they put it in too tight on purpose, a bunch of physio is stretching it to the right length, starts with an adjustable moon boot, a bit of a medieval torture device that slowly stretches it) - if you stretch too far they can't undo it without opening it up

I can hike reasonable distances (multiple kilometres), running not so much a thing - I feel incredibly lucky I'm doing as well as I am

I'm very aware that if I break it again I'm probably screwed (and all I originally did was step in a hole, nothing strenuous) so I'm generally careful

I think if you just exit your subjective perspective, this type of adaptation becomes obvious. What is using a game controller, keyboard + mouse, bicycle handlebars, snowboard, etc but augmentation. Yeah, it's designed to be ergonomic from the outset, but that doesn't change the fact that it is an augment.

Agreed. Furthermore, it feels uniquely weird when a scenario comes up where these "external augmentations" don't behave correctly. I often experience this when putting my laptop in the center of my normal desk setup. I'll instinctively go to move my laptop's mouse cursor via my desk mouse, and suddenly it doesn't work. For a brief moment it feels paralyzing, as if my arm is dead or etc.

That sensation happened to me as well! It feels like your mouse is stuck on something, you move it but the cursor doesn’t respond, only few moment later you realize that it isn’t connected to the notebook.

There was some research after the Vietnam war to provide blind veterans with a device on their back that used a matrix of 'pins' to 'draw' the output of a video camera on the users back..

Supposedly, it worked quite well - wearers got VERY good navigating with it and seemed to like the tech overall. Not sure why it disappeared - cost (it was probably made from pretty pricey tech for the time)? Weight ? battery life ?

> what is using a game controller ... but augmentation

Yes.

After 30 years of exclusively "joystick must be inverted Y" I got tired of being able to help other people play a tough spot of a game using their controller, and switched cold turkey. It took 2 - 3 weeks before I didn't randomly aim the wrong way, and 2 months to regain full accuracy.

Similar on the inverted scroll switch that Apple did when they married up scroll on iPad and Magic Trackpad. For several OS versions I stayed with the old way, then too many new users were a direction I couldn't handle, so switched. That switch took maybe 3 days to grok.

One of the weirder tricks you can do is hang upside from jungle gym or over the edge of a top bunk bed and "toss" a ball to your friend, which means you have to throw the ball "down" to them instead of toss it up. You can invert gravity much faster than you'd think!

Nowhere near as extreme but I broke my leg and there was a weird sensation if I touched my leg near the break, my toes would tingle even though they were quite a ways away. Years later, it no longer does that and feels normal in that area.

So can you not move your toe anymore?

I can, there are multiple muscles/tendons that move it, I believe this was one that pulls it up and there must be others that do the same - I really have not noticed any change in functionality there