Conversation

Why is it that for some physical things, the right way is also a natural way (eg: swinging a tennis racket) and with others the right way is the unnatural way (eg: golf swing — knees stay bent on the downswing but “want” to straighten out)? Other examples? General principles?
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2 other examples: Swimming front crawl: one-side breathing feels natural, both-sides breathing (on every third stroke) is the right technique for competition. Cricket: the natural instinct is to swing “cross bat” but the correct technique is “straight bat”
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I can figure out the specific reason in each case based on the rigid constraints (fixed length club, needing to see competitors on both sides, probability of missing the ball), but wondering if there are general principles of “natural” movements.
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Fwiw I’m not a klutz but not particularly athletic either, and have only shallow experience with very few sports. Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence probably in the borderline-idiot range.
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As an illustration of principles of “natural,” there are studies of gait dynamics in robotics showing why different gaits naturally occur at different speeds — they are natural because they are efficient in a physics sense. True of living things too but not the whole story.
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I think it will need a book like Kahneman's Thinking, Fast & Slow. Assuming that the painstaking research has been done. The common element might be many cognitively "obvious" actions that don't quite fit the goal.
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“Eating in the modern world” feels like a canonical example of this, from which you could derive an underlying reason: our instincts evolved for either a similar or a different situation. So natural-feeling sports are probably closer analogues of ancient practises?
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Joints, freedom of motion of limbs, orientation to gravitation, combined with hardwired and deeply conditioned kinesthetics constrain what is instinctual (distinct from natural). More—