Modifying habitus and sporting embodiment through physical training requires the development of a sport-specific haptic knowledge and a sensual knowledge of the environment. Ingold suggests that “such practice is not purely the property of an individual body but rather a total system of relations with the surrounding environment” (Ingold 2000 cited in Allen-Collinson and Hockey 2010, 341). For instance, trained swimmers often describe feeling the water that they are swimming in: “it feels thick”; “it feels fast”; and they “push and pull” and “catch” the water with their strokes. For swimmers, haptic knowledge is central to their embodied experience of the water and their physical activity in the pool. Wacquant (2004, 71) asserts that “sensuous intoxication” is key to embodiment education and athletes’ habitus cultivation.
Another example of training haptic knowing that I observed during my fieldwork was of basketball coaches teaching athletes to develop ‘automatic’ and ‘natural’ responses for jumping and landing. Basketball coaches instruct their athletes to jump in particular ways that involve using proprioceptor knowledge and feeling
of their feet, as well as haptic knowledge of their shoes and the ground on which they jump.92 In time, and with iterative physical training, coaches expect athletes
to “be a natural” at this particular body technique and automatically respond by “jumping like a basketballer” on court.
Basketballers are taught this technical jumping technique for the purpose of assisting their athletic movements on court and preventing unnecessary injuries from unreliable and unstable movement patterns. Coaches instil into athletes that jumping with correct technique requires them to use their whole bodies. For instance, athletes must prepare their bodies to jump into the air on five main coaching instructions: 1) bending their knees; 2) ‘activating’ their leg and buttock muscles; 3) activating their core (lower back and abdominal muscles) in a strong mentally and physically ‘switched on’ and engaged manner (activating their bodily awareness and proprioception knowledge); 4) pushing out their chests (lengthening and strengthening their torso) and 5) stretching their arms and hands out vertically or horizontally. Athletes are reminded to be especially conscious of their body weight distribution in their feet and to push the ground away from themselves.
Likewise, ‘landing a jump’ ideally involves ‘naturally’ (automatically) preparing one’s feet and ankles to simultaneously softly reconnect with the ground with one’s weight equally distributed across a flat foot (including one’s heels’, arches and toes). Athletes are advised to absorb the shock of touching the ground through their leg and buttocks muscles and a ‘strong core’. Thus ideally, when landing a jump athletes will adopt ‘soft knees’ (knees bent) and ‘engage’ their core to ‘take the load’ of the jump, and ‘reduce the force’ of the movement through
92 For instance, aforementioned Australian basketballer Lauren Jackson discussed returning to training
after knee surgery: “for me it's a matter of getting my touch back … learning to shoot properly again with two legs and doing things the way I used to do them (Tuxworth 2015).
their joints by actively using their muscles. These bodily activations, firing up of bodily awareness and haptic knowledge of the feel of the ground becomes natural, automatic and unconscious in athletes through physical training.
Physical training of haptic knowing requires a series of interlinking processes and embodied knowledge. For training jumping and landing techniques these processes include another five coaching instructions: 1) instruction from a coach about correct technique93; 2) an athletes’ bodily memory (informing what feels
right and wrong to assist replication of technique); 3) physiotherapist instructed mobility exercises and “pre-habilitation94” of ankle flexion; 4) strength and
conditioning of one’s core, quadriceps and gluteus so that the correct muscles are ‘switched on’, engaged and sensually active; and 5) repetition of the movements to the point of internalisation (embedded within one’s habitus) and automatic performance. Training of haptic knowing involves the development of athletes’ physiological, sensual and conceptual awareness so that it, eventually, become unconscious, and the development of complex technical movements so that they become habitual and enmeshed within bodily memory (and historical density). Merleau-Ponty (2001) describes historical density as embodied memory made manifest. Historical density rests on physical training of bodily techniques that are naturalised and automatic within the embodiment of an individual. Ingold (2004) extends this notion of embodied memory to include attunement, whereby an athlete is thoroughly in tune with the environment and external stimuli implicated in their sport, such as sporting equipment and weather. Attunement
93 One coach I spoke to identified problems that some of her athletes were having with their haptic
knowing and footwork such as: difficulty landing with both feet, incapable of changing stances quickly and “not playing the ball off [or from] the feet”. She explained that her athletes needed to develop footwork awareness and proficiency (and thus increase their haptic knowing through physical training).
94 Athletes perform rehabilitation exercises to heal injuries, whereas ‘pre-habilitation’ (otherwise known
as ‘pre-hab’) exercises are created by S&C coaches and physiotherapists as preventative exercises for muscles, joints and other body parts that commonly get injured in any particular sport. Alternatively, an athlete may need these exercises due to weakness or previous injury histories.
is present, for instance, when a hockey player, without looking at her stick, and purely by haptic (touch) knowledge and historical density, knows where and how to grip her stick and account for the added moisture of having dropped it on the wet field during play. Unthinkingly, she moves quickly to re-grip the stick, corrects her posture and gets back into position on the field without taking her eyes off her opponent and without losing awareness of the location of the ball. Chisholm’s (2008) investigation of one elite female rock climber Lynn Hill, and aspects of the physical training that helped cultivate her athletic prowess and rock climber habitus, provide an example from the literature of the embodiment of haptic knowledge. Chisholm suggests that there are several central components of Hill’s physical training that facilitated her embodiment of a rock climbers’ physical toolkit, and the reconstitution of her habitus, and in turn enabled her to master free-climbing. Below I discuss two techniques of the body that Hill developed through training: reaching and falling (Chisholm 2008).
Rock climbing is a challenging sport that requires intricate physical training to develop an appropriate habitus to support practical climbing techniques. This habitus requires embodied skills of strength, flexibility, endurance and certain physical qualities (such as finger callouses). To be able to reach holds95 and climb
up challenging terrains, Hill underwent physical training in reaching. In rock climbing, a climber’s hands serve as embodied instruments that are imbued with strength and technique. Through training her reach, Hill’s hands became accustomed to gripping rough and slippery surfaces, the skin on her hands toughened, her palms and fingers developed callouses, and her grip strength improved. In turn, her haptic knowledge developed such that her hands could read the surface of terrains for secure holds. Hill’s haptic knowledge training also
involved the development of a “soft grip” and maintenance of a “relaxed face” so that she could stay calm and minimise energy waste through using extra muscles during her climbs (Chisholm 2008, 16).
Another component of Hill’s physical reach training and embodiment of haptic knowledge involved manipulating her breathing to synchronise with her movements so that she could grasp hard-to-reach holds. For instance, she took big inhalations to maximise the lift in out-stretched positions and exhaled in quick bursts “to make a karate-style grunt” to help make powerful or dynamic moves (Chisholm 2008, 16).
Fundamental to rock climbing at an elite level, and to scaling intimidating terrains, is training one’s body and one’s practice (physically and emotionally) to accept the possibility of falling. This aspect of physical training involves being relaxed on the rock and looking down as well as practicing the correct technique to break a fall in its event. Chisholm suggests Hill’s ‘habit-body’ – her reconstituted elite athlete habitus – saved her from a potentially fatal fall she experienced during training (Chisholm 2008, 35).
As Hill describes it:
As I fell backward I waved my arms frantically in a circular motion to keep myself from landing on my head… Look for a landing, some inner voice instructed me. I veered toward the leaves of a tree to my left. . . tucked my body into a ball, blasted through its branches, then my left buttock slammed into a lattice of tree roots sprawling on the ground (Hill 2002, 7–8 cited in Chisholm 2008, 23).
Chisholm goes on to say that “[a] woman not so habituated… would have been immobilized” (Chisholm 2008, 23). Hill’s physical training in rock climbing had crafted her instinctual responses, her sensual perceptions and her views of her own physical capacity and reading of terrains, and these were fundamental to her falling safely. Through physical training (and specifically training the technique of haptic knowledge) specific rock climber values, norms, skills, movements, qualities and perceptions of the world were embedded in Hill’s reconstituted habitus as a rock climber.