Josh Waitzkin describes something like this in his book The Art of Learning. Basically, he broke his arm a few months before an important martial arts tournament. While it was immobilized in a sling, he worked out the other arm then meditated, imagining he was working out the busted arm. He reported that this helped keep his bad arm from atrophying and becoming weak while he couldn't use it.
You don't have to break 'em, just put them in casts.
I realize you're joking, but it reminded me of this story: one of my ex-girlfriends actually did something like this as part of her PhD: she signed up half a dozen volunteers--including herself--to wear casts on one arm for six weeks.
It was a total bust: she was the only subject who made it through more than half the investigation period. The rest mostly came in after a week or so and asked to have the casts removed. One didn't even want to wait for that once they had decided they couldn't stand to go on with it, and soaked it off at home.
Maybe with modern plastic immobilization it would be easier to do this kind of research, but it was pretty extreme at the time and getting ethics approval today would be almost impossible.
There was at least one study I know of that visualization can mitigate the atrophy caused by immobilization by 50%. From the abstract[1]:
> A group of healthy individuals underwent 4 wk of wrist-hand immobilization to induce weakness. Another group also underwent 4 wk of immobilization, but they also performed mental imagery of strong muscle contractions 5 days/wk.
Here were their results:
> Immobilization decreased strength 45.1 ± 5.0%, impaired VA 23.2 ± 5.8%, and prolonged the SP 13.5 ± 2.6%. Mental imagery training, however, attenuated the loss of strength and VA by ∼50% (23.8 ± 5.6% and 12.9 ± 3.2% reductions, respectively) and eliminated prolongation of the SP (4.8 ± 2.8% reduction).
The Atlantic ran a story on that research paper[2].
I am curious if the participants in the experimental group strictly adhered to the protocol, or if they flexed their arms within the constraints. More research needs to be done, but visualization is a common practice among top athletes (Michael Phelps and "watching the video tape"[3]).
A quick Google search for visualization during exercise yielded another article[4] summarizing a study[5] on the effects of visualization on strength gain. From the abstract:
> The first group (N = 8) was trained to perform "mental contractions" of little finger abduction (ABD); the second group (N = 8) performed mental contractions of elbow (ELB) flexion; and the third group (N = 8) was not trained but participated in all measurements and served as a control group. [...] Training lasted for 12 weeks (15 min per day, 5 days per week).
The results:
> At the end of training, we found that the ABD group had increased their finger abduction strength by 35% (P < 0.005) and the ELB group augmented their elbow flexion strength by 13.5% (P < 0.001). The physical training group increased the finger abduction strength by 53% (P < 0.01). The control group showed no significant changes in strength for either finger abduction or elbow flexion tasks.
The nice thing about this study is that it also attempted to explain the strength increases by taking EEG measurements of brain activity. It showed a significant increase in activity related to increased control of voluntary muscle contractions.
This effect has been the basis for stroke recovery program developed at the University of Alabama Birmingham by Dr. Eduard Taub. Here is explaining the program and it's results to the Dalaim Lama October 2014[6]. This is relevant because the therapy is about reorganizing the brain to use an unaffected area to regain partial muscle control. In other words, the therapy finds and strengthens new neural pathways to control the otherwise healthy muscles[7].
There are a lot of techniques that people have used for learning and training that we only recently started to take seriously and verify using EEG and fMRI by peering into the brain. I have been researching this stuff to inform an ed tech product for efficient lifelong learning, specifically to teach people about how the brain works and the implications and applications for learning.
I am trying to empower people to be efficient, confident learners. Doubt and not knowing how to learn leads people to believe that they are just "not smart" and discourages from from learning. It is true for children and adults.
