When I was a child, I learned badminton from a friend[0]. He was a fairly highly ranked player in our nation and so was very good. One of the first things he said was "Don't be stiff. Relax your muscles and hit the shuttlecock fluidly not rigidly.". I couldn't. When I finally could, it's because I was much better than I was when I started. The fluidity came after some degree of unconscious muscular competence, rather than prior to.

This aligns with what I know about Flow State: it requires some degree of unconscious competence before you can access it. When playing table-tennis, I could not access it when I was rubbish, but when I reached some degree of skill I wasn't thinking while I was playing, I was playing instinctually.

Over the years, many people have given me the same "don't be stiff; relax your muscles; move fluidly" and some of the time it has worked, but it has never worked when I did not have competence because I did not even know what it was to relax something.

So perhaps after one has acquired a base amount of skill at something, someone could "expend no effort", but that's just being in flow state.

0: not as a coach-student relationship but so that he could have someone to play against.

This is very accurate to me. In the last few years I've been learning ukulele / guitar / bass / mandolin / banjo, and it took a LOT of time and practice before I could control my muscles well enough to use less effort. When you're starting you just don't have the necessary dexterity, and it's very easy as an expert to forget about those early days, especially if you learned very young.

I learned piano starting around age 6, and I vaguely remember the first few years were spent largely on learning to control my fingers, stretch to play larger chords (as a child with fairly small hands, I couldn't stretch my hand to play an octave until around age 10 or 11), and so forth. I was learning to do this at the same time I was learning to write cursive, or hold a paintbrush, use a kitchen knife, etc - all kinds of basic childhood learning stuff.

Learning a new skill as an adult is like going back to grade school or even infancy in some cases. You can tell a small child not to grip their pencil so tightly, but until you've practiced handwriting for several years, your fingers simply don't have the control necessary to avoid using a heavy grip.

"Use a lighter touch" is fantastic advice for an intermediate or advanced student but incredibly frustrating for a beginner. Over the course of several decades of playing keyboard in bands I picked up the bad habit of playing with more force than necessary, which started to cause me problems. I had to practice playing with a lighter touch and that was actually a big help.

Flow is generally achieved when the challenge is appropriate, not too easy, not too hard.

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