I can relate to this through amateur but high-level recreational inline skating I did for about a decade.

One of my favorite things to do was running super-fast slaloms through cones, often backwards with intricate repeating patterns.

Every time I learned a new routine, I would knock the cones down. One day, a coach told me I needed to learn the routines without the cones first so I could get the muscle memory down. Most helpful tip I ever got.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen inline skaters do high-speed slaloms, but it looks incredible, like almost impossible. Their skates just flash, moving so fast you can’t track them with your eyes, but somehow they don’t knock a single cone down.

When I learned to do that, I was so thrilled. And I could barely understand how I was doing it. My body and mind came together in an automatic, mysterious way that was not altogether conscious.

The thing is, sometimes I couldn’t do it. Sometimes I thought so hard about it that all the training and muscle memory seemed to vanish. I would look at the cones before getting up to speed and feel so fearful of them that I knocked every single one down. I could not feel where my body was, and I could not feel where the cones were.

I suspect this is the process you’re talking about with yourself and with Biles.