A couple of weeks ago, my dojo held its quarterly belt testing. During the advanced test, the one person running through the test was having a serious issue with his endurance. He started strong, as to be expected, but petered out way too early. Even when normal breaks were given, he never was able to come back with a second wind.
He knows full-well that endurance has been his greatest deficit, and he's tried to fix it. He'll jump rope before classes start, and he tries to push hard in class. But in talking to the other black belts, we realized his way of training endurance is the wrong way. He's bursting, not pushing. He's training to sprint when he needs to do a marathon.
We're not planning to keep this realization from him; I know next time I see him I'll mention it. Still, as many things do, it got me to thinking. How many ways do we train or prepare for something inefficiently?
For example, if you have trouble remembering the sequence of a song or a form, how do you fix that? Maybe it's taking a really long time to go through it over and over, so you could ask someone to do it, videotape them from different angles, and review it at your leisure.
I won't list a bunch of different ways that this could apply, simply because it would make for too long of a post. My point is that when you look at what you need to work on, there may be better ways to approach it than what decide to try. Look at how other people tackle it, ask people you respect how they would do it, or at the very least think of alternatives. You may find that you are already doing it the best way that will work for you, but isn't it better to know?
No comments:
Post a Comment