Creating Accountability in an individual sport

The Expert in a Year challenge was a huge success! Ok, not a success in achieving its goal of Sam reaching the top 250. Sam will even admit he was not even close to being successful based on his goal...
But it was a success in perseverance, a success in keeping up the challenge even on the days when they didn't want to. Keeping up the challenge on those cold, tired, busy mornings and, to be perfectly honest, nobody would really blame them for taking an extra hour in bed, eating that extra scoop of ice cream, drinking that extra beer. But they didn't, they kept going.
This says a lot about the internal motivation that they possessed. That drive inside them to achieve the goal was undoubtedly strong. However at times even that would fail them, so what kept them going?

Accountability

One of the big things that kept them going was their accountability. In a team sport, like football you have the rest of your teammates relying upon you to do what you have to do for you all to succeed. That group is with you on the training pitch, with you in the gym, watching whether you are slacking or not. And if they catch you slacking, they are sure to let you know. While this is not the best reason to be your first call for why you do these things, when that primary internal reason fails, this is a very helpful backup to push you through those momentary dark times.
Those momentary dark times, when your primary motivation is failing is when you are most likely to give up, that nagging thought in the back of your mind- `missing one session won't make a difference`- can become even stronger and once that takes hold it can easily lead to a slippery slope to more and more missed sessions, and even giving up. So having that team around you to support you and push you through those particular time can be very helpful.
However, what if you don't have a team around you? If you play an individual sport, sometimes you have those days and days of activities and training sessions where there is not another person in sight. And if there is another person in sight they are most likely just focusing on their own thing and don't care what you are doing. Perhaps it is even beneficial to them to not care if you slack off or miss a session because they may be a direct competitor of yours.
So how do you keep this accountability through these times.

Find `training buddies`

Exercise clubs and gyms have been offering deals for `gym buddies` for a while now. Come along with a friend and you both get a discount. Partly this is for their own gain- getting 2 people in the gym means more money than 1 person- but also it is to help encourage more regular attendance and therefore a fitter population. You can incorporate this into your own plans. Find someone who has similar goals to you and make an agreement to push each other. Wherever possible to train at the same times (together) and keep each other honest about it. Skipping a session should not be ok (unless for extreme circumstances) and you should feel comfortable telling each other that!

Find `accountability supporters`

Make a commitment to inform other people of your progress. Sam had many many people regularly following his progress. If he slacked off, thousands of people would know about it. Ok, telling the whole internet might be a big step, but this can be as simple as telling a few close trusted friends, `this is what I want to do`, and give them permission to challenge you on it, ask about how it is going, this will help them to give you the push when you need it.

Be honest!

If you are not honest about how much you are actually doing, how will your training buddies and supporters know when to push you, when to comfort you, when to congratulate you? If you are not honest with them they are not effective.

(In England at least) I have found that there is a certain pressure to play down the amount of work you are putting in. There appears to be more adulation to be attained from seeming to winning/improving effortlessly. It is seen as good to boast how little training you have been able to do but still win, as if the `natural` ability is to be praised. When people make an honest effort to work hard for their goal and take things as professionally as possible they get shot down and laughed at. If you begin being more honest about how much you have trained, how hard you work, how much you want to win, perhaps others will also start to feel comfortable sharing their effort levels. All of a sudden there begins to be a shift in the `culture` towards one that sees working hard as acceptable.

On the other hand sometimes people like to boast about how much they have done. This is also not helpful, as other people be easily discouraged by comparison or also the lack of improvement seen despite `all this work you're doing` in the end will show you to be exaggerating.


What do you think? Please leave your feedback at the bottom of the page and if you found this interesting check out some of the other posts on the website or get in touch at brainspecsports@gmail.com

Struggles of a Training Athlete. Avoiding Overtraining

In the previous 2 posts, Diagnosing and Monitoring Overtraining we have looked at the issues surrounding overtraining and how we can detect when it is occurring. This is more of a treatment of an issue more than a prevention.

This post will look at how to prevent it from happening in the first place. This is the best course of action as it creates a sustainable environment to ensure training can carry on at full intensity without the athlete burning out and needing to take prolonged rests or unnecessarily miss training through injury.

So what factors are import to avoid overtraining?

Vary training!

If you train one muscle everyday and give it no time to recover it will fatigue. This also occurs mentally, if you are doing the same training all the time, the player will become bored, mentally tired, and lacking in motivation. This will affect training levels and improvement. Varying training styles, exercises, areas of focus will help avoid this. It also makes more efficient training, from muscle standpoints. different types of training will work different muscles and therefore allow some of the muscles to recover. As any bodybuilder will tell you, you never train everything


Keep A Diary!

I mentioned this in the last post for monitoring for overtraining but it is so important that it is worth mentioning again. If you keep a diary of your training, your diet, your emotions you will be able to notice the normal patterns and then plan ahead to suit your training to these patterns. If training in the evening is leaving you consistently over-exhausted then look at if it is possible to train earlier. Focusing on improving weaknesses before matches is consistently leaving you low on confidence in those matches, alter your training plan to work on them earlier and strengths closer to the matches. (Look out for an upcoming post giving an example of training diaries I have used with athletes and better idea of how and what to include)


Train Smarter not always Harder!

I have a whole series of seminars based on this principle. Even the top professionals of any sport will not train more than 8 hours a day for any extended period of time. If that is your only job, then you might wonder why more people don't decide to train 9 or 10 hours a day to get an advantage over the others... the reason- because humans only have so much physical and mental capacity to train. Therefore the key is to make those hours more effective than other competitors. Having clear goals to each training session, spending time away from the actual training analysing training and matches, there are many things you can do to train smarter. (Check out the services part of this website to look into booking the TRAIN SMART, PLAY SMART seminars).


Factor sufficient rest into your regular training plan!

Pushing yourself is a key component of improving, in anything you do. However, if you push too far something will break! Instead of working out your rest days/sessions/holidays as and when you feel you need them, plan them in advance. Often you can be swayed by your motivation levels, pressure to improve your poor recent performances, the fact you do not feel `toooo bad` and do that extra training session that you regret the morning after when it means you are too stiff or sore or tired and have to miss twice as many sessions than you had planned to in order to recover.
This is not saying that you shouldn't alter your training plan. The opposite! Your training plan should be constantly evolving to suit your body and mind! But this should be done over a longer period of time. The technical terms some coaches use is macro- and micro-cycles, but basically it means long-term and short-term plans to enable you to play your best when you need to. Changing training plans every week will not provide a sustainable, stable base of training from which to improve most efficiently.



So that is the end of the Overtraining series. Did you find this helpful? Is there anything you have learned from your experience you can add to this? Leave comments below!

As always check out the rest of the website for more tips and also how you can contact me for more individualised performance enhancement training... There is only so much general principles can help unique individuals.

Struggles of a training athlete. Monitoring for Overtraining

In my last post we discussed some of the symptoms of overtraining. These are things to look for incase you are suffering from overtraining. This post now will focus on how to look for these symptoms more effectively.
The aim of doing these things is not just to pick up on when you been overtraining and therefore know when to take a rest but to notice possible overtraining issues as early as possible to minimise the negative effects.
This is why I use the word "monitoring." Monitoring suggests a constant regular process, one that looks continuously for changes and addresses them as soon as they arise. This is how you should be when it comes to overtraining.
So what steps can you take to monitor your training...

• KEEP A DIARY!

Diaries are great ways of keeping track of every aspect of your training. If the word diary brings to mind young girls writing down their new crush before bed, then you can call it something else, perhaps a "training log." Your training diary will not be a long text but instead more of a checklist of items that you will keep track of during your training. You should every day or every session, mark down the list of things in the diary and how they felt/went that time. For instance a rating scale of how well you thought you trained that session.

There will be a more detailed post on the sort of things to include in a training diary HERE

But this will focus on the things to include that relate specifically to overtraining.
Thinking back to the post looking at symptoms of overtraining we want to monitor these in the diary.

• Tiredness, lack of energy - on a scale of 1-10 note down how much energy you felt you had in that session
• motivation - on a scale of 1-10, how keen were you to practice that session
• concentration - on a scale of 1-10, how well did you feel you concentrated in that session
• injuries - note down any little niggles, injuries or pain you felt in that session

Plan regular checks, where you take time to look back over the past few weeks of training and look for any steady decline in energy levels, motivation and concentration. Athletes training regularly will have ups and downs in these but overall there is a general level where these values will be. If there is a steady decline then this shows that the level of training is not maintainable on a long term basis- something which will lead to overtraining problems.
Similarly everybody will have little injuries or the odd big injury but if you look back in your diary and see the amount and severity of injuries building up more and more, or a particular type of injury in one part of the body regularly occurring, then this is a sign that you are perhaps pushing your body too hard and overtraining.

• Discuss regularly with your coach

use your diary and discuss this with your coach. People are subjective when they fill in their diary, this is both a strength and a weakness. It is a strength because nobody knows how you feel better than you. It is a weakness because you might be biased. You may feel like your concentration is good but your coach has noticed it isn't as good as it used to be. Or, because you have steadily improved in training, you don't feel any different but in fact from an outside perspective your concentration and energy has really improved.

Therefore, discussing these things with your coach can be helpful to put your thoughts into perspective and also, if you are regularly discussing these things with your coach, then your coach will be in a better position to know how to vary training accordingly.

So, now we have learned what to look for and how to look for it, how do we fix it?! Find out in the next post Struggles of a training athlete. Avoiding overtraining HERE 

To see the original article that inspired this series of posts check it out HERE.

To see what else will be talked about in this series click HERE.

Setting up effective monitoring processes is just one way which Brain-SPEC can help with your/your team's performance. If you are interested in working with Brain-SPEC check out the Services tab at the top or get in touch via email

Expert in a year: The challenge

A good friend of mine and table tennis coach Ben Larcombe has started a challenge...
to take a novice and turn them into an expert in the space of 1 year.
The way he has defined expert is "the top 1% of active players in the country" in English table tennis, where this project is based that means being ranked in the top 250 men in the country (with 25,000 registered members of the English Table Tennis Association).

Whether you agree with this definition of "expert" or not is not really the point. The point is: people at that level have been training many years, perhaps decades to reach that level, and are of a good standard. To get to that level in a year will be quite an achievement.

It will hopefully show the benefit and prosperity of efficient well-planned training or "Deliberate practice"- a concept talked a lot about in Matthew Syed's "Bounce", Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" and much scientific research over the past few decades. (I would highly recommend those books by the way- fantastic reads).

Brain-spec is proud to be accompanying Ben and his soon-to-be-expert Sam in their quest for success. As part of this process mental skills training will be given to supplement to coaching already being given and also consulting on how best to streamline the training being delivered.

This exciting project can be followed in more detail at: 

www.expertinayear.com

There will be also be some reflections from the player himself on how the mental skills training is affecting his performance and enjoyment.

Do you think Sam can do it? Comment below