England- Book your Brain-SPEC workshops in May!

Brain-SPEC will be looking at setting up workshops in England during May. 

If your club is interested in hosting one then get in touch now to ensure the dates that work best for you are not booked up!

Prices will vary depending upon numbers of participants (the more, the cheaper it will for everybody!) and the topic can be specifically aimed towards your club.

Send an email to Brainspecsports@gmail.com to allow your club to benefit from a workshop.

Struggles of a Training Athlete- Focusing on one thing at a time

As mentioned in the blog post from the Expert in a year challenge Sam enjoyed his training camp because (unlike normal training), he was able to completely forget about all the other work and worries he had and solely focus on improving his table tennis. The other side of this positive thing is the way it suggests the other training he was normally doing was not 100% focused because he was still thinking about work he needed to do or other places he needed to be.

This has undoubtedly affected the quality of his training and therefore his rate of development. In the Train Smart Play Smart series I talk a lot about the importance of maximising the effectiveness of the training you are doing, and if you are not completely focused during training that will not allow this to happen.

So how do we enable ourselves to focus when training? Do we (like Sam) need to take ourselves away to another country and forget about all other elements of life? Perhaps your boss, partner, kids, friends, parents, bank balance etc might not be so happy about that idea. For most people it is about juggling all the elements of life in a way you can get the most out of each part.


Here are a few tips (that don't just apply to sport) on how to maximise efficiency through focusing on one thing at a time!

Spend time getting in the right frame of mind

The same way you would take time to prepare yourself for your best performance in a match, take time to prepare yourself for your best performance in training. Warm-up routines are a good way of systematising your preparations and ensuring you are in the right frame of mind any time that you play.

use Trigger Music/Video

As part of this preparing integrate some sort of music or video. Associate this music with your sport and then on those days where you might have a harder time forgetting about that meeting at work, the music will help to get `in the mood` for training

Set Goals and Plans

Don't just go into a training session without a plan. If you have a plan, then you have less opportunity for your mind to wander because there is a focused, structured plan to follow.

Shorten the training sessions- humans struggle to focus intensively for long periods of time, that means if you are training for a long time youre more likely to lose focus and that makes the hours you have put in less effective. It is better to have shorter, more effective focused training than long, unfocused sessions.

Schedule Effectively

Will you have your best training session straight after long busy day at work? Probably not. Admittedly there will be parts of life that you cant move around just to suit you, for instance you may have to work 9-5 every weekday whether you like it or not. However, within that week there may be days that are more or less stressful. So, if you can schedule your more intensive training for the days where you are less tired/stressed then you will probably have a better training session.

using these tips should help you to be more focused during your training sessions, and as mentioned at the beginning these tips can also be used in other parts of your life for instance to be more productive at work!

If you enjoyed these tips and found them helpful, or if you have any tips of your own, leave a comment. Also, check out the other articles on the website and if you are interested in working with Brain-SPEC on a more personal basis, click `contact Brain-SPEC` at the top of the page. This is the most effective way in which brain-SPEC can help you with your performance... and if you haven't noticed, the idea behind these posts is maximising that effectiveness!!!

Preparing for things going wrong

Sometimes things don't go as you expect them to. That is just the way sport goes. However what often happens, is that these changes or things going wrong affects you whole game and can cause your performance to fall apart. This might not even be necessarily anything bad, just different. For instance how often do see a team prepare to play a really tough team, then that team gets unexpectedly beaten the round before. As a result the team loses focus expecting to beat the weaker team easily and as a result doesn't prepare adequately and loses!


So how can you prepare for things going differently to how you expect? The answer is quite simple -

PLAN!

The old saying `Failing to prepare is preparing to fail` is particularly useful here.

As is `Plan for the worst, expect the best`.

An important part of good performances is the expectation of things going well, e.g. not expecting a shot to go on the table has been known to have a negative effect on the likelihood of that shot going on the table! So you need to be confident things will go well. However it is doesn't go as well as you hoped you need a plan B. That plan B is a lot more effective if it is pre-thought out.

So how do you make a plan B?

The simple, effective way is the `If-then` method. IF this happens, THEN I will do this...
spending time doing this before a match or a tournament is a very good way of preparing for the unpredictability of sport. Let`s think of some examples of things that could occur that it would be helpful to have an If-then plan for...

Tactics-
You turn up to a match and the team/player you are playing against is playing completely different tactics. How do you change your game plan accordingly

Conditions-
The day is unnaturally warm. How do you change your nutrition, game plan etc

Equipment-
your racket is slower than usual. Do you change your tactics or just try to take bigger swings etc?

performance-
you make a lot of simple mistakes on your backhand. Do you change your plan, use some mental skills to maintain confidence in it, persevere with that shot?

These show there are so many things that are unpredictable in sport and any one of these things could cause you to lose focus and affect your performance. So having a plan written down beforehand will give you confidence and a plan to overcome these issues.

Here are a few tips to make this planning most effective-

Write it down.
Having a written list (I find 2 columns best- an `if` on the left and its `then` next to it) makes it a concrete plan that you can carry with you. The symbolism of this should not be underestimated!

Think of everything that could possibly happen.
If you make an `if-then` and the `if` doesn't happen you don't lose anything. If you don't make an `if-then` and something happens it could throw you off your game just like before.

Make the plans actionable.
Make the `then` part something you can actively change and measure. `If it is hot, then i will drink more water` is not as likely to be effective as planning specific times when you could drink the water. `If it is hot, then I will drink water during every stoppage of play` Would be more likely to get you to follow through the action instead of being vague.

Spend time doing this before matches/tournaments and you will be able to refer back to these notes should something come up and remember what you planned to do. Even if nothing comes up you can go into it with higher self-confidence because you know you are fully prepared for anything!

If you found this useful check out the other tips on the website. If you try this please comment below with how you found it and any examples or experiences where this was/ could have been used.

Struggles of a training athlete

Recently Sam Priestley, the protege of the Expert in a year project being led by Ben Larcombe, has released his own recent thoughts about his training and his progress in the project. It is a great read and really gives an insight into the thoughts going through his head, the highlights and particularly the struggles that he is going through. A lot of these are common struggles that a lot of athletes go through, both professional and recreational, in their quest to improve.
In the a series of posts I will discuss these troubles in more depth and give some tips to help overcome these struggles and continue to improve your performance.

To understand the starting position for these posts read the words of Sam himself here

So from this here are some of the struggles that he and I am sure many of you have

• Overtraining - Sam got sick of training, lost motivation and his training was suffering

This is a difficult one because lots of people think that not training as much as physically possible to fit in is laziness. But a sustainable schedule is important, as Sam found, your motivation suffers and as a result the quality of training both physically and mentally suffers. Bad habits form, injuries occur, and all of this is definitely bad news in both a short and long term viewpoint. For the in-depth ways to look at if you're overtraining and how to avoid doing this read the full article Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3

• Focusing on one thing at a time - Sam was very happy in Denmark and Hungary because he could focus his mind on just the one thing and saw big benefits to his motivation, general mental health and also performance

Not everybody is able to take weeks off from work to train full-time, and even if you can you will still need to balance work/school/family/everyday life with your training. The key is switching off each of those things when you're training and vice versa. This is a difficult thing to do but is key to getting the most out of your training. There are some methods to do this discussed in this article in the series HERE

• Difficulty transferring training performances into matches - Sam had the basic technique and good shots but in matches he is finding it difficult to transfer this and perform well.

This is a very common problem that almost everybody has at some point and few people find a way to truly overcome it. There are a few ways to overcome this including altering your thoughts in both training and matches and altering your training to help transfer these skills into a match. These are discussed in depth in this article of the series HERE

• Being professional in your training when others aren't - Sam found this part of the camps he visited to be very good but this shows the contrast to what happens if these conditions/mentality of others is not as good

Staying focused and training at 100% when other people aren't taking it as seriously is a difficult thing. As humans we are naturally swayed by social interaction and observation, so how do we shut out that and really get the most from our training? Read about a few tips HERE

• Fear of wasting other peoples time - Sam talks about not being good enough at blocking for his practice partner and feeling the need to apologise

The only way to improve is to push yourself slightly beyond your capabilities (read the article I created on the ZPD here) therefore practicing with players better than you needs to happen So how do you keep them happy, while being able to get the most out of it for yourself? I discuss this in this article of the series HERE.

(Not all these articles are yet written and will be added as they are completed so, if there is no link where it says there should be, please be patient!)

Don't forget to check out the rest of the goings on at Expert in a year and the rest of my blog, and comment below some more of the problems you are having. I will read each one and look into writing posts on how to overcome these in the future.

If you are interested in working on a more individual, tailored basis, contact me via email at brainspecsports@gmail.com and check out the services page of the website for ideas as to how I could potentially help you to improve you/your teams training and performances.

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