Practice, Practice, Practice
Antony Casella, October 21st, 2007
Which is better in a confrontational situation? Reacting to a fight with ingrained (i.e. learned) responses or having a strategic “plan” of action dictate your defenses? Obviously the answer is both. But are these two ideas separate entities? I claim that these two ideologies walk hand in hand and in order to be adept at one, you need the other.
Having a significant other in my life that studies in the field of psychology allows me to be privy to modern thoughts and ideas on human behavior. A recent discussion we both had dealt with a psychological study on high performance athletes vs. amateur athletes of various sports. This study claimed that the main difference between amateurs and professionals was that when under duress or under other stressful situations (i.e. competition) the high performance athletes tend to perform better than expected, and the amateurs tend to perform poorer than expected. According to the study, the reason for the greater than expected results by the high-performance athletes was due to the amount of time practicing their various sports (e.g. a footballer practicing his maneuvers and ball handling skills hours on end).
Amateurs typically had much less practice time and therefore less time to have fundamental movements ingrained to become second nature. Although the amateur may know what to do in a given situation (pass the ball or outrun a defender) his ability to due so is diminished due to a lack of training and having a lack of an automated response. That is, his brain wants to do something, but his body can’t do it. The high performance athletes on the other hand, could apply their strategies seamlessly and adeptly. Additionally, if their choices for strategy happened to be offset by an unexpected variable (someone tackling the ball from behind for example) they had a greater ability to rethink strategy and perform a desired response. This obviously applies to our WCK training as well. Persons who have trained key positions and principles to the point of becoming second nature will not only be able to think strategy, but will also be able to apply it under stressful situations. Someone who only “knows” the position or principle but has less practice time under their belt will performs less adequately under similar circumstances. I suppose my point in this is that I don’t think strategy and automated responses are separate things. They need to work together to achieve a desired response and persons adept at both would be the better performers. So what it comes down to is that no matter how tactically adept you may be, it won’t amount to much until you can perform those strategies with ingrained responses. What do you think?
That’s my rant and I am outta here..
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