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Training Log #5:
Recently the FTA partnered with Greg Roe and the GRT Network to create a 3D Mobile Trampoline Simulator. This simulator was meant to be a fun training tool for all athletes who want to have some fun, map out their skills and practice muscle memory when they are either on the way to training, resting during training, on their way to a competition or going home.
As a coach, we often focus more on what happens specifically at training and may falsely believe that most of the benefits of training happen in the gym. From my experience, however, it is the athlete that has a holistic approach to training that allows them to be consumed by training at all times. Athletes who go train 4 hours a day, but then go home and never think about training will tend to gain less results than those who are consumed by training even outside of the gym.
“Contemplative practices impact specific neural substrates and in turn impact key psychological constructs leading to specific behavioural outcomes.” - Richard Davidson Et al. (2012)
From my experiences, a “balanced” lifestyle is not conducive to elite level success. Someone who is not constantly playing and replaying their training in their brain by either actually playing a simulator, or by mentally going through their routines and watching their videos over and over again will not rank as high compared to those who are consumed by their training on a daily basis.
An interesting thought is to consider the difference between ‘consumption’ levels between traditional athletes and freestyle athletes. Traditional athletes will generally go to the gym and train for a few hours each day, and some will also go to a fitness gym to work out or to physiotherapy as well. But how many hours does it take to be consumed with your sport? I have seen many Freestyle athletes train as hard as traditional athletes and also be consumed by their sport to levels I haven't seen before. The freestyle athletes seem to be more consumed because the training carries over onto social media, where they are bombarded by skills their friends are learning every few minutes. They talk about these skills, comment on each others posts, post their own skills and have their followers give them ideas and pointers. Traditional athletes tend to be more protective about the skills they learn so they do not tend to live on social media in the same way. I hypothesize that this creates a more ‘consuming’ mentality when it comes to training and these freestyle athletes are essentially ‘living in the gym’ so to speak.
Would this be part of the factor as to why many of these freestyle athletes learn so quickly despite a lack of formal coaching? Something worth thinking about for this week!
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