profesormental
05-11-2006, 12:01 PM
Hi All!!
Here is another article I made for a newsletter for your reading enjoyment... hope you learn soemthing and stimulates some thought!
Sincerely,
Juan M. Mercado
__________________________________________________ _________________
What is ?Optimum Performance? other than a fancy name for ?doing your best??
Many people are out there advertising ?performance enhancers?... unfortunately most people buy into these products and/or methods thinking they are ?performance replacers?...
meaning they have to do NOTHING ELSE to get results. So how can you enhance your performance when you have no ?performance?? Interesting...
They want the edge... the extra mile... the turbo boost... the nitro supercharge... yet to get an extra mile, you've got to already have done at least one or two miles... for the nitro boost, you need to have already picked up a relatively fast speed...
The difference between the winner and a second place is normally about 3% effort or less in competitive situations.
So to get to a competitive level, you have to take a road filled with effort to obtain the skills needed to differentiate you from less than 1% of the world population.
Then the performance enhancers, be them methods of training or other agents, can help with that 5% to 10% extra performance.
So does that mean that the other 90% to 95% of the effort has to be my own? You betcha!
So you have to realistically ask yourself...
Do I really want to reach my maximum genetic performance? Am I willing to invest the commitment level needed to achieve such levels? Or do I want to maximize the time I have and have as much fun as possible training in a comfortable level?
Many people want performance enhancers because they think it's the magic bullet... an instant fix. And it sells!
Yet nothing replaces well earned skills gained by experimented methods of training, which is an optimum performance method disguised as effort, sweat and time.
This doesn't sell that much. And the full credit of these feats of skills are many times attributed to performance enhancers, which at most account for 2% to 10% in the athlete's performance.
So now we are going to talk about training methods as performance enhancers and optimum performance facilitators.
First, it's important to find your level of commitment and stick to that.
Not all people are going to engage in competition or a duel or prearranged fight, so they don't need the level of training a professional fighter should have. To many people that would be wasteful since they would rather invest that extra training time with their families, or they would associate too much pain an effort to the training, which can take the fun out of it and take motivation away.
Note that to defend against a ?street? situation, less strenuous training than that of a prize fighter is needed. Yet if you have it, the healthier you are and the more of a shining example of genetic perfection you will be!
So start by setting your goals for training and your Degree of Commitment as Low, Medium or High, or whatever names you want that sound cool to you. This is your program, so enjoy it!
So if you work full time, have are not in great shape and want to fight at a professional MMA event in 3 months, that is not a healthy objective...
that would require about a year at least and a high level of commitment, if you want to win, to accommodate the Development, Refinement and Rehearsal evolutions of training.
Also, a basic philosophy is at work here: Maximum Performance is not achieved by performing your skill alone. So the role of supplementary training should be considered.
These supplementary exercises are brought about by a process called ?chunking down? or breaking the execution of a skill into smaller pieces. Many people think that this ?sophistication? is unnecessary and a lot of useless extra work.
And it is useless, if you don't integrate it back into the simpler framework in the 4th level of competence.
Let's take a step back.
There are 5 levels of competence in any skill; here I'll explain the first 4 of them.
The 1st level is unconscious incompetence. You don't know you don't know. For example, you don't know what a car is.
The 2nd level is conscious incompetence. You know that you don't know how to do the skill. You know what a car is but you don't know how to drive.
The 3rd level is conscious competence... the hard part. It is the actual practice of the skills, step by step, to obtain results. You are starting to learn how to drive a car. You have many steps to follow, and you're aware of each one, one at a time.
The 4th level is unconscious competence. You are not aware of all the steps that you're doing simultaneously, so effectively, you don't know you know. You can drive the car without thinking about it much.
Let's look at this further. As a concrete example, let's take the Martial Methods of Kenpo and the sport of Boxing.
Boxing has several principles, about less than 10 different basic punches and a limited amount of targets. Its emphasis is conditioning and combinations of these punches to the body or head with evasive footwork.
American Kenpo has a very sophisticated and developed theory with many principles and Master Keys to account for most or all of the possible physical confrontations anyone can come up with.
These descriptions are incredibly simplistic and do no justice for any of these methods, yet it is easy to see that they have different amounts of sophistication and textbook theory.
Once you are convinced of that, think about this.
It takes a certain level of sophistication to get greater insight into how things work, so as to find a more efficient path to your objectives.
Yet there is a problem that comes from sophistication. If you don't get it to the 4th level of competence, when you really need it, the skill just might not be there for you!
Most people get stuck in the 2nd or 3rd level of proficiency in a skill, thinking they're in the 4th...
which in the need of actual execution of the skill, specially in martial skills, will lead to substandard or catastrophic performance.
Many people go through the sophistication phase and do not reintegrate all those steps, and can do a few at a time, which is still the 3rd level of competence, yet they think it's the 4th, so they stop working for improvement on it.
The thing is that you can take the principles and skills of Boxing, break them into smaller chunks, as in Kenpo theory, then reintegrate the skills again into the simpler theory, including the new insight given by sophistication. So effectively, it's a more efficient execution of the smaller set of principles!
For examples, how many Kenpo principles are used in the execution of a lead hook?
At first a punch is just a punch. When I started kung fu, a punch wasn't just a punch. Then when I learned kung fu, a punch was just a punch... (many forms of this taoist quote abound... if I remember right, Bruce Lee made it famous.)
So chunking down is one method to produce supplementary exercises. With this skill of chunking down, you can break goals into smaller objectives and use them as signposts of your progress.
You can use these signposts to now know if what you're doing is making you better or worse, or getting you were you want faster or slower. This way you can evaluate the efficiency of methods by yourself, for yourself. So it would be ultra useful to keep a training journal, as to really appreciate your improvements and analyze where you can get even better!
You can even add or subtract a principle to note the difference. The advantage that Kenpo has is that the many principles are already spelled out, so you can go faster, yet experimenting you might find your own way.
Another important point is that many drills are used just to learn some principles, and not necessary to train them every day. Other drills should be used continuously and persistently to gain even more from them. Practicing coordination set every day won't get you very far. Yet training in Chi Sao evolves as your skills evolve, so the more you train, the more you can get out of the exercise!
What other examples can you think of?
So in summary the maximum performance training methods that we discussed today are: calibration of the level of commitment and training accordingly as to meet your goals and not waste your time;
sophistication and chunking down with integration of the results from this chunking;
make a roadmap of your skills and put signposts to mark your way as to calibrate your journey by keeping a training journal. What are ways in which you can incorporate this into your training?
In the next article, I'll talk about the secret method that turns a devoted student into a Master of their craft... it was taught to me by a fencing master world class competitor in fencing and judo (has won medals in international competition). And as I was writing this article, I found it spilled out as if it was nothing by a high level kenpoist in the Internet! Send a private message and I'll reply with where it is...
Here is another article I made for a newsletter for your reading enjoyment... hope you learn soemthing and stimulates some thought!
Sincerely,
Juan M. Mercado
__________________________________________________ _________________
What is ?Optimum Performance? other than a fancy name for ?doing your best??
Many people are out there advertising ?performance enhancers?... unfortunately most people buy into these products and/or methods thinking they are ?performance replacers?...
meaning they have to do NOTHING ELSE to get results. So how can you enhance your performance when you have no ?performance?? Interesting...
They want the edge... the extra mile... the turbo boost... the nitro supercharge... yet to get an extra mile, you've got to already have done at least one or two miles... for the nitro boost, you need to have already picked up a relatively fast speed...
The difference between the winner and a second place is normally about 3% effort or less in competitive situations.
So to get to a competitive level, you have to take a road filled with effort to obtain the skills needed to differentiate you from less than 1% of the world population.
Then the performance enhancers, be them methods of training or other agents, can help with that 5% to 10% extra performance.
So does that mean that the other 90% to 95% of the effort has to be my own? You betcha!
So you have to realistically ask yourself...
Do I really want to reach my maximum genetic performance? Am I willing to invest the commitment level needed to achieve such levels? Or do I want to maximize the time I have and have as much fun as possible training in a comfortable level?
Many people want performance enhancers because they think it's the magic bullet... an instant fix. And it sells!
Yet nothing replaces well earned skills gained by experimented methods of training, which is an optimum performance method disguised as effort, sweat and time.
This doesn't sell that much. And the full credit of these feats of skills are many times attributed to performance enhancers, which at most account for 2% to 10% in the athlete's performance.
So now we are going to talk about training methods as performance enhancers and optimum performance facilitators.
First, it's important to find your level of commitment and stick to that.
Not all people are going to engage in competition or a duel or prearranged fight, so they don't need the level of training a professional fighter should have. To many people that would be wasteful since they would rather invest that extra training time with their families, or they would associate too much pain an effort to the training, which can take the fun out of it and take motivation away.
Note that to defend against a ?street? situation, less strenuous training than that of a prize fighter is needed. Yet if you have it, the healthier you are and the more of a shining example of genetic perfection you will be!
So start by setting your goals for training and your Degree of Commitment as Low, Medium or High, or whatever names you want that sound cool to you. This is your program, so enjoy it!
So if you work full time, have are not in great shape and want to fight at a professional MMA event in 3 months, that is not a healthy objective...
that would require about a year at least and a high level of commitment, if you want to win, to accommodate the Development, Refinement and Rehearsal evolutions of training.
Also, a basic philosophy is at work here: Maximum Performance is not achieved by performing your skill alone. So the role of supplementary training should be considered.
These supplementary exercises are brought about by a process called ?chunking down? or breaking the execution of a skill into smaller pieces. Many people think that this ?sophistication? is unnecessary and a lot of useless extra work.
And it is useless, if you don't integrate it back into the simpler framework in the 4th level of competence.
Let's take a step back.
There are 5 levels of competence in any skill; here I'll explain the first 4 of them.
The 1st level is unconscious incompetence. You don't know you don't know. For example, you don't know what a car is.
The 2nd level is conscious incompetence. You know that you don't know how to do the skill. You know what a car is but you don't know how to drive.
The 3rd level is conscious competence... the hard part. It is the actual practice of the skills, step by step, to obtain results. You are starting to learn how to drive a car. You have many steps to follow, and you're aware of each one, one at a time.
The 4th level is unconscious competence. You are not aware of all the steps that you're doing simultaneously, so effectively, you don't know you know. You can drive the car without thinking about it much.
Let's look at this further. As a concrete example, let's take the Martial Methods of Kenpo and the sport of Boxing.
Boxing has several principles, about less than 10 different basic punches and a limited amount of targets. Its emphasis is conditioning and combinations of these punches to the body or head with evasive footwork.
American Kenpo has a very sophisticated and developed theory with many principles and Master Keys to account for most or all of the possible physical confrontations anyone can come up with.
These descriptions are incredibly simplistic and do no justice for any of these methods, yet it is easy to see that they have different amounts of sophistication and textbook theory.
Once you are convinced of that, think about this.
It takes a certain level of sophistication to get greater insight into how things work, so as to find a more efficient path to your objectives.
Yet there is a problem that comes from sophistication. If you don't get it to the 4th level of competence, when you really need it, the skill just might not be there for you!
Most people get stuck in the 2nd or 3rd level of proficiency in a skill, thinking they're in the 4th...
which in the need of actual execution of the skill, specially in martial skills, will lead to substandard or catastrophic performance.
Many people go through the sophistication phase and do not reintegrate all those steps, and can do a few at a time, which is still the 3rd level of competence, yet they think it's the 4th, so they stop working for improvement on it.
The thing is that you can take the principles and skills of Boxing, break them into smaller chunks, as in Kenpo theory, then reintegrate the skills again into the simpler theory, including the new insight given by sophistication. So effectively, it's a more efficient execution of the smaller set of principles!
For examples, how many Kenpo principles are used in the execution of a lead hook?
At first a punch is just a punch. When I started kung fu, a punch wasn't just a punch. Then when I learned kung fu, a punch was just a punch... (many forms of this taoist quote abound... if I remember right, Bruce Lee made it famous.)
So chunking down is one method to produce supplementary exercises. With this skill of chunking down, you can break goals into smaller objectives and use them as signposts of your progress.
You can use these signposts to now know if what you're doing is making you better or worse, or getting you were you want faster or slower. This way you can evaluate the efficiency of methods by yourself, for yourself. So it would be ultra useful to keep a training journal, as to really appreciate your improvements and analyze where you can get even better!
You can even add or subtract a principle to note the difference. The advantage that Kenpo has is that the many principles are already spelled out, so you can go faster, yet experimenting you might find your own way.
Another important point is that many drills are used just to learn some principles, and not necessary to train them every day. Other drills should be used continuously and persistently to gain even more from them. Practicing coordination set every day won't get you very far. Yet training in Chi Sao evolves as your skills evolve, so the more you train, the more you can get out of the exercise!
What other examples can you think of?
So in summary the maximum performance training methods that we discussed today are: calibration of the level of commitment and training accordingly as to meet your goals and not waste your time;
sophistication and chunking down with integration of the results from this chunking;
make a roadmap of your skills and put signposts to mark your way as to calibrate your journey by keeping a training journal. What are ways in which you can incorporate this into your training?
In the next article, I'll talk about the secret method that turns a devoted student into a Master of their craft... it was taught to me by a fencing master world class competitor in fencing and judo (has won medals in international competition). And as I was writing this article, I found it spilled out as if it was nothing by a high level kenpoist in the Internet! Send a private message and I'll reply with where it is...