Make every rep, every, run, every jump and every throw count! Work without a purpose is not training, it is just work that will make you tired but will not make you better. To have real purpose the work must be meaningful and mindful. Each training session is part of an ongoing process of self-improvement – progress toward the ultimate goal of excellence in the competitive arena. Don’t waste any opportunities to get better, know why you are doing what you are doing so that you can do it to the best of your abilities – Make it count!
Good is not good enough. If you want to be the best stress quality, strive for perfection. Start with effort, effort is easy, it takes no talent to produce effort – build on superior effort. Focus on the task at hand. Each training session must take you out of your comfort zone either physically or psychologically. To be the best constantly push the envelope, get comfortable with being uncomfortable all the time. Risk, stay on the edge, fail early, fail often, get up, get going, try again, learn form each mistake – Make it count!
I came across this site, Writing Athletes, while scanning Daniel Coyle’s blog, The Talent Code. Writing Athletes is the site coach and author, Richard Kent, uses to promote his book, Writing on the Bus.
Kent argues that the act of writing will help athletes, coaches, and teams improve performance. He cites a number of highly successful athletes including Wimbledon Champion Serena Williams, Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, and US ski racer David Chamberlain who all use writing as a tool to improve their performance. His book is a way to give teams and athletes a way to organize their writing and focus it on performance improvement.
I am a firm believer in the writing process as a way to focus thought and analyze objectives and outcomes. I think that it is possible to use writing in a less structured way than Kent lays out in his book, but if you are looking for templates, ideas, and additional information regarding the impact of writing on performance improvement, this is a great place to start.
[iX3] kid Jackson Payne along with Stephen Beery and Chendo Sierra, who do their off season speed and agility training with [iX3]sports, teamed with three other players this weekend to capture 4th in the Kick-It 3v3 World Championships in Orlando, FL over the weekend.
Charlie Houchin representing the [iX3]sports Pro Swim Team won the 400 Free during the second day of the Professional Swim League Dual #1. Charlie followed that gold medal performance with a close third in the 200 Back. recently collected two gold medals at the 2011 Pan American Games in Guadalajara, Mexico.
You can see both of Charlie’s Pro Swim League 2nd day races here:
Founding member of the [iX3]sports Pro Swim Team, Charlie Houchin, notched two 2nd places finishes at the inaugural Professional Swim League Dual #1. Charlie recently collected two gold medals at the 2011 Pan American Games in Guadalajara, Mexico.
The title above is part of a quote from Samuel Beckett that writer Jonah Lehrer uses to concluded his article in Wired Online, Why Do Some People Learn Faster? Lehrer is another in a long string of writer-researchers who are becoming increasingly interested in the ground-breaking work of Mindset author Carol Dweck.
I first learned about Dweck’s work in the psychology of learning approximately two years ago. Since that time, I am continually running across folks in many fields who have been influenced and are continually being influenced by her research. From business, to education, to athletics, a new group of emerging thought leaders are referencing and embedding her work in their practices to improve performance.
I can not recommend it highly enough. Buy it. Borrow it. Just get your hands on a copy and read it.
Below are some excerpts from Lehrer’s article:
“The physicist Niels Bohr once defined an expert as ‘a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.’ Bohr’s quip summarizes one of the essential lessons of learning, which is that people learn how to get it right by getting it wrong again and again. Education isn’t magic. Education is the wisdom wrung from failure.”
“A new study, forthcoming in Psychological Science, and led by Jason Moser at Michigan State University, expands on this important concept. The question at the heart of the paper is simple: Why are some people so much more effective at learning from their mistakes? After all, everybody screws up. The important part is what happens next. Do we ignore the mistake, brushing it aside for the sake of our self-confidence? Or do we investigate the error, seeking to learn from the snafu?”
“The Moser experiment is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes, both of which can be reliably detected using electroenchephalography, or EEG. The first reaction is called error-related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a screw-up and is believed to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex, a chunk of tissue that helps monitor behavior, anticipate rewards and regulate attention. This neural reaction is mostly involuntary, the inevitable response to any screw-up.”
“The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness. It occurs when we pay attention to the error, dwelling on the disappointing result. In recent years, numerous studies have shown that subjects learn more effectively when their brains demonstrate two properties: 1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a bigger initial response to the mistake and 2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means that they are probably paying attention to the error, and thus trying to learn from it.”
“In this new paper, Moser et al. extends this research by looking at how beliefs about learning shape these mostly involuntary error-related signals in the brain, both of which appear in less than half a second. More specifically, the scientists applied a dichotomy first proposed by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford. In her influential research, Dweck distinguishes between people with a fixed mindset — they tend to agree with statements such as “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it” — and those with a growth mindset, who believe that we can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and energy. While people with a fixed mindset see mistakes as a dismal failure — a sign that we aren’t talented enough for the task in question — those with a growth mindset see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge, the engine of education.”
“The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence — the “smart” compliment — is that it misrepresents the psychological reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is when we learn from our mistakes. Because unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong — that surge of Pe activity a few hundred milliseconds after the error, directing our attention to the very thing we’d like to ignore — the mind will never revise its models. We’ll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of self-confidence. Samuel Beckett had the right attitude: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.’”
Taylor Branch in The Atlantic has an in-depth look a the business of college athletics, The Shame of College Sports, looking at who benefits, and who suffers. He does a great job of highlighting the hypocrisy behind the business of the NCAA and the sham of “amateurism.”
“I’m not hiding,” Sonny Vaccaro told a closed hearing at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., in 2001. “We want to put our materials on the bodies of your athletes, and the best way to do that is buy your school. Or buy your coach.”
Vaccaro’s audience, the members of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, bristled. These were eminent reformers—among them the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, two former heads of the U.S. Olympic Committee, and several university presidents and chancellors. The Knight Foundation, a nonprofit that takes an interest in college athletics as part of its concern with civic life, had tasked them with saving college sports from runaway commercialism as embodied by the likes of Vaccaro, who, since signing his pioneering shoe contract with Michael Jordan in 1984, had built sponsorship empires successively at Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. Not all the members could hide their scorn for the “sneaker pimp” of schoolyard hustle, who boasted of writing checks for millions to everybody in higher education.
“Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”
Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”
William Friday, a former president of North Carolina’s university system, still winces at the memory. “Boy, the silence that fell in that room,” he recalled recently. “I never will forget it.” Friday, who founded and co-chaired two of the three Knight Foundation sports initiatives over the past 20 years, called Vaccaro “the worst of all” the witnesses ever to come before the panel.
But what Vaccaro said in 2001 was true then, and it’s true now: corporations offer money so they can profit from the glory of college athletes, and the universities grab it.
by James Allen
