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When you are going along in a practice, how do you know when to stop for the day?
Go for as long as you have time? Go for as long as you have energy? Go until it hurts?
None of these.
You need to stop when the weakest member of the performance team cannot keep up with the rest.
Your performance team is composed of these systems that must work together in proportional strength:
- Metabolic – your body’s ability to supply energy and remove waste.
- Muscular – converting energy into power.
- Motor (neural) – directing that power with precision.
- Mind – your ability to direct attention and hold it, to perceive and interpret what’s going on.
The weakest member of this team is going to hold you back, and if pushed beyond its current capacity to work in a healthy state, it will cause you problems and increase potential for injury. Just because other parts of your body are feeling stronger and want to go more, that does not mean you should let them go ahead of this weaker member.
So, when you going along in your practice session, you will start to feel some fatigue in one or more of these systems. Like a child trying to keep up with his big siblings on a long hike, one of these will eventually start to lag behind, hindering the others.
Initially, you are able to and should increase your effort to maintain focus and control. But at some point you are no longer able to do that, and form will start to deteriorate. If you can no longer hold attention, you should stop for the day. If you can hold attention, but can no longer correct or protect key parts of your posture or movement, then you should stop for the day.
It is very likely that you will actually experience a wavering in your awareness and control of movement (features of the Mind system), before you actually feel to tired physically to carry on. This course is requiring you to build up strength of awareness and control so that these can work in proportion to your metabolic and muscular strength. Or, if you happen to have strong awareness and control, but lack fitness in the others, likewise, your body will quite responding consistently to your motor commands and you know its time to stop.
In practice, you do want to work up to this failure point for your weakest system and let it be pushed, just a little. This is how that system will get stimulated to grow stronger. So don’t be discouraged by hitting this limit, but be glad that you can recognize it clearly and use your result today to compare to your result in the next practice to have a clear sense of progress from practice to practice.
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