Working on Weaknesses
Do what you love, do what you need, get what you love, no matter your goal something about that sport makes you love it. Think about what that is. For most of us its intrinsically fun, we enjoy the challenge, we enjoy succeeding, commaraderie, etc.
Think for a moment about how much time you spend or have spent in your sport. Hours today? Days a week? Weeks a month? Months a year? Years this decade? Longer? Wish you had made it further with your time? Well you can, and with minimal extra effort.
True Champions
You are doing what you love, your sport! We want you to love it more, and have more success with it, by doing what you NEED! Everyday I see gifted athletes, passed by less gifted athletes because they decide to do what they need instead of what they want. So lets start with defining what you need.
A baseball player is required to have many skills to be an All-Star. There are many players who can hit or field or throw. Less who can do two of those, and less that can do all 3. This is a simplification but you can begin to see the idea. For a all star hitter to become a better player he can simply improve on the skills he is lacking and get far better than spending his extra time on hitting.
Lets use for this example a student. In language has an A, in Math has a F, in Gym has a A, and in Science has a B. This student’s GPA(the score of the quality of a student) will not rise if more study time and energy is put into Language and Gym. But with a relatively small amount of extra work on Math could raise that grade to an average level and boost the GPA significantly.
It is exactly the same with your sport. Baseball, Football, Soccer, Wrestling, Tennis, Basketball, CrossFit…. Your ability to put your valuable time towards improving your weaknesses will improve your overall athleticism and improvement over time.
As with all sports, your “grades” are relative to your competition. If you are competing at a world class, nation level, regional event, state wide, or local league your standards will be your guided by the level of competition. It’s important to consider the level you would like to be competing at when grading yourself. So your template for grading should begin with 10 physical skills or by an objective testing system like we have here at CFJG.
10 General Physical Skills
- Cardiovascular Endurance
- Stamina
- Strength
- Flexibility/Mobility
- Power
- Speed
- Agility
- Balance
- Accuracy
- Coordination
Your sport may call for higher levels of particular skills, but if all your current skills stayed the same, and you improved on your two worst skills, do you think you would be a better athlete in your sport? ABSOLUTELY.
There are a variety of ways you can realize your most lacking skills. A well versed coach can help you more quickly with recognizing and alleviating the issues faster than trial and error on your own. I can writing about the general topic, so seek out a sport coach and a general physical prep coach.
How to adjust your training…
Programming wise we are going to make it simple in the sense that I don’t know your exact situation, strength, weaknesses and sport. As a general rule you can make significant gains on your weakest skills be transferring 20% (aka 1 day a week) of your total time spent on strongest skills and giving it to your weakest skills.
Your time is valuable, spend it on something that’s going to be the biggest bang for the buck. If you can consistently work on weaknesses more than your opponents you will consistently get better faster than they do… and that’s how you win championships on a consistent basis!
Increase your athletic GPA and spend 20% more time on your weakness. Over the course of 20 training days you’ve made a giant dent in your first weakness and have become a more UNSTOPPABLE athlete!
