Competitive Wellness Series - New Skills and Repetition

For the student-athletes out there, there is no greater time than Summer. The dedicated will wake up early, maybe attend some camps at a local school, and then your day is over. Often the dedication of time to your specific sport, or specific school, is only one month of two. It’s a time to relax, not think about school, and be outside (weather permitting). 

However, this time is the ultimate decider of improvement and/or success the following year. To be given time-off, with varying degrees of responsibilities, but a good deal of flexibility, is a gift that not many people receive. Even if you are working a summer job as a student, rarely is it going to demand from you after-hours the way school does. (If there is a case where it does, it is probably the aim and focus of your improvement anyway). Now is the time to maximize growth!

Ideally, you leave the summer with one less weakness...at minimum. Can’t kick with your left foot? Summer. Can’t finish around the rim? Summer. Inconsistent when back-setting? Summer. If there is something your coach has told you to work on, or part of your game that you know holds you back from the next level of achievement, Summer is the time to eliminate this blemish from your scouting report. If you return to season with the same holes in your game that you ended the season with, there is no one to blame but yourself. 

Sometimes these improvements are going to require new motor memory. Think of our neural pathways as hiking trails. When the same route is taken over and over, a groove is created in the earth. The same is true in your brain. There can be a lot of initial frustration in learning an “old skill” a new way. “Why should I change my shot now?”, “I do alright the way I’ve been doing it until now”, etc. But what you are asking of yourself is not to go back and cover that path with dirt, replant the grass or brush, and make it look like no one has ever gone down that path before. You are simply choosing to start a new path, often from some point along the one already there, and run over it again and again until your brain “knows” that is the way that we always take.

Another aspect of this training, and one that will be discussed more in-depth in another post, is visualization. There have been numerous studies showing that when you mentally rehearse a skill, your body does not know the difference between action and thought. Therefore, those reps that you go through in bed before falling asleep may also count toward your daily total of repetition. 

Don’t waste your summer! Be honest with yourself about where your game needs improvement and set aside time to make sure you go back to school with one less weakness, a new confidence, and a peace of mind having taken a different path. 

Oh, and this doesn’t apply just to sports. Though many of us don’t have “summers off” to devote to our training, it doesn’t take much to recognize weaknesses and address them for a few moments a day. Simple mental rehearsal and repetition may make us all a little bit better. 

Suggested searches: Motor memory, muscle memory, motor sequencing, imagining exercise, visualization muscle growth

Summers “Off”

As teachers, we catch a lot of flack for “having summers off” from those 9-5, 360ish-a-year-ers. Sure, enjoy the ribbing and your 12-month salary, (not just a 10-month salary stretched over 12 months), but at the root of this “advantage” we have is a necessity to perform at our highest level: the ability to step away and improve ourselves. 

It is easy for any of us to get stuck in certain “grooves” of life; we fall into the routines that guide us through our day with as little active-thought as possible. We enter “survival mode” for a great percentage of our year while underneath it all, beyond the ease and convenience, we suffer both personally and professionally. This is as applicable to teachers as it is to bankers, doctors, or politicians - we become comforted by the routine thoughts and emotions that carry us to the point in our day when we can release ourselves to something much more enjoyable, but equally routine. 

As a teacher, one is relied upon to the n-th degree, to the n-th times during each and every day. This isn’t service to other adults who are within their own grooves, simply looking to maintain the survival-until-enjoyment of their own lives, but service to children who, hopefully, have not yet acquired that draining and simplistic way of life. Our job, as teachers, beyond and despite the red-tape and testing requirements and proof-of-academic-progress, is to help children understand a control in their own lives that leads to constant enjoyment, achievement, and peace. Ask any GOOD teacher you know and they will admit that it’s beyond 8-4, it’s beyond 180, it’s beyond summers off. 

I have told my students on a number of occasions of the nightmares that I have had of them the night before. It is never a nightmare of their momentary action, it is never a nightmare of me losing control in the classroom, but it is a nightmare of me losing it on them. I am not a “yeller”, I do well not raising my voice, so THIS is my nightmare - my reaching a point where I have lost control of myself in my professional environment. I would be lying if I said it didn’t happen, but, I have strategies to make sure my losing control doesn’t mean directing my frustrations at the children. 

These moments as a teacher are the result of becoming stuck in that survival groove. These moments are running the same path over and over until you wear the path down so much it builds walls around you. These moments are living off of expectations for a general populace and understanding that it may not be applicable to your students but continuing to hold them to that expectation.

“Why aren’t they the way I want them to be?! Why aren’t they the way I NEED them to be?!”

Herein lies the problem. It shouldn’t be about where we, as teachers, want and need them to be. It should be about helping them understand where they are, and where they are going, and how to get there, (or, where they are, where they are going, and how NOT to get there while making corrections in order to go another direction). 

(“Well what right of it is yours to decide if the direction they want to go is the wrong one?” Did 10 year-old you make the best decisions? Did wanting a pet dinosaur end up happening? They’re children, it’s our job, our sensitive, important, and influential job, to know the appropriate balance of leading and guiding, relax). 

So what does this have to do with having summers off? As humans, we have a tendency to engage in survival mode...and this is potentially harmful and damaging to children. If I am in survival mode with Weirdly-spelled-first-name-with-a-rouge-x Johnson, then I am not giving him or her what he or she needs from his or her teacher. I have developed a mental and emotional expectation of my engagement with this child which is completely unfair. What great things might I be missing from this student because I am caught up in my own prejudice toward my own well-being? Sorry, my own PERCEIVED well-being. For in my ability to let go of those expectations, those struggles, and those “disappointments”, I am myself growing and providing for my environment a stronger, stabler, more peaceful me. This is the example we should be setting for the students in our classroom and this, realistically, requires a bit of a break from them. 

Granted, I teach within the Montessori philosophy and I typically have children for a three-year cycle. This interaction with students may be different for teachers in a traditional setting who only have students for one year, but that creates a whole different set of dynamics. Granted, as a teacher, I’m starting to fall more in love with the thought of year-round school for the benefit of the younger students, (at least through 6th grade). Changing the structure of education begins with changing the structure of the teachers, of the guides, of the administration. Yes there is red tape, yes there is governmental requirement, yes there are a million excuses as to why one couldn’t, can’t, won’t, shouldn’t,  and YES there is an attraction of falling into the path of least resistance, the survival groove, but there is nothing stopping each and every teacher from ascending to a higher sense of self that allows them to act above the routine while with students, and strive to bring back that reverence that was once shown to educators. 

Do we really need summers off? If they are being used correctly to recharge the self, tie up loose ends, re-energize before heading into a new year, and unlearn some of those bad, adult habits that we carry with us, then absolutely.