There is one thing that keeps implements from flying far, athletes from running fast, and shots from falling through the hoop.
Too much effort.
We’re all aware of this, as shown by the humorous clip from the popular movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” below, but do we really practice it?
As funny as the confusion in the movie is, the idea of trying too hard certainly does exist.
If you’ve been around the throwing ring in track and field, you’ve seen this more than anyone. An athlete warms up, launches the shot, disc, hammer or javelin a mile, and then throws 10% shorter when the competition actually starts. It literally happens at least once every single meet.
I’m no exception.
“I won warmups”
I would say that 5/10 of my farthest javelin throws of all time have been in warmups. Quite sad, really.
Athletes throw farther in warmups than competition because they are relaxed in warmups. The extra arousal of serious competition puts them over the top, and coordination goes down the hole.
This concept doesn’t just happen when it comes to throwing either. I’ve seen it in every sport I’ve played and coached, from lightning relay legs in non-consequential swim events, to timed track sprint practices, rock climbing, dunking and more.
Why is relaxation so important? It all comes down to sport as a skill. Even strength exhibited in lifting barbells is a skill.
What is a skill?
A skill is an athletic movement that requires a specific sequencing of the proper muscles firing at the exact right time, agonists turning on and antagonists turning off on timing that comes down to the microsecond.
What is the enemy of a fine tuned skill? Conscious thought. “Trying hard”. “Grinding it out”. Forebrain dominance.
Sprinting fast is a hindbrain activity
I managed to land one dunk in a high school game, although I was always flying high in warmups, and I even won a dunk contest. I missed more dunks in high school games than I remember. So how did I finally land the magic slam-jam-thank-you-maam? By not thinking I was going to dunk.
When I finally put one down, I remember stealing a pass on the wing, and taking off a few steps; then I remembered hanging from the rim and the crowd roaring. What happened in between, I’m not really sure. I certainly don’t remember deciding to dunk; in fact, when I was hanging from the rim I was more surprised than anything. I think I was more immediately concerned with the opposing team trying to chase me down than I was trying to dunk, but either way, my subconscious mind knew what it was doing all along.
Funny enough, that day I did get that dunk, my warmup jumps were really low. I’m not even sure I could have stuffed the ball through the hoop.
Many times, our subsconsicous just needs an opportune distraction.
This is what “The Inner Game of Tennis” is all about: distracting your conscious mind so that your subconscious mind can work its magic.
If any of you have played tennis, you know exactly what I mean. One minute, you are on fire, but the next, everything is into the net. But why? Because the conscious mind gets in the way, and it often causes a landslide at the smallest failure.
For me, the distraction to finally get my dunk was likely the guards on my tail, but in tennis, it can be focusing on elements of the game other than conscious internal cues, such as looking at the way the seams on the ball spin as the ball is incoming, or paying attention to the sound of the ball off your racket. For basketball, you can just have an awareness of the way your index finger feels as the ball leaves it towards the hoop.
Trust me, this works, and works well. When I turned 30, I decided to hop in my high school’s alumni basketball game after not playing seriously in well over a year. In past experience, every time I had gone more than a few months without playing or shooting, my shot was “broke” as they say, and took at least a few days to really get back.
I didn’t have the luxury for this alumni game, but what I did have was some knowledge that I wasn’t armed with previously: how to let me subconscious mind do the work.
I started the game off missing a few shots, but instead of thinking of how to adjust my shot mid-game, I just took some good breaths and drew an awareness to how the ball left my hand. I finished up sinking the majority of my shots and scoring a dozen points after not playing for years, and honestly not being that great of a shooter to begin with!
I was able to finally cure my “win the warmups” problem in javelin the last year I threw competitively, which was 2011, and this ultimately led to a nice competition and lifetime PR. What I did was focus simply on taking as much tension out of my arm and face as I could on the warmup throws, and escalating from 60, to 70 and 80% effort throws in warmups, and then shutting down, preparing for competition, and then treating the first few competition throws as an “extended warmup”. My first competition throw was 90%, and I wouldn’t “try harder” than that unless I absolutely felt like it was needed. The result was exactly what I was looking for: a lifetime PR on the first competition throw the first time I rolled through this. Try less, throw further.
This leads me to my next point.
Trying Too Hard and the Art of Relaxation
The idea that set me off on this article, many of the points within I’ve touched on before, was actually born from my recent bouldering sessions at the local gym. What I’ve found is that when presented with a hold that is at the limit-edge of my maximal finger strength, I have a far better chance of hanging onto that edge if I can keep my body and arms loose and relaxed, while letting my subconscious drive just the right amount of tension into my fingers. The brain is wired to hang on if that’s your intention, and you don’t have to tense everything else up to make it happen.
I am often amazed by what I can hang onto when I simply relax. Trying too hard brings a lot of extra un-needed muscle into the equation and also tips me a few degrees off of hanging straight down from that hold, which takes the grip need over the edge, and I can’t stay on.
The great Charlie Francis had a ideal when it came to running 10 meter flys, which was to run them at 90% effort, as relaxed as possible. This practice usually yielded a better time than running the fly at 100%! (Charlie was also a proponent of being able to do drills on a hind-brain, or “unconscious” level; the only way they would likely be able to transfer to actually sprinting) I’ve found this to also be incredibly true while running 10 yard dashes. Try too hard, and you’ll run a lousy time. Again, many of my fastest times when I got the Freelap BLE system a few months ago were in warmups, and after a few weeks, I finally figured out that I needed to relax more during work sets, and viola! My times started dropping.
(Side note: doing Be Activated work between sets of sprints, etc. is great because it helps draw awareness to “imploding” patterns of movement, and helps set the mentality of “explosion” from the glute/psoas outwards”, aiding relaxation)
I also found that my fastest 10 yard of all time came from the first 10 yards of doing 40 yard sprints with gates at 10, 20 and 40 yards out. When you run a 40, you’re much more apt to stay relaxed versus a 10, due to the nature of the longer run, and it’s always interesting to see what happens to the early splits in this situation.
Without the feedback of the system, however, I would have never known! In my opinion, 10 yard accels with immediate feedback are one of the best ways you can teach an athlete to relax, because you can do a large volume of them without blowing up the CNS or risking injury.
There was an interesting bit recently on twitter, with Stu McMillan mentioning the lack of “maximal” sprinting Andre DeGrasse performed leading up to his double medal performance at the Olympics. Of course, the nature of maximal can mean a few different things based on the level of environmental arousal, and athletes will certainly go “maximally” in competition, but we can assume that the priority in practice wasn’t on grinding out the best time on the clock at all costs, but focusing on other coordinative and rhythmic aspects of the sprint process.
We can also look at this idea in the weightroom.
One way that the weightroom often tries to contribute to sport is teaching the “position of the core”, which often includes things like bracing hard in a plank position, squeezing the hell out of the glutes, lats and abs, etc. While this position is awesome for building rock-hard total body tension, and preparing to fully take a fist to the gut in a bar-bet, is it good for teaching the system to relax and perform? My thought is not really.
Try maximally tensing your abs, and going out and running a 40 yard dash while doing keeping those abs at full tension. (I heard Cal Dietz mention this on the Central Virginia Sports Performance Seminar) Try even running trying to keep your core in the position it was in during that plank. How fast will you run? Not as fast as you could just sprint without that bracing focus.
Or, if you fear a dreaded hamstring pull, go out and throw a baseball or football as far as you can. Now tense your abs up hard like a plank, and let the ball rip. What happened? Is “terrible” an appropriate word?
For maximal performance, you need a strong element of relaxation, and that can only come from reflexive core action, not conscious tensing of muscles. The rectus abdominis must fire and relax rapidly to transfer energy, and not just tense and shorten. This filters into every lift and movement in the weightroom as well. The weightroom creates helpful sensory feedback to improve posture, but over-doing these cues for the sake of holding the bar can have repercussions over time.
It is important to learn positions in the weightroom that transfer to sport, but by overly tensing the core, and “trying too hard”, one can get caught. I will say that I do love isometrics as a portion of the warmup, but I always stress good breathing patterns, and a relaxation of the extremities, and proper tension/relaxation couples in the core (i.e. tensed rear glute, relaxed rear psoas).
I do think that momentary high tension in muscle groups is totally fine, but it is important that athletes are also coached to relax that tension.
How do you help transfer lifting to the field of play? Simple: keep the lifts in the scope of athletic positions (i.e. match the torso and shins while squatting) breathe and be reflexive.
For more static lifts like squat and deadlift, belly breathe and stick to the “minimal effective dose” of whatever you are doing. Many times, 2×5 or 1×15 will suffice. In the last year, I’ve gotten way more out of lifting by taking tension out of my neck and shoulders (keeping the minimal amount for proper lift biomechanics), and centering it in my breathing pattern than I ever did with any other system or strategy.
The Minimal Effective Dose is a Critical Concept for Any Coach
So how do you cure winning the warmup or trying too hard?
One strategy I’ve enjoyed I’ve learned from rock climbing. In rock climbing, a beginner tendency is to “overgrip” every hold, which quickly wears down fingers, forearms and skin. To combat this, it has been suggested to climb problems close to the ground with the minimal possible tension in the hands, to the point where you actually fall off the wall. The reason you do so is that you need to teach your CNS the absolute minimum needed to stay on the wall! If you never know the minimum, you’ll always be over-tensing and never reach your climbing potential by using more muscle than needed, which always catches up to climbers at the end of routes and problems, and also creates grounds for injury.
I have been reading through “The Psychology of the Body” recently (bioenergetics and mind-body relationships are a special interest of mine), and the book draws a great example to the fact that humans will over-muscle nearly any movement with too much tension. Try the following example taken from the book: Go ahead and lift your straightened arm vertically into extension in front of you. Now bring it back down, and lift your arm again, but this time draw your awareness to how much tension it takes you to accomplish this task. By having an awareness of tension, you’ll find that the amount of muscles you need to raise your arm are much less than your standard “preset” mode.
As Douglas Heel would say, too much tension in, and reliance on the extremities causes athletes to implode rather than explode. By developing the proper amount of tension in the glutes and psoas, and sending this energy outwards, athletes will explode in performance.
You can take this idea and apply it to literally anything.
For cleans, try taking as much tension as you humanly can out of your arms and neck (some have argued that emphasizing the shrug isn’t the most beneficial thing for athletes, and I am agreeing a bit more each year of coaching) while working with 60 kilos. For jumping, try to touch 10 feet with the minimal amount of body tension, or try and long jump 15 feet with the least possible effort. For throwing, try to throw the javelin 40 meters with the least possible amount of strain, and one’s upper body like a “noodle”.
Make this a regular practice. I have found these drills particularly helpful at the end of training sessions, or as separate skill building pieces.
You get the idea.
Enjoy your new found power, skill, and explosive ability that you may have never knew you possessed.
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