Andrea Contents
To become strong you have to agree to fail!
Failure is part of the learning process and I tell you about any learning process.
Many people can’t accept this!
This is often even more evident when you hear with great ness that this does not work or that is not needed, etc. by people who justify it with platitudes where in the eyes of an expert the technical and methodological vacuum to develop the attributes needed to resolve complicated situations.
Like everything there are simple obstacles to overcome and others very complex and articulated for high physical and psychological variables such as knife study.
In fact if you asked them how much they trained that problem they would probably lie to you, they were ashamed to fail and fail to find the arcane that solves the problem and they branded this as useless.
In fact there are types of dynamics that need to be trained 100 times more than others but this is not done because it requires a sacrifice that you are not willing to spend and it is easier to say that it is not possible or that it is only for experts, etc.
Wrong and don’t be in a hurry! Do-Fail-Learn-Repeat!
When you study combat sports but this is even more evident if you study personal defense are two important aspects related to functional training.
The key thing is to understand why you failed, then gain awareness.
You’re educating your body and mind.
One:
If your training partner isn’t really trying to stop you from succeeding with your techniques then you have to tell him “don’t let me do this.”
And you have to do the same thing with him, you have to stress him out.
Two:
It is necessary to ensure that the techniques used in sparring are the same as those you use and study in technical exercises and other training methods.
If your training partner isn’t trying to stop you by any means, and if the techniques and applications you’re studying aren’t the ones you’re using in sparring, then your training isn’t realistic.
The value of failure and the comfort zone
Another aspect you have to remember and always keep in mind is that you need to fail.
If while you’re training you’re not failing in your practice, then you’re not realistically training and you’re not maximizing your learning ability.
When you’re not failing, wrong, taking your heavy bag training, to paos, or other situations like sparring in a state of difficulty then you’re not pushing to the limit.
If you don’t push yourself to the limit in the meantime, you don’t know where your limit is or where the boundaries of your abilities are.
It is essential to know where your limits are in order to work more effectively to extend them, to increase your skills.
You don’t have to train to fail, but you have to train until you fail at least once in a while.
For example,:
- You’re trained and you’ve got to do a number of combinations you have to get to the point where you can’t do it anymore to shoot shots
- You’re doing paos and your partner/catch calls you the shots and you can’t anymore and you get to kneel from fatigue,
- When your partner attacks you, resists or fights more than you can handle, causing your defense to fail,
- While sparring to understand how to manage your energies or test your strategies and combinations, etc.
- You’re struggling with your training partners (that’s also why you sometimes need sparring conditioned with limits to get you in trouble like starting from disadvantaged positions).
These conditions give you the opportunity to learn better.
At what point in training did you fail? Why did you fail? What happened. Ok! Repeat again.
Now slow down for a moment or lighten your ideas a little and try again until you fail again and gradually increase the intensity to extend your skills again.
Repetition has the ability to make a complex gesture simple!
Understanding and analyzing errors
If you need it because you can’t figure out where exactly you’re wrong, unpack whatever you’re doing in different components to figure out exactly where the problem areas are.
Focus on the problem area until you’ve fixed it, put the parts back together, and repeat.
Now you also have to be consistent if you train in this way it is clear that over time it will be increasingly difficult to fail unless you push yourself towards new conditions and new challenges, so not always when you do not fail it is because you limit yourself, sometimes you are already over the limit that others can offer you and it is also the reason especially among professionals where at some point they have to get out of their gym and go looking for new levels challenges.
- Train continuously above your level, where your instructor or opponent always beats you, where you never succeed is not productive at all.
- But training far below your level, where you always win, is equally unproductive.
The ideal place to train is just below the limit of your skills, in the border area where with your partner pushing just beyond and this already allows you to gradually extend your limits.
As you can see from the image on the comfort zone the dot of success is on the boundary line.
Strength training and adapting signal
I want to use a metaphor that is now well known and that I think many of you have passed, weight training.
If you’re doing a strength boost workout the same principle applies.
Muscle and strength growth is a biological adaptation and your body won’t adapt unless you “think” it’s necessary.
You have to send the signal to your body that needs to adapt but how do you do this?
Through failure.
Try to think about it, if you can lift 100 kg ten times and keep going to the gym to lift 100 kg ten times, you will never increase your strength.
If you want to increase your strength you have to fail in your workouts, failing to do the same repetitions with more than 100 kg or you have to try to do more repetitions than you can, or as I told you more weight than you can today.
When you fail, you are sending a signal to your body that must adapt, otherwise your body will have no good reason to add strength or muscle.
Failure in general
Every time you venture to do new things it will fail unless you are doing something for everyone, something trivial or something that your body is already adapted for.
I’ve definitely failed a lot more than I did!
But failure should be the best lesson you can learn even if most people who do nothing and who are not used to failing for their immobility will criticize or tease you, but they do not know a fundamental thing or fail to accept that:
It is a fundamental step towards success.
Who succeeds the most in life in every area if you have the opportunity to have you tell the story you will find that it has been full of failures.
The Teaching of Failure
Failure can teach you that something is harder than I thought, but it shows you where your skills or knowledge gaps are, which allows you to fill these gaps.
You may also know that whatever you were trying to do was not worth the risk or effort.
This is also good if it serves to give greater awareness of your skills and also of your limits because knowing your limits allows you to adopt behaviors and strategies to get around the problem and overcome it.
It’s always a matter of adaptation but if you’re never failing, then you’re not really trying.
Failure is like a positive sign that you have to use it to grow.
It’s a sign that you’re pushing into uncharted territory, an opportunity to learn or move forward.
But beware! If you refuse this you will always be in an area of you mediocre, you will never know who you really are!.
Experience is not what happens to a man; is what a man accomplishes using what happens to him. Aldous Huxley
Conclusions
Even if you see people who always succeed, you need to know that even in their learning process there have been mistakes and failures, .
You’re seeing the end of a process, you just see the result, so you don’t know what’s behind that person who succeeds.
To improve you have to get out of your comfort zone and go face trials that are bigger than you at the beginning!.
Of course, as I told you, it’s critical to use failure intelligently so that you don’t keep failing all the time because you don’t understand what’s going on.
It is also for this reason that the area of success is on the border, because working too far in the comfort zone does not only mean failure but harm.
For example, sparring with a very strong one would make you take a lot of beating without understanding anything, as if your ceiling on the flat bench are 100 kg and you put 200 kg , you would be crushed, you would hurt without any advantage.
Like everything, it must be done in degrees and with intelligence because you have to give your body the time to adapt that he listens to thanks to the signals you give him.
You’re educating your body!
Train beyond your abilities today! If it’s too easy, you don’t need it.
Andrea
