Thursday, September 2, 2010

Do What You Can...

Doing what you can may or may not be what is required to win.
It suggests that you have reached your limit and are unable to do anymore. So, if I do what I can, win or lose, it should always be enough regardless of outcome.
The great thing about doing what you can, is that what you can do will improve every time you reach the pinnacle of your limits. Push yourself out of your comfort zone and do more than you think you can, this is the essence of improvement. Eventually doing what you can will surpass what is required to win.

So, if you have reached a plateau in improvement, it's not your coach, its not who your training partner is, it's not your parents fault for not getting you into squash as a junior, it's you. The problem is there is a flaw in what you are doing to improve.
There is a better way and you're wasting your time if whatever it is you've tried hasn't brought you any gains.

There are countless players out there who don't have the luxury of training with the best coaches or playing higher level opponents. So step one is to stop blaming everyone around you and take some responsibility for improvement.

I used to think that I worked hard and that I deserved to win because I got a coach, learned some stuff, trained with some pretty good guys had some big wins and pretty positive results, well it turned out that's all superficial B.S. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't necessarily a bad thing, cause it showed me what a little bit of confidence could do for my game. But after the initial improvement, there was a definite decline in the rate improvement.

The epiphany was that I wasn't doing what I could do, I was doing what I thought was enough.

I want to train hard, I want to be pushed and I want to improve my understanding of the game, for me competition is just a venue to gauge my ability to do what I can and determine what I can and can't do. This philosophy is lost on people and they see me as being uncompetitive. Everyone wants to improve, step two is figuring out why.

I see it in lessons all the time, these people talk and give explanations and want instant fixes and they tell me why they couldn't do it, or someone else told them to do it a different way. So it seems that people don't want to improve, they just want to win.

When I get lessons, I go to learn drills that will drill consistency into my game, and then I go and do drills...if it was as easy as just showing up and watching, everyone would be in the PSA. But this is what happens everyday, people just poke at it, they don't drill it.
Anyhow, that's my first rant for the 2010-2011 squash season.

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