First things first, if you haven't read Patricia Pyrka's excellent post on neuroplasticity as it applies to the late ballet adopter, I strongly recommend you do so immediately. Aside from its own merits, it'll give you some grounding for the rest of this post. I retweeted a link to it a few weeks ago and Patricia (@PatriciaPyrka) was kind enough to ask for my thoughts on how the same concept could be applied to wrestling.
Did you read it? Go read it. This isn't going anywhere. You can come back. It's fine.
Done? Ok. First, let's review the basic idea of neuroplasticity. (I used to teach community college freshmen. I know people lie about doing the reading. It's ok. I got you.) Neuroplasticity, greatly simplified, is the idea of how easily your brain adapts to new input... in other words, how easily you learn. Children, it was long thought, have a high degree of neuroplasticity. Their brains aren't yet "set," so they learn easily. Adults, by contrast, were believed to be more or less a completed product. Hence learning new skills, particularly physical skills or languages, was much harder and in many cases impossible. That's why, for example, Michael Jordan was an amazing basketball player but couldn't transform himself into a professional level baseball player despite his tremendous physical gifts.
Long story short, new research suggests that isn't true. There's no physical reason you can't learn new skills at any point in life. But - and this is a big but - the new input has to be... put in... in the right way. This, it turns out, is probably the major difference in the way children learn vs the way adults learn. (Again, go back and read the original. She explains this really well.) So let's look at the five key factors identified in maximizing the value of input, and how they apply to learning wrestling.
1 - Massed Practice
Practice, they say, makes perfect. Or, as one of the YMAA books I bought years ago put it, "Ten thousand times answers all questions." Refer if you like to Malcolm Gladwell's Ten Thousand Hours theory. Terrible lies. Practice makes permanent. But the basic principle is the same - if you want to get good at something, you have to put in the reps. Lots and lots of reps.
What neuroplasticity research suggests is that those reps are more valuable if you have a lot of them in a relatively confined period, say two to three weeks. Are you starting to see why it was easier to pick this stuff up when you were a kid? For most adult learners of wrestling or other grappling styles or martial arts, this is a part time hobby. You get in a couple hours after work a couple days a week if you're lucky and nothing came up and no part of you hurts too much. When you were a kid, you could go to an Intensive Camp for couple weeks over the summer and devote all that time to the sport. You practiced every day after school and wrestled around with your friends on the weekends. Who has time or money or energy to do something like that at 40? Not me and, unless you're a pro or have otherwise dedicated your life to this, probably not you.
So what can you do? One thing - again, blatantly stealing this from the original, but good advice is good advice - is to focus your training. Spend that two or three weeks working primarily on escaping from the bottom, or on improving your favorite rides and turns. Spend a month on your upper body throws, or how to hit your double wristlock from anywhere. My JKD teacher used to do a broader version of this, breaking up classes into months focused on trapping, on grappling, on striking, and on weapons. At the time I thought it would be more helpful to spread that time around more and cover each range at each class. I should not be surprised to find out Bruce (not that one) was right and I was wrong.
Also worth pointing out that Pavel Tsatsouline advocates a similar approach to strength training. Greatly simplified, Pavel advocates teaching strength as a skill, the skill of creating maximal tension. As part of this approach, his programs include very frequent, very heavy lifts (daily 90% RM deadlifting!) in very short sets. I can tell you from experience it works. You get stronger fast with minimal soreness and very little chance of injury. You can apply the same method to your other skills training. Make your workouts shorter and more focused and take fewer days off. Try it, see what happens.
2 - Emotional State
People are bad at learning under stress
People are bad at learning under stress
People are bad at learning under stress
Everybody get that?
One of the biggest sins committed by combat sports and martial arts coaching is throwing people into the deep end too soon. It seems like everyone spars too soon. Every room fears the call of "go 50%" because there's one guy who doesn't understand what that means. (If you don't know who s/he is, good chance it's you. Settle down.) Wrestling is stressful. Learning new and uncomfortable movements and twisting yourself into previously unknown positions in close body contact with strangers is stressful. Being the one person who gets something wrong is stressful. Being trapped under someone who's better at this than you are, who's bigger or stronger or faster, sucks. For novices, it can be terrifying. And that's before they start trying to strangle you or twist your joints in directions not suggested by the manufacturer or "crossfacing" you... which we all know just means clubbing you in the face. What's the most common word beginners hear?
"Breathe".
Because they forget. They really forget. Imagine that. Getting so stressed you actually forget to perform a basic process you've been doing your whole life which is essential for your survival. And you think you're going to learn something new in that condition?
This is bad coaching, for one thing. A coach is a teacher, first and foremost, and if as teachers our students aren't learning, we need to ask ourselves why, and "because they're dumb or lazy" isn't an acceptable answer even if it's true. As a coach, it's imperative that you monitor the emotional states of your students. See who's too high and who's too low, and bring them back towards an emotional state that fosters learning. Pushing charges to see how far they can go before they break, and then discarding the ones who "can't take it" is like overloading the bar for a starting weightlifter and ditching the ones who can't lift it yet. It's inane. To teach effectively, you have to meet people where they are, and show them the way forward. Introduce stress in controllable degrees that give them a chance to adapt and grow.
For the student, the number one thing to reduce stress is, yes, breathe. Inhale, exhale. If you can't do anything else, if you're getting thrown and turned and twisted and pinned and tapped without fail, just breathe. One of my personal breakthroughs, as dumb as this sounds, was getting to the point where I actually could recognize in real time what my coach was doing to me as he basically ran a lockflow on me which I was physically and technically in no shape to do anything about. "Toe hold, knee bar, heel hook, Achilles lock, reverse heel hook, SHINLOCK..." Breathe and you'll start to relax. Relax and you can start to learn.
The second thing is goal shifting. Far too many people - and I am definitely guilty of this - spar to win rather than to learn. An embarrassing number of people (not guilty, Your Honor) drill to win. Stop it. Focus on the process, not the result. You don't have to beat the girl you're on the mat with every time. Focus on doing the right things, in the right way, even if the result isn't what you wanted. There's no prize for kicking everyone's ass in the gym, and doing things wrong because it's convenient for the moment doesn't make you better. For me personally, this is one of the things I'm actually better at as an adult than I was as a kid. Much less concerned about looking stupid or getting hurt, much less blindly competitive. Focus on the process, and the results will come. Which leads me to...
3 - Slow
The second most common thing I've told students is "slow down". Do you recognize this? You take a shot. It's a little sloppy, the timing's a little off, and you get stuffed. So you work your way out and take another shot. Still sloppy, still a little off on the timing, but it's faster. The problem last time was obviously you were too slow, right? And what happened? You got stuffed again, didn't you?
You're not alone. You see it with everything. Armbar didn't work. Do it faster. Punch or kick didn't land. Do it faster. Head movement was off. Faster.
Do it right first and do it fast after.
Simply put, if your answer to everything that goes wrong is "do it faster" you end up practicing the moves wrong a lot and getting good at doing them wrong. Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Do it right. Once your mechanics are sound, you can get faster and you can make your timing better. It is a million times easier to do it that way than to train yourself to do it wrong and try to break bad habits later.
4 - Variation
Wait, didn't we say up in #1 that we should focus? Yes, but. Minor variations make your brain think about what you're doing, and approach the same skill from different angles. In wrestling, this can be literal. You can hit a double wristlock from this position, but what about that one? How many grips can I land this one throw from? Can I hit it on a taller opponent? A shorter one? Heavier? Stronger? How do all of these variables affect my setup and my execution. Going through a variety of training partners, each of whom will have their own counters to what you're doing, will give you different perspectives on your technique, too.
5 - Awareness and Attention
Or, as the guru says, be here now. It's not just listening and watching closely to instructions, but as Pyrka wrote, paying attention to how your body feels when you get the movement just right. If you've grappled for any length of time, you know that when you hit a move perfectly, it feels like nothing. You take an opponent from where they are and put them where you want them with no effort and no resistance. The hard part is reproducing that feeling, remembering exactly where every limb was at just the right moment and doing it again. Even harder is noticing the movements you're doing wrong and correcting them without (see #2 again) dwelling on the mistake and bringing yourself out of the moment. The answer isn't easy, but it is simple - be here now. Do what you're doing. And (again, back to #2) focus on the process, not the result.
(Incidentally, this is another thing Pavel recommends for strength training. Pay attention to what your individual muscles are doing, how they're tensing, and you can control it. In controlling it, you get better at it, and strength is essentially just the control of tension.)
This is obviously not all there is to neuroplasticity or to applying it to your training, but it will give you a good start and maybe help you get past a plateau. If you do get the chance to incorporate these principles into your teaching or training, I'd love to hear how it goes. Hit me up in the comments, or on twitter (@FALLWrestling) or email.
If you're interested in applying some of these principles to strength training, I strongly recommend Pavel Tsatsouline's Power to the People. Get stronger, faster and easier. (If you're like me and prefer print, try this link.)
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