Pro-Sports

And we’re back…

After two weeks down under, I’m glad to report back that I did managed to work out and not just stuff my face silly with all the food I’ve missed eating in Australia.  Thanks to my Dad, who bought himself a Nintendo Wii Fit, I didn’t end up using the Yoga DVDs I brought back with me (except for one time).  My Dad’s also got a rowing machine that I only got around to using once.  I spent the rest of my time using his Wii Fit, which I have to admit is one of the most fun ways to work out!

I first read about it on Cool Mom Guide when she talked about how she lost 60 pounds by using the Wii Fit.  When my Dad told me he had bought the Wii Fit, I couldn’t wait to give it a go.  Needless to say, it was addictive.  One hour of working out goes by so quickly, I reckon I could have spent a couple of hours everyday on it if I didn’t have other things to do.

The real fun is competing against other members of the family and trying to outdo their high scores.  Even hubby (who hates to exercise) got into the swing of things on the Wii Fit!  Even if you don’t have anyone to compete against, you can challenge yourself by trying to better your score.

You can track your progress on a daily basis, measuring your weight and calculating your BMI.  You can also create a Mii character and customise him or her to look like yourself.

You can also do a body test each day to check your Wii Fit Age to see if you are older or younger compared to your real age.  When you’re done with the body test, you can go for training in four areas: yoga, muscle, aerobic or balance.

Each time you do a particular work out, you add time to your “Fit Piggy” (which is a concept similar to putting in coins to save money in a piggy bank).  Once you collect a set amount of time in the Fit Piggy, you can unlock a new exercise or level that was previously unavailable to you.

I’ll write more about the different exercises in my next post so stay tuned.

Popularity: 6% [?]

When you want to reach new levels in sport, training hard is important but I’m sure you’ve heard about burnout.  Sometimes taking some time out away from training can be just the thing to help you break the barrier into the next level.  You can find yourself improving in leaps and bounds upon returning to your sport after a short leave of absence.

There are times when being away can be a curse, however.  That is when you’ve taken too long a break from your sport.  This was what my SIL2 discovered when she started doing Yoga again yesterday after stopping for a couple of years (she went to the States to complete her degree).  The body couldn’t perform as well as what the mind remembers being able to do and she was naturally frustrated. 

Well, I can identify with that.  A few years back, I took a break from climbing and when I started climbing again, it was intensely frustrating to find I couldn’t climb like I used to.  It was a strange sensation because I would look at a route and assess it assuming my ability was still as it was before the break.  When I couldn’t grip a hold or make a move like I remembered being able to do, there was at first surprise - the kind where you do a double take and wonder if someone is playing a trick on you.  When you discover it was no mistake, frustration sets in.

While it is naturally to lose some level of competency, the up side is that it will take you a lot less time to build it back up compared to the first time you learned the skill.  That is because your body already remembers how things work.  It’s just your muscles that have weakened.  To put it another way - it’s like riding a bike.  You never really forget how.  Even though you might be a little wobbly getting back onto the bike after years of not riding, you still know how to ride and that means you’ll pick up your ability a lot faster the second time around.

In fact, once you regain your strength, you’ll find yourself improving again and even breaking your glass ceiling.

Popularity: 17% [?]

The power of visualisation lies in the fact that the mind cannot differentiate a real memory from visual images that are made up.  If you create enough visual images and store them as memories, you can fool your mind into believing that these are past memories, rather than created images.

If you still don’t get me, don’t worry, let me give you an example.  I know I have a tendency to talk in circles sometimes.  In the book called, “The Mind Gym”, the author writes about a golfer who was stuck in a POW camp for many years.  The only way he could survive the experience was to imagine himself playing golf.  He would visualise the golf course right down to the breeze that blew through his hair.  When he finally escaped from the POW camp, he played golf again only to discover that his handicap had improved despite the fact that he had not touched a golf club in years!  His improvement was due to many years of playing golf in his mind.

When I was projecting “Pear” and “Chess“, I used to visualise myself working the crux several times before I attempted it.  In fact, during the week before I nailed “Pear”, I was visualising the crux sequence even while I was at work!  So in my mind, instead of having climbed “Pear” the number of times I had done it physically, I had actually climbed the crux as many times as I had done it physically plus the number of times I completed it in my mind. 

If you had been there when I was projecting “Pear”, then you’d realise that I had actually climbed “Pear” a lot of times.  In fact, I climbed it so many times in such a short span of time that I injured my right ring finger so that was another reason why visualisation really helped.  Even if my fingers were injured, I could still climb in my head.

Another benefit of visualisation is that it reinforces to your mind and body that something is possible.  Just like when you watch another person climbing a particularly difficult route, visualisation is like watching yourself climbing that difficult route. 

In a nutshell, visualisation helps you:

• practice climbing a route in your head when you don’t have the time to do it
• practice climbing a route in your head even though a part of your body has been injured
• reinforce your ability to climb a particular route

Popularity: 21% [?]

Based on the concepts from The Expert Mind and the other articles I read about in my pursuit to raise a smart kid, there are several things you can do to help prepare your child for excellence in golf (or any other sport for that matter, but since I’m doing this with Gavin, we’re going to look at golf) even before he is old enough to pick up a golf club.  Here are 5 ways you can prepare your child to become a pro-golfer:

1. Let your child watch golf on TV so he can observe how the game is played.
2. Bring him to the driving range so he can get familiar with the setting and watch other golfers in action up close and personal.
3. Get him the equipment - not necessarily the real stuff, a toy set can be just as effective for the time being - so he can “play pretend”.  This is the first step towards eventually teaching him how to visualise.
4. Bring him to golf shops to see the real equipment.
5. Start looking around for golf schools that he can go to when he’s older (I’ve seen a few around for children).

It is never too young to start and many of these things can be done once your child begins to walk.  Remember, Tiger Woods was only two years old when he started playing golf.

Popularity: 18% [?]

I’ve been researching some information my SIL read about genius and smart kids recently and it reinforces my belief that Gavin can still become a world champion golfer if he so chooses even if the hubby and I do not possess the genetic material for superior sportsmanship. 

The underlying principle is that geniuses are made and not born, and we’re talking about geniuses in any field - science, music, and even sports.  If you want to excel at a sport then there’s no better way to get there than to practice, practice, practice!  Even a person born with “talent” can only get so far on pure talent before they will inevitably be surpassed by other sports people who put in the training time to improve their skills.

My own personal experiences in rock climbing and what I have been able to achieve on a personal level are testimony of this truth.  When I first started rock climbing, I had a friend who climbed better than me in every way.  In order to keep up, I started putting in more climbing hours so that I wouldn’t fall too far behind the rest of the group.  What eventually happened was that I surpassed my friend’s innate climbing talent simply because I trained and she didn’t.

In the field of sports, I never harboured any illusions of being a talented sports person. Instead I had the belief that in order to be good at rock climbing, I had to dedicate the training time to build up my abilities or accept the fact that I would only ever be able to climb 5C routes.  I think this was what allowed me to break through my glass ceiling in climbing.

It was also interesting to hear about an experiment my SIL related to me where the subjects were given electrical impulses to interfere with the function of left brain.  This is basically what I understood of the experiment (although I think you should bear in mind that I’m hearing a second or third hand version of it so some of the essence may have been warped or lost in translation). 

The right brain, which is responsible for creativity, is also believed to be responsible for the creation of genius.  It is the logical left brain which sets the limits to the right brain and keeps it in check, therefore it was speculated that if we could block the function of the left brain, we could artificially encourage right brain activity and increase an individual’s creative potential. 

In the experiment, subjects were asked to draw a picture of a horse, which was, at best, a mediocre drawing.  They were then given the electrical impulse which interfered with left brain function and asked to draw another horse.  The second drawing was a lot more detailed and a vast improvement over the first drawing. 

In a similar real life example, this is partly the reason why some autistic children have displayed tendencies for genius because autism affects left brain function in a similar way to the electrical impulses that were given to the subjects.  In essence, the logical controls of the left brain inhibits us from reaching our full potential because it sets our belief systems.  If we could overcome these limits and actively tap into our right brain, we would have the potential to improve everything we do in life.

An example of what having no limits can achieve can be seen in this story that I read about in Unlimited Power by Anthony Robbins:

A student who had fallen asleep in a Math lecture wakes up and sees two equations on the board.  Assuming they were the set homework for the day, he copies them down and sets to work on them when he gets home.  Because he had been asleep through the lecture, he did not hear the lecturer telling the rest of the class that these two equations had never been solved.  Because he had assumed that these equations were homework, he believed they had to be possible to answer.  As a result, he was able to come up with the answer to one of the equations and surprised his lecturer when he handed in the answer at the next lecture.

When I was in school, there were two reasons why I was never able to excel at sports.  The first was because I came from a family that did not deem sports to be particularly important and never gave it any focus.  Since I never had the practice time, I never did well in it at school.  Since I didn’t do well in it at school, nobody ever wanted me on their team and that fostered my belief that I was terrible at sports and would never ever do well in it.  I had set a limit in my mind that sports and me just didn’t gel.

Prior to entering highschool, my brother developed an intense passion for cricket.  My aunt bought him a cricket bat for Christmas and, not having anyone else to play with, he made me play cricket with him all Summer in our backyard.  I guess the practice must have done some good because cricket was the only sport I did well in during Physical Education.  It was a strange feeling to suddenly become a valued team member as opposed to being the team’s downfall.

So if we can get Gavin interested in golf, we might still have a pro-golfer in the family…  Although at the current rate we’re going, it’s looking more like a pro-footballer rather than a golfer.  Gavin’s mad about soccer balls.  He’s barely learned to walk and already he sort of knows how to dribble the ball with his feet.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Anthony Robbins believes that one of the steps on the road to success is to create your own magnificent obsession.  While on the road to climbing a 7A, I did just that…  I created an obsession out of rock climbing.  If you really want to nail that project route, here are some tips on how you can send it.

You have to walk, talk, eat, breathe, dream climbing in everything that you do.  That means climbing anything and everything possible.  Even the pedestrian crossing:

Any walls that look remotely climbable (read: as long as it has some sort of feature) you should attempt to climb it:

Never mind if it belongs to a Salsa Club - just as long as nobody comes out to chase you away, you’re good.  Don’t worry about the passerbys either.  A little performance pressure won’t hurt you.

Although it’s probably better if it isn’t and I’m sure you can find something at your local park’s obstacle course that you can practice on.

When it rains and you can’t climb, the beams in the shelter you’re taking cover under make an excellent project to practice your campus power. 

Although a more conventional approach would be to practice on some monkey bars at a park:

Or any weird structure hanging out of nowhere.  As long as you can create some rule that everyone has to follow, you’re good to go.

Climb anything that looks interesting, even if passengers on the train yell at you as if you’re crazy and they think you’re going to kill yourself.  Hey, you’re the climber - you know perfectly well what’s safe and what’s not.

Beach boulders are fantastic as long as you don’t fall and maul yourself on the rough edges.

In fact, any boulder you can find is fair game.

When there aren’t enough ropes or belayers to go around, practice climbing trees.  It’s unconventional, but I’m sure you’ll be learning something.

Climb even after dark.  You really have to squeeze every last climbable hour out of your weekend unless you can get a full time job climbing.

Climb even after a hang over from the night before.  That way, you’ll have a good excuse for your mates even if you can’t send an easy route.

Spend all your birthdays at the crag.  Your friends will think up all sorts of crazy schemes to make you climb just to get your present.

Like make you climb barefoot…

Practice balancing - it’s good for your climbing, really!  Poles like the one in the photo below are great.  The first one to fall off is a rotten egg.

If you don’t have those, a canopy walk’s about the next best thing you can try.

Or one of these lacky band thingos:

Practice your pinch power on a set of scales.

Practice dyno-ing across a chasm - using a rope of course! We’re crazy, yes, but not suicidal!

Travel all day by train,

van,

and boat to get to the climbing mecca in Asia - Krabi. 

Spend Christmas, New Year and every public holiday climbing.  Climb until you miss all your dinner dates, when nobody but your climbing buddies will ever want to plan dinner with you ever again.

And that’s how you get good enough to climb a 7A…

Popularity: 33% [?]

If you want to get good at anything, you’ve got to put in the hours.  Well, the same goes with climbing.  It’s also a good idea to set up a training schedule that you can stick to.  If you’re anything like me, you’ll discover that even a missed week of climbing can do some serious damage to your climbing ability, so it pays to hit the rock s as often as you possibly can.

At the peak of my climbing, I was climbing four days a week - two evenings indoor at the gym and two full days outdoors (Saturday and Sunday).  Here’s an example of one of my climbing schedules:

Tuesday evening - traversing warm-up, climb twenty routes in blocks of five (i.e. climb none-stop five routes in one go), boulder if time permits.

Thursday evening - traversing warm-up, climb a few routes, work on project route, boulder if time permits.

Saturday - climb whatever I wanted as long as I completed 8 long routes (at least 20-30m long) before leaving the crag.  This included working on my project route and climbing regular routes for the fun of it.

Sunday - work on leading and project route.

Follow your training schedule and adjust it as necessary to address your weaknesses.  For instance, if you detect a weakness in your footwork, include some training time to tackle that problem.

Popularity: 30% [?]

There are several ways to go about this but I’ll share with you the two methods I used to get stronger.  I’ve heard of people talking about campus boards, hanging on their fingers for as long as they can and whatnot, but puh-lease!  If you can’t even do a chin-up, you can forget about these methods.  So I say, forget about these methods (at least until you can at least campus - where you can climb using your hands only, no feet - with jugs) and try something that really works. 

What can you do for strength training to improve your climbing if you aren’t that strong to begin with?

1. Climb overhangs (you don’t have to go for anything extreme, even a mildly overhanging incline will do)

2. Boulder

If you do any amount of climbing on a regular basis, you are bound to get stronger whether you want to or not.  However, if you specifically want to get stronger, you should consider tackling an overhanging route as a project on a regular basis.  My most notable strength increases came about after the Rockrats started climbing at a place called “Comic Wall“.  We spent a good few months climbing there every weekend and by the time I walked out of that place, I could climb everything 6B and below (except for one 6B which I seriously think is sandbagged).

Anyway, this shot gives you a good impression of the overhang. 

When I first started climbing, I hated bouldering.  I avoided it like the plague because I was extremely weak at it.  That and the fact that I couldn’t climb without a rope because I was afraid of falling.  Even when I got better, I could never tackle bouldering routes that went up too high on the wall because I didn’t trust myself to fall onto the mats below. 

I also found bouldering rather tedious because I wasn’t strong enough to complete the problems given to me.  At least when I climbed, I had the benefit of feeling some sort of success from reaching the anchor.  I wasn’t quite sure what mental benefit was derived from bouldering.  And since I wasn’t all that strong, most of my boulder problems involved large holds, like jugs.  If you climb a lot, you’ll realise that using juggy holds too often is a great way to develop callouses, but in the interim, you’ll have to endure the pain that comes with it.

Anyway, there was an additional benefit from working the overhanging routes first.  By the time we were done climbing at Comic Wall, I could finally boulder with some degree of success.  Being able to boulder was encouraging and it made me feel more inclined to boulder again and that helped me to further develop my upper body strength.

Next Tip - the importance of a training regimen

Popularity: 29% [?]

Got a project route?  If not, go look for one now.  What’s a project route?  It is basically a route you are trying to red-point.  It is usually a grade or two above the grade you are comfortably climbing.  For instance, if you are comfortably climbing grade 6A, you should work on a challenging 6B or 6C route.  The route should be sufficiently challenging but not physically out of your reach.  That is, you want something with a crux that you can’t complete, although you know that with a bit of work you could eventually nail it.  A route that you can get to the anchor, albeit you have to hangdog, is not a suitable project route - it is too easy.

What does a project route do for you?  It helps you to refine your climbing skills and work on an area that you are weak at.  In a weightloss program, it would be like focussing on a particular area of your body, like your abs, or your thighs.  With your project route, it may be a particular crimp, or sloper, or pinch that you just can’t hold, or it could be a short series of moves that is beyond your current physical ability.  Given enough time, you should be able to work through it and red-point the route. 

If you have been working on it solidly for a couple of weeks and you clearly aren’t making any progress, drop the project and look for another.  It may be that the route you have chosen is way too difficult for your current climbing abilities.  You can always return to this project again at a later date after you have clocked up more climbing hours. 

The great thing about a project route like this is that it helps you “see” your improvements.  When you are climbing every week, sometimes it can feel as if you aren’t making any progress at all.  It may feel that your climbing has hit status quo and you don’t seem to be able to improve no matter what you do.  Fear not, it is just temporary.  Many climbers I have spoken to have experienced this at some point where they have been training but nothing they do seems to make them climb any better.  They hit a plateau phase that seems to last forever until one day, they suddenly make a leap and start climbing beyond their perceived abilities. 

When you feel that this has happened to you, go back to that project route you had to put on the shelf and try it again.  You will be surprised how much easier it suddenly seems.  It was quite similar for me when I first attempted two 7A routes - “Pear” and “Stupid With Manners”.  When I went back after several months of additional climbing under my belt, it was suddenly possible for me to work both cruxes.  Likewise, with “Chess”, the first time I ever climbed it was on top-rope.  I remember thinking how impossible the route was and I honestly never thought I would ever be able to complete the crux, but I eventually red-pointed it, too.

Project routes like these can bring an enormous satisfaction when you are finally able to climb them.  Never rule out anything as impossible.  Just give it a go and see how you go, but know when to quit and call it a day.

Below: The only picture I have of me on Stupid with Manners and it had to be on top-rope…

Popularity: 26% [?]

The rock climbing purists would probably shoot me down for writing this but I do believe that this really helps you to get better at climbing…

Every now and then, push your limits and try climbing some more challenging routes on top-rope, even if they appear to be physically out of your ability.  I used to have an understanding with my climbing partner that with any new route I was working on, I had only three attempts to work out the crux on my own.  If, by the third time, I was not making any headway or progress, my belayer would “help” me up by giving me a tight rope.  As for how much tight rope I would get, well, it really depended on how much I was struggling to get up the route.  I have had instances where I made it to the top of the route through a combination of my own effort and the belayer’s effort. 

Now you may wonder what is the point of struggling up a route when it is clearly beyond your ability…  The thing is, when you put your body through the motions (even if it is not completely on your own merit), it helps your body to learn the moves.  The next time you try to climb the route, you may surprise yourself to discover that you struggle less (require less tight rope or even none) when trying to finish the route. 

I noticed this when my friend egged me on to try a particularly nasty route in the gym with brown coloured holds.  Knowing how tough it was, I was rather reluctant to give it a go.  I only attempted to climb it because my friend wouldn’t leave me alone until I tried it.  Needless to say, I struggled.  Huffed and puffed and got blown over by the route, I gratefully accepted whatever help my friend/belayer was giving me.  After a painful struggle, I made it to the top and vowed that I would never be so stupid as to try this route again.  A couple of weeks later (or perhaps it was a month later), I tried the route again.  To my surprise, I managed to get through it without cheating nearly as much as the first time.  The third time I worked on the route, I managed to complete it on my own merit (although I had to hangdog a couple of times).  The fourth time, I sent it.  And this was a route I had already labelled in my mind as “too difficult” for me.

Please note that you should only do this in the climbing gym.  Don’t try this when climbing outdoors because your struggles can destroy the rock surface (especially if you’re climbing limestone) which can be very annoying to the climbers who are physically capable of climbing the route.  If you do try this outdoors, don’t say I didn’t warn you and don’t mention my name either.  I don’t want anyone kicking my behind for even suggesting this.  The climbing purists will probably come here and flame me. 

Another thing you can do, which helps you psychologically, is touch the next hold.  Even if you need help to get there, just make sure you don’t get lowered before you’ve touched the next hold.

Popularity: 25% [?]