Your Muscles May Be Working Against You

It’s called ‘muscle memory‘ and it may be working against you… Yes, your own body sabotaging your success. Every time you do something repetitively, it builds within your body’s ‘muscle memory’ so that the next time you make the request for that movement, it’s instant and automatic.

But here’s where the problem lies…

What if that movement is WRONG or NOT the one you want in a particular situation?

Excuse the expression, but you’re screwed, stuffed…

Why? Because the brain can’t process what you WANT from what you’ve been DOING, so it opts for what you’ve been doing.

I’ll give you a squash example. 90% of the time when you cross court the ball, you want to hit it deep so that the first bounce hits the nick behind the service box (the joint between the wall and the floor)… But there’s another 10% of the time when you want the ball to bounce before the midcourt court T line and bounce again right away.

It’s a very difficult shot to make BECAUSE you have to OVERCOME your muscle memory to hit it deep…

So what’s a Champion to do?

Re-train your MIND and BODY to COMMAND that shot by PRACTICING it over and over and over and over and building the muscle memory so that your brain has BOTH options ready to act ON COMMAND.

Otherwise you’ll find yourself THINKING one shot and MAKING another.

I know the feeling – it’s the most frustrating thing in the world…

YOU KNOW the shot you wanted to make, but your body lets you down.

A Champion understands this and MAKES the investment to keep TRYING the shot until it becomes another weapon that can be called on in his/her arsenal.

The way to TEST this is NOT to make up your mind until the last split second and then try the short option and see if your body can respond instinctively, if not, you need to DECIDE before getting to the ball to MAKE that SPECIFIC shot UNTIL it becomes instinctive and automatic.

If you don’t do this, you’ll continue to get frustrated and expecting something that will ‘never’ happen automatically.

What to take a short cut?

EVERY TIME you can make that shot, MAKE it. Even if it is obvious and your opponent can ‘read it in advance’… Eventually you’ll get to the point where you can add delay and deception, but FIRST you have to be able to MAKE the shot, THEN you can start to disguise it!

Of course PRACTICING with DRILLS is the fastest path to making this transformation… But then again you know that by now – it’s called deliberate practice.