BTG 85 - Too Much or Too Little

Hello and welcome to another episode of Breaking the Guard. I'm David Avalon and once again, this is a pre-taped podcast as I am currently in Iceland. This is my second week there last week and I'll be back uh to doing more topical episodes. On this one, I wanted to talk about too much or too little uh dealing with moderation in martial arts. So, when we first start off on our journey into the martial arts, chances are we're going to be on the too much side of the equation where you have lots of motivation and enthusiasm because you've just discovered something new in your life and you're trying to do as much as you can as quickly as possible. It's the very natural thing that most people do which is they try to totally immerse themselves into this new found hobby. One of two things usually happens. One, if your appetite is sufficiently large enough, you might keep that enthusiasm and it just rolls on indefinitely. That's far and few between. Most people end up on the other side which is they start to burn out a little bit and they start lowering their amount of volume. Uh sometimes to the point of quitting um other times to a more balanced schedule where they can maintain progress while having enough time to recover. I say this because sometimes less is more. If I just try to do as much as possible constantly, you will wear out whether from fatigue physically or from mental fatigue where you're just grinding too much and now like you're not making really any any real progress. Recovery is not just a physical concept. It's also a mental concept, right? Uh, I have found personally I've done so many all-nighters grow going through college because I was taking 15 credits while I was training, while I was coaching and running a business with my brother at like 18 and 19 years old. So, I was fumbling through uh quite a few uh roles in life and I had to be very efficient with my use of time particularly for studying for college. And I've always noticed that for me personally two to three hours of focused attention gave the best results towards study and once we got past about 4 hours it was diminishing returns very difficult to make any progress. Uh normally I would coordinate breaks around like two three hour marks to have eat or have a snack or even just take a short nap so that then when I get 30 minutes or an hour of rest I can restart and I I have a new engine to run with. All right. Uh in life everything follows a similar pattern. If you put too much of your time into something by the word too much is already implying that it's not being used efficiently and it might be wasteful or detrimental. Uh so when we're talking about martial arts, especially if you're older, there's a lot of physical limitations that get introduced just because your body is no longer able to recover as quick from workouts. I find myself, and I've talked about this before, where I will refrain uh from doing sparring every time I train, which is sometimes difficult because sparring is a fun part, right? Like normally that's the part we're looking forward to. We get to challenge ourselves and we get to see all the drills and strategies that we've been working on come into fruition and see if they work. But it's also the area where you're most likely to get hurt. And when you start getting fatigued or you have injuries or you have soreness, the sparring is going to exploit those and they could be a resulting injury. So I find that you have to focus on doing uh less, right? Uh, and if you're wise with your use of training and you just don't train just to train, just to say like, "Oh, I I trained, you know, 5 hours today." But what what did you do in those five hours? Were they practically used or wastefully used? Meaning that you just had time to kill, so you just poured it all into this thing without really planning it out? Or were these carefully curated training sessions that were focusing on particular areas of your game? Did you do them all at once or did you schedule maybe a morning session then an afternoon session and then an evening session with appropriate rest in between? Right? This is what I mean about sometimes less is more and just because you have a lot of free time doesn't mean you should blow it all into training without thinking about it. Right? You have to be strategic with your use of time. Again, you don't you never get it back. So, you want to be wise with how you use it. Now, that's a bit on the too much side. Of course, there is the too little side and uh the extreme obviously is doing nothing which would be horrible in my opinion, right? We should be doing something. Now, if you find that you are never fatigued, that you always feel fresh, uh maybe you're not mentally uh being uh stressed or challenged in in training. Maybe you're not making any progress, right? You're not developing in any way. These are all signs that you're probably on the too little side of things, right? Uh I mean, if you're making lots of progress, doing really well, whether it's like uh you're learning new techniques and getting more refined or you're getting stronger and better stamina and you feel fresh as a daisy, then God bless you, right? Like you're doing good, right? But if you are not making any progress, but you're not feeling any of the signs of overtraining, then chances are you're probably undertraining and then you can probably step it up a bit more. All right? So, that's kind of a good indicator. If [snorts] again, there's no reason to be a massochist. I said if you're making lots of progress and you feel good and mentally you're in a good place and physically you're in a good place, then you're you're obviously doing something well, right? Uh maybe you want to progress a little faster. Okay, then maybe we find some more ways to implement uh training, but otherwise that's a good place to be. If you're injuryfree and you're you're rested and you feel fresh every day, that's great. Uh, but if you're not making progress and you feel very fresh and you know all that, then I would say you're probably not getting enough time in, right? You're probably not investing enough time into it to gain a result and that's why you feel fresh. It'll be like somebody that says, "Uh oh, you know, I only do like 10 minutes of homework a day, but they they score straight Fs." It's like, well, [laughter] that's clearly not working right. Uh, now if it was somebody that was only putting 10 minutes a day, but they got straight A's and you quiz them and they know everything, so you know they're not cheating or anything and okay, they're just gifted and they picked up things great. Good. Right? So, uh, that's how I feel you could judge too little training, right? If you're on the too little side, again, that would imply no progress is being made. And at the same time, you're not feeling any signs of stress from uh overtraining physically or mentally, right? You're not you don't have a lot on your plate, basically. Uh, and that would be a good time to start putting more on your plate where if you're on the too much side, you're physically or mentally stressed and you're also not making progress, right? That would tell you like or you're maybe you're going backwards, right? You're starting to get hurt more. You're you're getting injured, right? Or you're on a plateau. That might be well then you're you're trying too hard. You're doing too much. you let's step it back a little bit and perhaps refocus our efforts on figuring out what's going on, right? Like how come we're not making progress? If we're putting so much time on the mats, obviously then we're not using the time judiciously, right? We have to figure out a better use of our time. And this might be a good point to ask a coach or a mentor or you can even ask me online, right? like what could I be doing better because I feel like I'm kind of stuck right now or I'm getting hurt more often or I just can't focus. Right? If you're in a place where you're making lots of progress and you feel good both mentally and physically, then you're probably on the sweet spot and you you don't really have to change much there. You can stay at that point. I will say that normally in life, at least in my experience, you're never going to be in the same spot forever, right? Like it's always moving around, right? [laughter] Uh I've detailed this a bunch of times where uh a training volume that I was able to keep a few years ago now is not sustainable for me anymore. Right? Uh so I've talked about this. Older you get generally the less volume you're going to be able to handle. uh all things being equal. So, you have to adjust accordingly, right? And let's say you're a young 20-year-old guy, uh you don't have any of those issues. Still, if you're in a sweet spot right now, chances are after a few months, that's not going to be your sweet spot anymore. And it's going to shift because basically the challenge that you had at that point that you were making good progress with at a certain point you're going to hit that diminishing returns again and you're going to have to find a new center, right? Uh it's just like running. If you are thinking about running a three mile run and you're timing yourself, maybe the first time you do it, you're you're not a great runner. you hit like a 30 minute uh three minute mile. If you keep running on a regular basis, you're gonna see more than likely your time start to drop, right? Where now it's going to be, you know, a 29m minute mile, a 28 and a half, 28, and maybe you get all the way down to the teens where you're starting to become a really prolific runner. That challenge of you doing a 30-minute mile if you're running 60-minute miles is almost nothing. That's like almost walking to you at that point. All right. So, your original balance of 30 minute mile is no longer your sweet spot anymore. before when you did a 30-minute mile, you know, it it took like all your mental focus and it was physically tiring and you would have to rest properly the next day to be able to try to repeat that. But after repeated exposures now, that's now that's an easy thing for you, right? For you to get a challenge, you have to really push yourself to 16 minute miles and maybe now 15 minute miles. Uh I mean 15 minute three miles, right? So that's what I mean. like you're you're not going to stay in the same spot. And if you're training well, you shouldn't be. You should always be having to adjust right now. The more experienced you get, the less adjustments you'll be making, right? Uh again, we use weightlifting as a analogy here. Once you're like a been lifting seriously for like 5 10 years, you're kind of already at that top point of your physique more than likely as far as like how much muscle you could you can stack onto yourself and you've probably developed a lot of technique uh along the way. So you have diminishing returns at that point like you're making incremental gains, right? Uh, so you're not going to be shifting as much as you were like for example the first time you lifted where in the first month you might have gone from just benching 135 to benching 205, right? And you make these huge jumps uh early in. It's the same thing that's going to be for your martial arts experience. In the beginning, you might be making these big jumps in progression and as well as your conditioning and the the training. But once you're in there for two to three, four, five, six, seven years, that starts to diminish a little bit, right? Where now you've kind of learned quite a bit and you've also developed tolerance for physical training and you also had the resilience mentally to be able to endure the stress of combat. So now you don't have as many shifts. Those shifts that you generally are seeing are going to be very incremental towards learning and physical progression and more so from an aging standpoint as your physicality starts to get stripped a little bit from you because your recovery is going to change the demands of what you'll be able to h handle volumewise. So we don't want to be in a too much category. We definitely don't want to be too little. We have to be in it just right. And like I said, the best way to measure this is with your progression. How are you progressing? And this might be from a physical standpoint. Are you getting stronger? Are you getting faster? Are you gaining weight? Are you losing weight? Are you getting leaner? Um how's your your speed uh progressing? Right? These are all objective traits. These are all measurable. And if you have the means to do so, which most people do now, you should be measuring them. You can obviously measure strength in the weight room simply by journaling your lifts and seeing how much you lift now, how many times can you lift something, how quickly can you lift something. If you guys seen me when I post on Instagram when I'm lifting, I have a tether attached to my barbell, which measures the the velocity of the bar and also the force and other things. So, I can tell uh even when I'm lifting the same weight if I'm lifting it more powerfully, right, which is something I'm concerned with. uh so these physical traits that are easily be measurable should be measurable so that we then can objectively say oh you know I am getting stronger or I am getting faster or I have more endurance right um because I'm measuring versus just guessing again we go back to the running analogy that would be like you want to run a faster mile time but you just run without measuring the distance or the time you're just guessing right that's a terrible place to be Right? You don't have any real data to work with. You should obviously have a mile measured and then you should have a clock so you can understand if you're running faster or slower and be able to break down the data that way. When we think uh physical, we also have to think recovery. How am I feeling? Are my joints uh achy and pop popping around all the place or they they they gliding well? Do I feel like I have enough sleep and do I get enough rest? Do I feel fresh coming to every training session or do I feel like I've been in a dryer with a bunch of wretches and just getting smashed right? Uh these are also important because if you feel beat up every time you show up to training, chances are you're not performing at your best. Right now, it's natural. Every so often you're going to feel sore. But if you feel beat up every time you go to train, that's not a good thing either. That's obviously telling us we're not getting enough recovery in and we should be figuring out how to get that, right? These are a little bit more subjective as far as we can't I mean we do have some devices like the Fitbits and the other you know biometric devices that calculate a recovery score for you. I don't really understand like what they're scoring there as far as is it just a resting heart rate versus the heart rate variability and what does that how does that translate to physical performance? I'm not too clear in that. So I feel that's a little bit more subjective, but it's definitely something easy to feel, right? So on a human level for yourself, you definitely know the difference when you wake up and you're like, I feel good, you know, versus when you wake up and you feel like, oh man, you know, you feel pretty rough. So this is something that you should be following as well. You guys know I journal every day. So that's something I will write in there as well. I I talk about how I feel, any health issues I'm going through or energy or just general status and that way I can look back and say okay uh it makes sense what's happening right now. Uh so talk about physical uh attributes of progress as well as recovery. When we think mental uh we we obviously have to think about how our uh progression of technique is going, our understanding of the martial arts game. Are we continuing to learn? Do is our technique cleaning up better? Right? Again, some of this could be a little subjective, but you can make it more objective by just analyzing performance. Right? So if you train with somebody, how many techniques were you able to successfully execute? Which ones did you hit? How many times were you able to do it versus how many times did you fail to do it? Right? You can figure this out, right? Not the easiest thing to do, but it is possible. If you set a camera off to the side and film yourself when you're sparring, you're going to get to be able to tabulate results. You can look back, watch it, and see, okay, how many points did they score? How many takedowns did they score? or how many times did Maggar get passed, etc. Right? And if you keep enough of this data tracked, you'll then be able to understand by like real world performance if you're performing better or worse, right? So, uh that's one way of figuring things out. Also, another is just to film yourself practicing a drilling technique to see how smooth the technique is being executed. Sometimes we think we're doing something well or we think we're doing something poor, but when we see it from a third person view, we have a different uh appeal to it. And especially if you're starting off, maybe showing that video to somebody who's higher up, maybe your coach or your instructor or a higher ranked [snorts] friend, so that they can analyze it for you as well. because we obviously want to be growing with our proficiency in technique and our uh knowledge of all the different techniques as well as a strategy right so I feel that's also an important thing to measure progress with and just from a emotional or spiritual point of view just analyzing your mindset how confident are you uh what's your level of happiness or satisfaction with your current uh state in in the martial arts. Is it growing or is it shrinking or is it staying at the same place? This is also important because this is going to be basically your feeling about you and your place in the martial arts. Cuz maybe you're a brown belt and you've uh trained for like 12 years, you're doing really well, but you don't think you're that good, right? You don't like when you talk to yourself, you write yourself off, right? You're not very confident. That's not a good thing, right? I think everybody should be very confident. My wife always tells me that I'm overconfident to the point of being delusional and uh I wouldn't have it any other way, right? I I think every person should be very confident in their abilities and for good reason, right? Obviously, if you're very confident but you don't train, then you're unfounded, right? But if you put a lot of time and preparation into uh your deeds and your activities, you should be confident in them. If you're not, then that should be telling you something like what's wrong? Why aren't you confident in what you're doing? If you believe in the things that you're doing, you should be confident in them. So somebody who's unconfident, there's definitely something in congruent like you're doing stuff you don't think works, right? um or you know and that might be because you don't believe you understand how to do it or maybe you have less confidence in the person teaching you right or the path that they're taking you there which is also a big problem right uh I think we were talking about last week about the importance of having uh faith in the coach right and believing in the path that they have laid out for you and the plan because if you don't then you're not going to be confident and then you're not going to want to execute that Right? So, it's another thing to consider as well. Right? So, I've talked about quite a bit here, probably on the too much side of things, but I didn't want to leave you with too little. All right? So, uh hopefully this helps give you an idea of what I mean about uh too much or too little in training and you know, as far as preparation in the martial arts. If you guys got some value from that or you have any questions, go ahead and ask me. I'll do my best to answer. Thanks.