time

As I shared in a recent post, over the summer I read Malcolm Galdwell’s tremendous book “Outliers.” Many of us are familiar with Galdwell’s now famous “10,000 Hour Rule.” Essentially, it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice before a person can become an “expert” in a particular field. Gladwell argues that people aren’t born geniuses, masters, or experts, but instead they get there through tremendous time and effort. One example proffered by Gladwell of the 10,000 Hour Rule is Bill Gates, the iconic founder of Microsoft, who was able to begin coding as a teen due to a fortunate opportunity through his progressive Seattle high school. By the time Gates was a freshman in college, he had reached approximately 10,000 of coding time. A second example in Outliers, were the Beatles. The famous band played long—8 hours at a time—gigs in German clubs before their American invasion, which allowed them to achieve the 10,000 hour threshold on stage performing at a much quicker pace than other bands. Continue reading →

All athletes, regardless of their sport, ultimately seek to become a more athletic version of their current self. They want to be able to run faster, jump higher, throw it harder, and hit it further. One of the most important factors that will help athletes achieve this is to become more efficient with their movements. Efficiency is critical because in order to become a superior athlete, there can’t be any wasted movements. Every single movement that an athlete makes during any activity should be contributing directly to helping that athlete achieve the intended goal of the movement. Efficiency in an athlete’s mechanics has two great nemeses—time and tension. These two factors, if allowed to creep into an athlete’s movements, will prevent an athlete from being as mechanically sound as he could be, and will result in decreased performance levels. Let me address time and tension separately. Continue reading →