Video transcript:
If you’re someone who puts hours upon hours of training in and you still find it difficult to trust your abilities come game day, and it just doesn’t seem to be translating into the game, the answer probably is not more training, but it very likely could be making the training that you do more intentional and more game like.
A lot of you put a ton of reps and a ton of work into making sure that your mechanics are as efficient and as fast and as powerful as possible and so you take bp and you do back speed drills. You know every pitch is the same speed, every pitch is a strike or if you’re a pitcher, you know, you throw your pens probably mostly out of the wind up. You make sure you’re hitting your spots to make sure you’re moving well and you call it good. And it’s great to work on these things. We absolutely should be making sure that we’re moving well.
But the problem is, is that we assume that this alone is going to translate into consistent performance in a competitive environment which is a completely different environment. The training environment is typically very controlled and very safe. There’s not a lot of stakes, there’s not really any pressure.
The competitive environment is pretty much the exact opposite. It’s filled with pressure. It’s filled with stakes. There’s another team that’s trying to make sure you lose. You got your team counting on you. You got people watching. Compared to the training environment it can feel very uncontrolled and very unsafe and the initial thought might be, “I just gotta pretend like I’m at training” or “I just gotta pretend like I’m at practice.” The problem is, is that that ignores the heart of the issue and it can cause a lot of frustration and confusion when you find out pretending doesn’t work.
What would be far more helpful would be to make our training as game-like as possible. So trying to include as many environmental factors from competition as we can into our training. The nerves, the competition, the consequences, the stakes, the pressure.
A fantastic example of a professional athlete that does this is Steph Curry. There is not a shot in a game that he will take that he hasn’t already practiced and he is practicing off balance jumpers, he’s got his trainer providing leverage, closing out on him, he’s getting his fatigued as possible before he does drills, he’s got a certain number of shots that he has to make before he can move on, if he misses he’s got to start over. His trainer Brandon Payne said, “If we just let him stand there and catch and shoot all day, the level of difficulty just isn’t going to be high enough to get anything out of it.”
The lesson here is that competing is a skill, and it’s not a skill that we can just show up and expect to have on game day if we don’t practice it. I’ve said it before, in order to become truly confident, we have to become truly competent. We have to be really good at what we do. We have to be really good decision makers. We have to be really good at handling pressure. We have to be really good at regulating emotions. We have to be really really good at handling those stakes that come with competition.
We become really really good at those things when we practice them. When we become truly competent, we become truly confident.