"Athletes Improve Faster-Train Consciously"

By Bo Hanson - 4x Olympian, Coaching Consultant & Director of Athlete Assessments

This article is specifically for athletes.  Making the most of your training session is simple.  You simply must never be on autopilot when training.  A great mentor of mine once said, "If you want to learn quickly - slow down."  What he was referring to is what I call, conscious training.  In this article, I show you how to do this so you can get on top of your technical changes faster than ever before.

Do you know the feeling I am referring to when I talk about being on autopilot?  Perhaps you have driven to training in your car and could not even remember the trip?  Perhaps your coach has been talking to you and you couldn't hear anything.  Are you just going through the motions?  These are all symptoms of being on autopilot.  Being on autopilot, for a whole training session means you have not improved.

To ensure you are not on autopilot you simply need to focus on what is going on around you.  Listen, see, feel, taste and smell your environment.  Get in touch with your surrounds and tune in to them.  This is the first part of consciously training.

 Once you have done this, engage your brain!  Think about what you are doing.  The technique you are executing, what this feels like, what results is this creating for you.  Are you going better doing this particular technique?  What if you tried something different?  Do something different and see what happens.  Talk to your coach about what you are doing.  Engage with those around you.

Try to create an exercise to break down your technique into its individual components.  When I was rowing, we would change our grip purely to activate different muscle groups or to isolate movements and exaggerate them.  Making these continual changes ensures we were always thinking.  We would row and with each stroke do something different with our oar or we would stop at different parts of the stroke purely to break our routine movements up and to check our timing within the boat.  The bottom line is, all of these activities and exercises ensured we did not lose concentration.

Most people struggle to concentrate fully for more than 7 minutes.  Work with this and plan some mini breaks in your training.  It may be a short break each ten minutes or, as we would do, have a switch off time every so often.  Then switch back on and consciously complete the training session with high awareness of what you are doing.

I can guarantee, if you do train consciously, then you improve faster than your competitors.  Most athletes operate on a relaxed mode of autopilot, switching on and off in an unconscious manner.  Most athletes do not improve as fast as their coach likes them to.  Be an athlete who controls yourself.  Train with a purpose.  Train with consciousness.  

This article is from the Athlete e-course, available to you free on the right hand margin of any page on our website.  Sign up to benefit from the rest of the series.