So you played / participated in an event on the weekend and it didn’t go well. Come Monday you decide you’re going to practice all the things you did poorly and ignore what you did well.
Sound familiar? Well it is and it’s a very bad idea for two main reasons. First, by practising what you’re not doing well you’re actually reminding yourself over and over again that you suck. Imagine if after school you got a select group of kids and made them only do extra maths practice. They would think it must be because their maths skills are poor.
Secondly, by practising what you did poorly on the weekend you are risking swapping your strengths for your weaknesses. One of our aims as sport psychologists is to remove strengths and weaknesses from the picture. How do we do this? You spend your time getting better at the elements of your sport / performance area as they relate to their importance. For example, only about 5% of tennis shots are lob shots so regardless of how good or bad you are at playing the lob you’ll want to spend 5% of your practice time on this shot.
Exact ratios for each sport are rare (golf expected) so please feel free to email us your thoughts for your sport or add a comment below. Cheers, GJM
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Sadly, that scenario sounds very familiar!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip