Slump

I just read a martial arts book what spends a great deal of time talking about training slumps and plateaus.

What's up with that?

I guess I better explain what a slump or plateau is in the first place. You are training away, week after week, making steady progress. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, nothing seems to be happening. It is as if you are stuck, not improving, or possibly even regressing in ability. Other people continue as before, and in comparison you are losing ground. This is a slump, or a plateau.

Funny thing, I've never had any such feelings, and I've been doing one martial art or another since 1981.

Ever have a “bad day,” where nothing seems to be going right. Really? Nothing? If we were to strap a lousy-ness sensor onto your wrist on such a day, would it really report that every single second was bad, and that none at all were good, or even neutral. I seriously doubt that it would. It might seem that way in retrospect. It might even seem that way at the time due to our having labelled it a “bad day” after the occurrence of a few disappointments or disasters.

If you went to get a cup of coffee, likely the walk was pleasant enough, or at least neutral. You got your coffee as you always do. Normally this is a positive occurrence, but you have decided that this was a “bad day.” You sat; you always like that, and then spilled your coffee in your lap. Nasty, true, but not all of the event was that way.

To me training is never like a “bad day.” It is a mix of exertion, camaraderie, mental learning, and body training. There is normally new material, and some review. If I were to put a progress-meter onto my wrist it would never register a total failure in any session.

I have been to lessons that were aimed at people of much greater level than me, and ended up with a crappy partner, and also picked up a minor injury. It would be easy to think that no progress was made, but it would be untrue. There would be something.

A very clear example happened at the last Seattle seminar that I attended. It was lead by the superlative Rener Gracie, and covered material that I love working on. I ended up stuck, however, with the world's most useless partner.

We would be shown a movement or sequence extremely clearly, and given specific details to work on, and how to work on things. My partner, thought we were in the Gold Medal round of the World Championship, and would do everything conceivable to thwart me during my turns, and would do his turns by attempting to not only kill, me, but also my dog, and my entire family. As a result, I was not involved in even a single repetition, in either capacity of what Rener Gracie was showing us. Not only that, but it hurt. Was I stalled or was this the start of some kind of plateau? Not at all.

Mind you, I severely dislike my partner, and think he's a useless pile of dog excrement. After trying to do things correctly a couple of times, or to get him to change, I went with it. As he liked making it impossible for me to experience performing the technique, I did the same to him. As he was significantly less skillful than I, I was very, very good at doing this. When it was my turn, I would execute the first movement with speed and aggression so that I could at least get in a repetition of that part, and then when he tried to shut me down, made him work hard for it. Was I able to really absorb the class's lesson? No. Did I get to work a totally unrelated drill with my partner? Yes. Did it hurt? Not exactly. It wasn't comfortable, but I did top and bottom controls of my partner so that there was no risk of getting damaged.

Even at that subverted seminar session, when the learning should have been in the neighbourhood of a 10, I at least got to progress to 1 or 2, or maybe even a 3.

The graph of progress isn't always the same angle, but it usually heads up.

Might the overall total for a session be zero? I suppose. Could it be negative? Again, this might be possible, but even that isn't very likely.

Let's say you go to class, and is all review of stuff that you are not only comfortable with, but are actually bored by. The teacher explains it poorly, and your partner is useless. Then, during rolling time, everybody that you usually catch easily with arm triangles has become immune to them. You try everything, but just can't pull it off.

Could you easily go home calling that a negative progress day, or at least a zero progress one? I suppose you could, but why? It shouldn't be a slump.

Let's say that the material taught includes trap-and-roll, which is often the very first lesson that Gracie Jiu-Jitsu students learn. I am never bored with it. Are you equally good at it both left-handed and right? Be honest. That gives you at least one thing to work. Do it the way that is harder for you. There are three basic variations. Get your partner to change up his bad-guy behaviour, forcing you to come up with other options. But then again, I said your partner was useless. Help him if he'll let you, and if he won't, modify trap-and-roll for the incorrect indicators that he presents you.

If, during free-roll, your arm triangle don't work anymore, you should try and discover why. If it is because you are doing them wrong, you need to find that out. If, instead, the class knowledge-level in general has left them behind, you need to move on to something else as well. For me, at White Belt, mount was the position to achieve. As a new Blue Belt, it sucked and was dangerous, so side-control and back-mount were the things to shoot for. A bit higher again, and guard became my happy place. If I'd stayed static in behaviour, I'd have become one easily-dominated puppy.

As the recently-deceased baseball great Yogi Berra is credited with saying, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Having a negative or unproductive experience during training is not the same as no progress at all for an extended period. A stagnant second does not mean you are in a stagnant minute. A lousy minute is not a stagnant hour. A bad class is not a meaningless week, and a bad week is not a stagnant month. One roll of the dice does not effect the next. A non-progressing moment can be just as easily followed by a good one, than by another lemon. Don't let your prediction of what kind of a lesson it's going to be taint things.

I don't let a failure paint over potential success.

And how did I get so wise?

Simple. When I first got involved in Karate over thirty years ago, it was my first commitment to any sort of sport or physical activity. Based on contact with previous sports, I assumed that I would seriously suck. Maybe I did, and maybe I didn't, but I certainly never expected progress to be easy or fast.

As a result, any learning or improvement was a wonderful, magical surprise. It turned out that I wasn't as horrible as I thought, but that didn't matter. The pattern stuck. Never had a plateau doing Karate either. The graph of progress continues its slow climb towards competency.

A slump?

Never.

As Yogi Berra said, “Slump? I ain't in no slump. I just ain't hitting.”