I have seen a plethora of motivational videos, but only a couple stand out. It's always clips of people some how pushing their bodies beyond their limits to achieve success. Recently someone showed me this video. It is one of the best inspirational videos have ever seen. I've heard this speech before, but never paired with these clips and music. After watching it I wanted to fight a bear, climb a mountain, hurl a car, workout harder than ever and go play volleyball in Europe again.
The more I thought about the message that's being sent, the more I realized there was something missing from the video. The missing link was the quality of training. Imagine preforming optimal, scientifically proven training methods with this kind of attitude. The chance at failing becomes minuscule!
Pair this incredible motivation, with sport specific movement pattern training and that's how you win. There are over 650 muscles in the body, and they are ALL used in conjunction to move you. Training individual muscle groups is like "taking a shoebox full of words and letters, slinging it at a wall and hope a dictionary will appear," says master strength and conditioning coach, Gray Cook. We must train muscle patterns, and we must train for our sport of volleyball. Do we run in volleyball? Not really. We sprint very short distances using only 1 of 3 energy systems in our body, but that's a topic for a post in the future.
Hard work is only half of the equation. You must work hard AND work smart. You can study any subject for a science test, but only if you study science will you do well on a science test. Just because you studied, does not guarantee success on the test. Same concept applies with sport.
I'm not saying people shouldn't work hard, but the hardcore, sleep when your dead, type attitude should be adopted during competition. You need to earn the skill and body control to keep the quality of movement high BEFORE you start increasing work threshold.
Train smarter to play harder
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-Volleyball skills & conditioning specialist
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