Hello Friends,
What does “mastering your technique” mean, I asked my coach in Russia. Does it merely mean, “use good form?” He replied that it exceeds proper technique, to include “pressure cooking” your form. When you experience stress, does your breathing, movement, and alignment dis-integrate from each other?
“Unconscious competence” refers to performing a movement near- automatically yet with very good form. Like driving a car, you begin anxious as you learn how to switch lanes and merge onto a highway, but over time, this becomes nearly effortless.
Exercise offers positive stress to create an adaptation of growth, so we shouldn’t be exercising in automatic mode. When you feel as if your technique will fall apart if you don’t focus all of your concentration on holding your breath, movement and alignment in sync together, then you’ve found what yoga has described as your “edge” of maximal benefit. Step over it, and you could get hurt. Stay under it, and you lack sufficient stress to fully benefit.
When you remain unconsciously competent (or in “flow”), then increase complexity, speed, depth, intensity, duration, density, length, et cetera until you must remain consciously competent to hold your technique. Just one micro-step at a time, one tiny increment farther than you had thought, but not across the edge.
Guide yourself out of your comfort zone to the edge, so that you can adapt and grow. In TACFIT terminology of breathing levels, this differentiates the level of flow where breath is effortless, from the level of discipline where you must exhale to perform the effort. Flow is where we go, but discipline is how we get there.
Mastery of a movement may be at unconscious competency, but self-mastery is the practice of pressure-cooking competency, so that you continually improve and adapt throughout your life.
Be compassionate with yourself. One day your edge appears much earlier than the prior. We do not progress linearly. Honor your edge. Find it and practice staying on the side of good form. As you push your edge, you grow as a whole person.
Very Respectfully,
Scott B. Sonnon
TACFIT Co-Founder
Don’t Miss Our 30th Anniversary Birthday Specials!
And as we continue to celebrate thirty years of building something worth believing in, we want to make sure you have seen everything currently offered in our 30th Birthday Specials, because the deals are as good as the milestone deserves.
- TACFIT Warrior is 50% OFF
- Coach Sonnon’s Vintage Legacy Collection is 50% OFF
- TACFIT C.S.O.R.E. and MedBall PDS are 30% OFF
But we are not done yet! TACFIT Gym Rings have been added to the birthday sale alongside our ongoing equipment specials including kettlebells and more. Whether you are a longtime community member finally adding a program you have always wanted’, ‘or someone brand new to TACFIT looking for the perfect entry point into thirty years of the world’s smartest training system’, ‘there has never been a better time or a better price to invest in your practice. These are not permanent prices’, ‘they are birthday deals’, ‘and like all birthdays’, ‘this one will not last forever!