Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent”

As we get over our COVID quarantine and start hitting the gym consistently again, we start to get back in our routines and we start to get competitive again. Competition is key to what we do as humans. Whether we are competing against others or competing against ourselves, we should all try to be better. Better than we were yesterday. But if we want to be better, we have to constantly practice. Practice our movement patterns, practice our skills, and practice being better in general.

So many have heard the saying that practice makes perfect. Well practice for sure doesn’t make perfect. Practice does make permanent. Permanent movement patterns. I often see many people who do things just to do them. They go for back squats with collapsed arches in their feet, they allow their hips to shoot up on a clean or deadlift, their shoulders have little to no stability on muscle-ups. Yes, we are all excited about a PR lift or getting your first muscle-up but these should not become movements that we don’t learn to perfect. After you get your first muscle-up you should sit back and critique the movement with a coach. You need to discover ways you could make the movement more efficient. What you don’t want to do is make your 100th muscle up look like your first. The way to prevent this is to start fixing the small movements immediately. You should start to perfect your kip, start perfecting your transition, and start perfecting your dip. The longer you go without perfecting your movement pattern the more permanent you start to make it. Think of your body like a paper clip, when you bend a paper clip it will not break but if you bend it over and over again eventually it will break. Your body is resilient. It will not break on the first bad movement but after a while, with the same poor movement over and over again it will eventually break. To prevent this from happening start to master the movement early. If you like to run, start to video yourself running and create a good movement pattern for running. If it’s lifting do the same. We shouldn’t only be videoing our movements for social media. We should be constantly self-critiquing ourselves. This will not only make you better in the gym but in everyday life. A teacher should video themselves teaching. After the class watch the video. Did you make sense? Did you clearly articulate your lesson? More importantly, would you want to attend your class? As a coach, I need to do the same. As a police officer, you should do the same. As a construction worker, would I want to live in that house? These movement patterns or better put, life patterns apply to everything we do in life.

Before you do any workout or perform any movement, remind yourself, practice makes permanent. Whatever you do some of the time is what you will do all the time. Use your phone and video your patterns and see how you can improve yourself. Constantly remember that the patterns you create apply to everything you do in life. Improvements should be made constantly and started from day 1 of learning something new. This will not only help in the gym but outside and everything we do as human beings.

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