How to be more coordinated?

As a professional stuntman, breakdancer, and martial artists, I’ve spent my life trying to learn how to do weird things with my body. Wether it’s a backflip, spinning on my head, or fighting someone who is 100lbs heavier than me, it’s definitely been years of practice. So how do we get better at skills?

The answer which you can guess is practice. You hear it all the time. “Practice makes perfect”. It’s true except there is a subtle difference that I want to explore more. The challenge is not just practicing, it’s practicing well. What does that mean? I have two important criteria for good practice: First, is the task perfectly hard enough? Second, are you getting feedback?

Let’s break down the first one. I think this is the most challenging aspect of practicing, finding the perfect difficulty. We hear all these motivational speeches about getting outside your comfort zone, failing, get back up and get after it again. Yes that does hold merit but the problem is, if you’re picking up a challenge you’re not ready for, you may be making bad habits, you may get frustrated and give up, or you may even get hurt attempting. Instead we want to find the right level of difficulty. When I was learning how to flip, my coach use to say we want to train in the zone of  “Difficult but possible”. That’s because it requires our attention to focus and sync everything up but it’s not so unreasonable we’re not going to make progress. In my opinion, if you’re attempting something and your success rate is less than 50% per trial, you should make it slightly easier so you can work on building good habits and eventually move onto something harder. Once your success rate is higher, on that task close to 90%, that’s where I would make it a little harder to add more challenge. I think this is a very important nuance that allows us to get more out of each session. If you want to get better at something that seems impossible, try to break the task down to something easier to start, master that fundamental than add a little bit more. I wish someone show’d me this while I was breakdancing and I probably could have avoided a few surgeries and have had a better career.

Once we get the right difficulty, we want to address the second problem. Are we getting feedback? If we want to get better at some skill, we need feedback to tell us if we’re doing it right. At the beginning specially we need lots of external feedback to tell us, but as we get better we can switch to internal feedback (Does this feel good or bad?). If you don’t have a coach to give you that feedback that’s where watching footage of yourself and analyzing it is very helpful. Often times you don’t realize your making mistakes till you see it in third person. However I highly recommend getting a coach or physical therapist to watch you instead. 

I hope this helps you accomplish some skill you’ve been wanting to learn, or maybe something that even hurts and you’re trying to adjust. As always go see a physical therapist to help breakdown any barriers so you can better results, faster.