Sporatic Playing Training.

[jay7]

Greetings Modified.

Recently, I've undertaken an exercise, of doing tiny bursts of footbag throughout the day. This was inspired, by doing chin-ups, when I woke up, got home, and before bed. I figured, if I can do chinups in those bursts, why can't I train a single, not-too-physically demanding move?

So, I chose sidewalk. Three times a day, I'll take 2 minutes, lace up, and just do some sidewalks. I suck at this trick, which, is the motivation. The idea is, I play only as long as it takes to do sidewalk*5, twice in a row. The first day, from cold, it honestly took 15 - 20 tries. Today, maybe, 2 days later, it took about 4. Granted it was 6:00 am...

With that being said, has anyone else tried to train any moves like this? AS per the Vasek Manual, where he says do a mobius under a streetlight, etc, I imagine this could do good things for muscle memory, and commanding a trick on the first try. And, with such a small amount of work, like a sidewalk, I imagine it wont do harm for things like warmup, or stretching...etc.

And, if no one really has tried this, would anyone be willing to pick their move, be it vortex, or torque, or whatever, and report results? If I show any success with sidewalk, especially seeing if things like ripwalk or dimwalk improve, I plan on trying this with many moves..

Anyway, this probably will end up not being discussed. Who knows. But if you have input, at least a PM would be greatly appreciated.

[C-Fan]

As an old player whose body isn't as spry as it used to be, I'd have pretty big concerns about injuring myself if I don't warm up properly.

That said, i remember talking to Felix at Worlds 2004, and asking him how he got so good at ripstein. His response was that he was injured for most of 2003, but he'd carry around a footbag and mess around with ripsteins casually, and that's how he learned them. So maybe it'd work for people? For me, I wouldn't try it because I'd be afraid I'd pull something, even with an easy trick.

[Jeremy]

For a while I had a rule that I couldn't leave the house without hitting a decent down double down. This rule massively improved my DDDs, which were probably my weakest flipside move at the time (or at least, weakest for their difficulty). I did drill them in training sessions too, but adding in spending a few minutes a few times a day hitting them definitely helped too, and I think more so with a move like that where you really need to ingrain the muscle memory to make the jump from spastic to easy. I think those kinds of tricks would work much better for this technique than tricks that are difficult because they're really hard.

[rjadamson]

I still suck at footbag, but I think this would be a good way to improve my nonexistent swirl. I could even do it in pants. I would be quite motivated to do this if several us of all participated and regularly reported our results.

[Asmus]

I am up for that. And I would be schooling swirl aswell.

[SlashC]

I think playing intermittently during the day in different environments to train a specific concept or trick could be beneficial. However, as Ken pointed out this has to be done with some care since some concepts/tricks are more likely to cause injuries without proper warmup for certain people. For example, I need about 10-15 minutes to warm up clippers (stretches, calibration/fundamental drills) before I can do anything at all with them. If I skip the warmup (which I sometimes do occasionally when playing in public) I will more often then not flare up the tendonitis in my ankles and have to take a week or more off. On the other hand whilst recovering from an ankle sprain a year ago I trained penduluxes sporadically throughout the day and was able to learn and retain the concept to a high level quite quickly relative to concepts I only practice during regular training sessions.

[Anexthesis]

I'm not going to try this myself (mostly because I don't only wear footbag shoes) but I fully support bringing the scientific method into footbag training more. I just wish there was a way to setup a control group, all people learn different concepts at different speeds so it's pretty much impossible. Despite that I think this idea has merit if only because the reason I can do Paradon was that throughout the day for months I practiced the motion without a bag to become familiar with it and my Paradons improved significantly. One thing to note here is that you can do your game more harm than good by practicing a trick incorrectly. Perhaps one way improve this method is that before you try any move with a bag you do the trick slowly without one to make certain the motion is clean, and your balance is good. Good luck to those who attempt this, I'm eager to hear some results.

[Jazzkid]

Hey,

this is an interesting topic....I have done this with a couple tricks....... rev swirl, dyno, ducks, and ripstein.

usually it was only one trick at a time....every where Id go whether in line at the grocery or at the mall I would do rev swirls.......I made it a goal to every time I attempted i had to hit three reverse swirls in a row..... doing this for about two weeks significantly dialed in my rev swirl.....I think the most I did before in a row was about 5 or so but a month later ...within a couple of attempts i could get into a groove and easily hit about 15 or more......
I basically got good at ducking clipper and gyro mirage the same way. even my flip ripstein became my strong one this way......... usually it was tricks that i felt I could easily hit in pants..... but I do agree that picking a trick link janiwalker is not a good idea.....ripsteins never felt tight or that i should warm up first .....but a trick like a quantum set would require me to be a bit looser and warmed up before I would try it .....

[g00d33]

This is more or less how I learned swirl/rev swirl in the first place. But now that I haven't done it for a while, it's really tapered off lol. But, I'm willing to give something like this a shot again!