Israel Footblog - Training program

[PoisonTaffy]

Last session I did a 61 tiltless run. That is pretty huge for me. All this regimented training really helps with my stamina and consistency. I am no longer surprised when I get a 20+ or 30+ contacts. I can't say that's my standard, but it's getting there.

On the other hand, my progress towards 50 infinities is frustratingly slow. Last week I thought for sure I'll hit it in a few sessions, but during today's session I couldn't convince myself I can actually do it. The numbers say I'm improving (average contacts constantly on the rise), but I actually feel in regression due to my weakening conviction.

I started working on stepping - something I used to be decent at and almost completely lost during my previous break. I don't really know how best to collect data when learning something, so I just write the amount of time I work on it, and how many hits&drops I got on each side. Not a lot of insight is going to come out of that, but at least it'll be a record of my progress.

Finally, I'm working on drills as preparation for working on guiltless runs. Today I schooled:
Pdx mirage->butterfly rpt
Osis->infinity->infinity rpt

Both went pretty good, the infinities work really show value there.

I used to do drills+infinities+tiltless, and now that I added stepping after the drills, the titltless practice really suffered. I may have to drop one of these, but I can't decide which one I feel like dropping. If only I could hit those damn 50 infinities already!

[boyle]

excellent work on the tiltless...anything over 50 plus is always great, it shows a level of concentration and commitment that you can't just make appear out of magic.

I think something you can practice for stepping is ripwalk>clipper repeat. Well, the best stepping practice is ripwalk > sidewalk, but then it's harder, with more chance of dropping.

I like that you are doing a lot of stats with your training. This is something I might start doing soon. Sounds like a great way to build on each session. Do you have graphs and things to show your performance over time?

[PoisonTaffy]

I had a very interesting session today, interesting because my brain said it went great and the numbers said it went horrible.
My previous session was the opposite - I felt it went bad but the numbers were very good. I guess it's not new that our experience of reality is absolutely subordinate to random frames of mind, but it's interesting to see such a blunt proof of that.

A serious drop in averages and total counts in both titless and infinity. I'm pretty sure this is because I played about30 minutes after having dinner, but I'll need another session after dinner later on to prove this.

I got a new computer game, X-COM: Enemy Unknown. Thank goodness it's relatively short; I finished it in two concentrated days, otherwise there wouldn't be a session today or tomorrow. It's a remake of an old game I really loved, and it doesn't disappoint. Highly recommended.

[PoisonTaffy]

I changed my tiltless drill - Instead of stopping whenever I drop, I pick up the bag almost immediately and continue shredding, until I either reach 4 drops or more than 50 contacts. I want to get comfortable reaching a high number of contacts, so stopping after every drop seems counter productive. Last session I got twice to 50+ contacts with one drop.

Next session will be 10th with statistics. I'm going to prepare some cross-session graphs, once I figure out a good way to pull data from multiple excel sheets, and maybe make a post about it.

Some things I learned about myself:
1) I CANNOT play after eating.
2) 10 minutes per drill for optimal performance. I tried 5 minutes and didn't see progress on the drill. I tried more than 10 minutes and saw decrease in average. This doesn't mean 10 minutes is optimal overall, it's just the minimum to ensure progression, and makes the best looking numbers.

3) 3 Drills per session. Adding another one fucks the performance of the 4th drill. Removing one doesn't improve the performance of the remaining drills.

4) Gu energy gel had no measurable impact on any stat I measure. I tried it only once, granted, but the results were so unremarkable that I don't feel like spending more money on it. Besides, it sort of tastes like ass.

Some things I want to investigate:
1) How much time to rest between drills? Right now I listen to my body and end up spending about 3 minutes rest between drill. I didn't test any variation yet.
2) How much time to rest between attempts in drills? I have no idea how to measure this without an assistant or a stop watch in my hand while playing.
3) How much time to spend warming up? Again, I listen to my body and usually spend about 5 minutes before the first drill. Also, what kind of warm up? Not sure how to test the latter.

[crazydwarf]

I have also found that I CANNOT play after eating. I've never tried an energy gel but I do find that caffeine taken before hand makes me play better.

When I'm playing alone I often just drill concepts. I think to get a strong tiltless (and later guiltless) strings up it is important to do what your doing. IE. don't stop just because you drop set a number of contacts and get to that before stopping. Same thing for infinity rpt. Try to make it to 50 a couple times a session no matter how many drops you have. It'll up your endurance and also get you better at doing infinities while tired.

Your 3 drills per session measure is interesting. a 30 minute solo session is pretty good for me but I never really measure how long I drill during that. Of course I also play with other people 3 times a week and then it's more like a 2 or 3 hour session. I think a mix of both is very helpful.

[PoisonTaffy]

Good idea about doing the no stop with infinity, thanks! I have to try that. It'll be much harder to evaluate progress with that though, so perhaps I can do it for a couple of sessions and then see how my average is on subsequent 'normal' drills.

3 drills x 10 minutes is actually not a 30 minutes session: with warmup & break between each drill makes for 45-50 minutes solo session. And then there's stretches and a little workout, so it's a respectable chunk of time. On a good week I get 1 session with another player. Count your blessings...

[crazydwarf]

Yeah, if you want to count progress I might see how many drops it takes you to get to 50 (or a 100), instead of how far can I go on 1 drop. Both help in different ways and like you said it's good to mix it up.

Yeah I know I'm very lucky to get to play with so many other people, for practice I meant that it's important to have sessions that aren't 100% drilling I think. Where you just do strings of various things. I'm somewhat forced to do that when I play with others but you can do it by yourself to.

[boyle]

some great observations already - this could be something to try and publish in some kind of sports or coaching journal once you have a more complete data set.

[PoisonTaffy]

And I was wondering if I have enough interesting things to say for a post at "General Footbag"

[boyle]

small steps!

[PoisonTaffy]

Today I had my 10th measured session, after a 5 days break since the last one. In between I had an outdoor session with Oren, which went great, probably my best session ever, which indicates that the new practice system is better than my previous one.

Today's session had mixed results: Shitty performance with Infinities, but stellar performance in my butterfly->pdx mirage drill (36 contacts!).

I created a consolidated graph with the info from across the sessions:


The X axis is the day # since I first started to collect data (so for example, horizontal position 5 is my third session, with two days break since the previous one).

The second graph is the total number of infinities hit in the drill, divided by the amount of minutes spent on the drill (for example, 150 contacts / 11 minutes = 13.6 contacts per minute).

At first glance it looks rather disappointing, as if there's no progress. However, from day 5 to day 16 there is an "up" tendency:


During three pairs (1-2,5-6,11-12), second session is always slightly worse. I haven't noticed that until I looked at the graph. Day 15 is the post dinner session, which should explain the freak result.

Session 22 clearly suffers from the time delta since the previous session, but as I said earlier, I had a stellar achievement in a different drill, so I'm a little confused with these numbers at the moment. Only in the last few sessions I took care to do the drills in the same order and spend the same amount of time on them, so earlier sessions suffer from significant variations that are not represented on these graphs. I obviously need to collect more data.

[boyle]

I think you still need some more data - will be interesting how the next 10 measured sessions go for you and how they compare.

[PoisonTaffy]

Yep, the first 10 sessions had too many variations in them as I was building the system. I think I can get the next 10 sessions to be more 'clean'.

So far I've been setting a time limit on each drill. I'm going to replace it with an attempts limit, which is easier to keep (not having to look at the clock all the time), and produces more easy-to-compare results. Since I already know for each drill how many attempts I usually squeeze into 10 minutes, I know what the limits should be (12 infinities strings, 10 pdx mirage strings, 5 tiltless to 50). I'm curious to see whether it has any impact on performance as well. I'm nearly convinced that keeping my eyes on the clock all the time has a negative effect on my focus and motivation, so I'm optimistic that it may actually help improve my performance.

[PoisonTaffy]

First session in almost a week. Lots of life things happened last week so I couldn't find the time to play. In hindsight, it's good that they all happened at once, so now I should be free to pursuit my training.
Today I started a new round of structured, measured training. Again, I plan on doing 10 sessions with the current program, and then modify it.

I'm sorry if this post is going to be boring and technical, but it's a diary of my experiment in a better type of training and I want to keep it to the point and somewhat reference-able.

The current program consists of:
1) Infy to 50: 5 runs of consecutive infinities, each string ends when reaching 50 contacts, not when dropping the bag.
2) Osis b2b: 10 minutes of Osis b2b, where string ends when dropping the bag.
3) Tiltless to 50: 5 runs of tiltless, also ending strings when reaching 50 rather than when dropping.

My first impressions of the new structure:
Infy to 50 is much more intense and condensed than the b2b counterpart. It produces more measurable stats and I think it'll be easier to make a comparison across sessions than with the b2b. The downside is that it's so much harder to focus on correct form when having to keep going rapidly. On the one hand I want form to be more important than sheer contact mass, but this drill is geared towards the latter rather than the former, and I only collect contacts stats, I don't know how to collect form stats.

It felt sketchy and rough and there's a long way to go for an easy 50.
The stats right now are: Average of 5 drops a run (best: 3, worst: 6), and average of 15.4 longest contact between drops (best:22, worst:10). 250 contacts, 5 strings, 16 minutes

Osis drill went terrible. I really suck at osis. I almost always dropped left osis, which is a really high risk trick for me. Hopefully there will be a bright side for such a low starting point, which is seeing gradual progression. I don't think the bare bone b2b is the most efficient drill for improvement, but I first want to measure how efficient it is, and then test out other drills and compare their efficiency.
Stats: 3.85 average contacts per string (best: 8, worst:2), 75% drops on left osis. 77 contacts, 20 strings, 10 minutes.

I did only 4 runs of tiltless to 50, because at my 4th attempt I surprised myself by reaching 50 contacts rather breezily, I wasn't even tired. At that point I forgot that I've got one more to go.
Stats: 2.25 drops a run average (best: 0, worst: 5), average of 34 longest contact (best: 50 worst: 13). 200 contacts, 4 strings, 9:20 minutes

[PoisonTaffy]

I'm thinking of looking closer into what is the purpose of each drill, and which drill should be used in each stage of learning.

For example, right now I'm thinking about the two drills that I already have some experience with:

The b2b drill feels like a confidence building drill. When one can hit a trick rather regularly, this drill measures what are the actual limits of one's ability with the trick, and encourages optimizing the trick to achieve longer strings. One should focus on form and control when doing the b2b drill. With that in mind, maybe I'm doing osis b2b too soon and I should come up with a drill/training routine to build the necessary skill needed to get to the b2b phase.

Drill to x (ex. infy to 50) feels like a later stage drill, when one already feels comfortable and in the "flow" when doing b2b. Its purpose is stamina building and aggressive limit-pushing with the trick.

For a workable, long term training regime I want to build a roadmap of learning from zero knowledge of a trick to great control of a trick, and which drill to use during in between each phase. At the mo I have experience with only a short band of this spectrum.

[C-Fan]

I like your approach, and am enjoying reading about it. Now I want to make footbag graphs.

[PoisonTaffy]

Thanks, glad to hear I'm not coming off too crazy here

[boyle]

It really makes a lot of sense, and is something that more of us should be doing. Particularly measuring the top players to see what works the best for them. I think I will do some measuring in the coming weeks as well.

[PoisonTaffy]

"Lesson learned" via the new system:
There are strong indications that I cannot perform at peak performance when playing two days in a row. Just like Ken's Pizza and Mac n'cheese analogy.

The previous 10 graphs showed that there's a measurable decrease in performance on the second day of a two days training.
This week I had an intense outdoor session and a training session the day after, and the results were a huge drop in all stats. I took a day of rest, had another identical session, and the stats came back to normal.

This is all very anecdotal, not quite the scientific precision that I would like, but I realize that with only one test subject it's never going to be exact, but it is much better than hunches and guesswork.

I was working on osis, and thought that it's silly to measure string length on a trick that I can hardly hit b2b. So instead, I counted how many hits I got in ten minutes in my previous session (around 50), and decided to hit 50 each side this session, and instead of recording hits, I recorded drops and types of drops. Hopefully being aware to the various ways that I drop the bag, I'll have a better idea of which are the more severe, and how to combat them.

[rjadamson]

As several others have said I am now looking into gathering data from my sessions as well. I haven't played for over three weeks, but that changes tomorrow.

I wouldn't extrapolate too much on trends you find between just two sessions because there are so many other variables that could be at play (I say this as someone who has historically benefited from having a light warm up session the day before a more grueling one)! I really hope that you keep this up over the coming months. The more you do it the smaller the margin of error!