How to know which drills are best for you
One of the first things to know when starting to work with the drills I’ll demonstrate in this blog, is that you want to know which drills work best for you (or your athletes) and are keepers , and which ones don’t yield much of a change.
The Key: Assess - Reassess
To best experience the change that’s possible with brain-based drills:
Assess something:
Test flexibility/range of motion (touch your toes, do a bridge, squat)
Do a skill you (or your gymnasts) are familiar with, can do consistently, and is moderately challenging
Do a drill (like body brushing)
Then reassess exactly the same thing you did initially and notice if you feel a difference.
You may feel a positive, negative, or no change; the result is data that would help customize a drill set that works best for you. If you had a really noticeable improvement on 3/5 drills, you would then include those drills in your warm-up.
Why won’t every drill work for you? Your body & brain’s history and current state is unique, so not every drill will have the same effect. Some people may need more intensity and more reps to see results; others the opposite.
What’s happening? When you provide a specific input to your brain, it will process and interpret that input, then send signals — an output— to the rest of your body. If we continue to provide the input (a drill, learning a new skill, a vision exercise), we are creating change in the brain (neuroplasticity), which can then create a change in muscle tone, how we move, or help us retain a new skill.
The changes from doing a drill once are likely temporary; for the change to be sustained, we need to repeat the input, the same way we learn how to do anything new. This is neuroplasticity at work.¹
Change the input, change the output… the core principle of Neuroperformance Training.
¹Mateos-Aparicio, Pedro, and Antonio Rodríguez-Moreno. "The impact of studying brain plasticity." Frontiers in cellular neuroscience 13 (2019): 66.
Neural plasticity, also known as neuroplasticity or brain plasticity, can be defined as the ability of the nervous system to change its activity in response to intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli by reorganizing its structure, functions, or connections.