There are a lot of similarities to practicing guitar and training your body to accomplish something new or recover some function you've lost.
In guitar, there's something referred to as "working speed". This is the tempo at which you must play to increase your speed of playing and above which your playing begins to deteriorate. If you practice too often below your working speed, you'll see no improvement. If you ignore your working speed and just try to play faster, you'll see no improvement. The key is finding the speed and then doing something I call "edging" - working a little bit harder or faster. So, if my working speed for a particular scale is 75 beats per minute, I'll "edge" myself to 76. If I can do 76, I'll try 77. If at 77, my playing falls apart, I'll go back to 76. The next time, I'll start at 76. If you're consistent with your edging, you'll get better and better.
Edging works for the body too. If your therapist has asked you to do 100 quad sets (this is where you tighten the muscles on the front of your thigh as hard as you can with your knee in a straight position) per day, the question you need to be able to answer is, "Where's the edge?" Is it at 30? 50? 95? You want to push your self to the edge and then just a bit more. So, if you're doing quad sets and find that at 35 reps you begin losing the intensity of the contraction, do 3 more and write the number down (38). Next time, your "working speed" or "edge" will be 38 and you can then do three more, etc. Before long, you'll have 100.
Edging perturbs the body and with perturbation comes transformation.
There are a lot of similarities to practicing guitar and training your body to accomplish something new or recover some function you've lost.
In guitar, there's something referred to as "working speed". This is the tempo at which you must play to increase your speed of playing and above which your playing begins to deteriorate. If you practice too often below your working speed, you'll see no improvement. If you ignore your working speed and just try to play faster, you'll see no improvement. The key is finding the speed and then doing something I call "edging" - working a little bit harder or faster. So, if my working speed for a particular scale is 75 beats per minute, I'll "edge" myself to 76. If I can do 76, I'll try 77. If at 77, my playing falls apart, I'll go back to 76. The next time, I'll start at 76. If you're consistent with your edging, you'll get better and better.
Edging works for the body too. If your therapist has asked you to do 100 quad sets (this is where you tighten the muscles on the front of your thigh as hard as you can with your knee in a straight position) per day, the question you need to be able to answer is, "Where's the edge?" Is it at 30? 50? 95? You want to push your self to the edge and then just a bit more. So, if you're doing quad sets and find that at 35 reps you begin losing the intensity of the contraction, do 3 more and write the number down (38). Next time, your "working speed" or "edge" will be 38 and you can then do three more, etc. Before long, you'll have 100.
Edging perturbs the body and with perturbation comes transformation.