Monday, November 18, 2013

Anatomy of a slump




Ultimately what I believe, or don’t believe, doesn’t really matter. The only thing that beliefs do for me is close my mind to different possibilities. -Daniele Bolelli, On The Warrior’s Path


For the next little while we are going to be taking a detour through SlumpLand.  I apologize for being more dull and depressive than usual. However, if you are new to your MA journey and have never had one of these before, please do stick around and watch the show. It's important to understand that this is part of the MA journey, and that they suck, but they do go away.  I see a lot of people put down by their first serious Slump to the point where they quit. Don't let it get you.

So the worst one one of these that I've had thus far was in Kung Fu, and it lasted a full 7 months. Man, did that one bite. Most of them tend to last a few weeks. I can only speak to my own experience with them- maybe other people's slumps are different. I haven't figured out, as of yet, how to make them go away. Fighting harder as they descend seems to make them worse. The law of negative returns kicks in. It's like the Universe has decided to tap me out, and the Universe is a 350lb black belt with PMS, so struggling against the inevitable seems to only prolong the process. Tap tap tap. There ya go, Universe. You win. Now let's restart.

The last time I had one of these, I had finally figured out that part about "fighting harder only prolongs the process", so instead of spending a long while denying what was happening, and then struggling in futility and frustration like a fly in a web, I simply acknowledged that I was having a slump and validated my emotions about it. Then I tried a fresh tactic. Instead of increasing my training hours, I cut out all sparring and just did drills for a few weeks. I think it's critical to **NOT** stop going to class. Your conditioning goes to hell, if nothing else. TV and video games start to look attractive again. Your diet goes out the window and the weight starts coming on.

Positional training actually is worse than free sparring at this point.... unfortunately, while it's fairly easy to avoid sparring for a few weeks (with the exception of the odd class where the teacher decides that's all we're doing for that day), it's impossible to do just drills and opt out of positional sparring unless I want to fake an injury. Being a straightforward person with a low BS tolerance, I don't want to go there. So there will have to be some positional training, but I'll just have to deal with it as best I can.

Avoiding sparring and just doing drills minimizes the amount of failure that one has to deal with on a daily basis. It breaks you out of the Deadly Failure Spiral. It's critical to be able to deal with failure- in MA, getting our asses kicked repeatedly is how we learn- but when you're in SlumpLand, it's difficult to keep this in perspective.

Tonight- after pummelling, keylocks, figure-4 armbars and the same takedown we did this morning- I had to do positional sparring with Dave and two medium-sized white belts. Now, Dave has been a prince to me lately, and he only wants to help, and I truly appreciate his efforts. But I've been doing BJJ long enough to be able to tell when you're handing something to me. It doesn't make this better. It was actually easier to cope with being smacked down soundly by two white belts than it was to cope with Dave dialling his performance to just a half notch above mine and then handing me a guard replacement at the end. But it's the thought that counts, and I have enough presence of mind to will myself to accept it- if not with as much grace as I would wish, at least without openly snarling at him. I once got snippy with Ben during a Slump- this was like three years ago- and I immediately felt awful about it and still do to this day, so I try really hard to be mindful to not take out my frustrations on my teammates.

I'm hoping to come up with at least one new tactic to experiment with during this Slump. Still looking for a method to actually make it go away.

Izzy got her first stripe today, which is awesome.
 

3 comments:

  1. Great post SavageKitsune! I was actually just writing about slumps a couple of days ago. I was thinking that we don't talk about them much in MA, even though I'm convinced that everyone has them. My worst slump to date was about 6 months ago. A few things happened that helped me get over it: I recognized what was happening, I vented about it with some (trusted) teammates over some tea, and I started helping out with the kids class (not BJJ). We also coincidentally got a particularly lovely bunch of newcomers to our club and their enthusiasm is strangely infectious. The venting option also had the extra benefit that it helped to stop me taking my slump out on my teammates, since I could just tell them I was frustrated instead. Although I've read a little bit online about slumps and being fed up with training, I never hear people actually talk about it out loud, and I have a sneaking suspicion that we lose teammates this way because they don't realize that it's just a slump and it will go away.

    Love your blog!

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  2. I'm really fond of holing up and doing some escapist - which usually means long baths and fiction for me, but movies and such work just fine as well.

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  3. I wouldn't recommend cutting out two weeks worth of classes either, but for frequent practitioners (~4x/week), I think taking a full week off can be good for recharging the physical and emotional batteries. Getting completely away from the sport, focusing on other aspects of your life and coming back fresh has worked for me.

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