The warm-up period
Your footprints may not be visible tomorrow, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t here. (Image by Ulrike Mai)
It is the most basic concept in the world: Before you can reach peak performance, you’ve got to warm up.
If this is true for the very best musicians and athletes in the world, it’s probably true for me. And it’s probably true in other disciplines, too.
Though I know that this is the case, I often forget. Even in the middle of warming up, I find myself wondering why my legs, or fingers aren’t functioning the way I expect them to. I have to remind myself that — hello! — that’s the point of warming up.
Lately, I’ve been observing that a period of cognitive warm-up is necessary as well. As a morning person, I have gotten by without this, but it makes perfect sense. My writing gets better as I continue to write. My thinking gets better as I continue to think.
And my speaking gets better as I continue to speak: smoother, more confident and coherent, and with fewer filler words.
Naturally, this happens across a period of weeks and months, but it can also be observed within a given practice session.
Why didn’t I see this before? Simple: I didn’t persist long enough in these activities or do them consistently enough to notice. But now that I’ve regularly had the experience of spending hours a day writing and creating in various media and formats, it’s obvious. And I gotta say, it’s very encouraging.
If you’re not yet in the habit of doing a particular activity, it’s all you can do to just squeeze it into your day. The idea of adding a warm-up period might feel like an unnecessary raising of the bar, especially when we’re already struggling with the pain of being a beginner.
However, if you understand that the level of mastery that you were capable of yesterday will not be reflected in your early efforts today, you may gain a bit of motivation to keep going.
You can begin to see your weak and feeble performance as a level you need to pass through on the way to the next one, not as proof that you should quit right now.
In a sense, the tendency to backslide is a hidden advantage if you recognize what is happening and do not allow it to deter you.
Here’s how this might look in a writing session:
Ten minutes of babbling about nothing.
Twenty minutes of halting progress.
Thirty minutes’ worth of useful material.
Five minute break.
Thirty minutes’ worth of useful material.
Ten minutes of declining performance signaling the end of the session or the need for a longer break.
How many of us give up after just ten minutes? How many of us give up after thirty? If we do, we can still gain skill if we come back the next day. But we’re missing out on significant upside. What we thought was a bunch of crap was actually our warmup. If we stick with the work all the way through that period, it will pay off.
The best part about this is that even if I’m totally full of crap, the placebo effect will work in your favor. Here, want this lucky penny so that you can be great at whatever you’re trying to do? It takes anywhere from ten minutes to an hour to start working, and it works better the more days you use it.
If what you’re trying to do feels impossible, there are likely skills involved that you haven’t fully developed yet. Give yourself a chance to develop those skills each day, and you will see them improve. Your progress will not be linear, and it may seem to disappear each day, but the overall trend will be a positive one.
If you don’t believe me, I encourage you to prove me wrong. Warning: You will risk proving me right in the process.
