You Can't Optimize Your Way Into Being Good

I've noticed something over the years, particularly with serious athletes: we have a tendency to turn training into an optimization problem. We want to find the perfect program, the perfect number of training sessions, the perfect recovery strategy, the perfect strength program, the perfect diet, the perfect supplement, the perfect warm-up and the perfect balance between hard and easy days. Some of that stuff matters. A lot of it is part of good coaching. But there comes a point where you're spending more time trying to optimize training than actually doing it.

That's an important distinction because it's my job as a coach to think about those things. My job is to analyze, plan, organize and adjust. I should be thinking about how training is structured, what an athlete needs to develop, how much work they can handle, when to push and when to back off, how to sequence skills, how to develop physical qualities and how to create an environment where people can improve. That's my work. I don't expect an athlete to walk into the gym and figure all of that out for themselves.

But the athlete has a different job. Your job is to get in quality work.

At some point, you have to stop looking for the perfect way to train and start training. You have to drill the technique. You have to spar. You have to lift. You have to get tired and keep working. You have to make mistakes, get feedback, make adjustments and come back the next day and do it again. That's where skill actually comes from.

I've seen athletes spend an enormous amount of time worrying about whether they're doing the optimal thing when what they really need is another six months of consistent training. They're reading about different conditioning methods, changing programs every few weeks, worrying about whether they're doing enough recovery work or whether they should be using a different training split. Meanwhile, the person who simply shows up four or five times a week, pays attention and consistently gets good work done is quietly accumulating thousands of useful repetitions.

That's not an argument against good programming. It's an argument for understanding what programming is supposed to accomplish.

A good program exists to help you get better work done consistently. It isn't supposed to become another thing you obsess over. If your coach has created a sound training environment, your job is to take advantage of it. You don't need to understand every decision that went into the program any more than a baseball player needs to design the field before taking batting practice.

There is also a point where optimization becomes counterproductive. Constantly changing things means you never give an approach enough time to work. Looking for a better exercise means you stop doing the perfectly adequate exercise you were already doing. Worrying about whether today's session was optimal can distract you from the fact that you trained hard, learned something and accumulated another useful day of practice.

This is especially true in martial arts because there is no shortcut around experience. You can understand a technique intellectually without being able to perform it. You can know exactly what you're supposed to do and still fail when someone resists. You can watch a hundred videos about a particular position and still need hundreds of repetitions before your body begins to recognize what is happening without conscious thought.

At some point, you have to put in the work.

That doesn't mean training mindlessly. Quality matters. Deliberate practice matters. Good coaching matters. The environment matters. If you are doing the wrong things badly, simply doing more of them isn't necessarily going to make you better. But there's a big difference between trying to improve the quality of your work and endlessly searching for a theoretically better way to work.

The first is training. The second can become procrastination disguised as preparation.

I've become much more interested in getting athletes to understand that distinction. I want them to think about their training, understand why they're doing things and eventually become intelligent enough to make good decisions about their own development. But I don't want them paralyzed by the idea that every session has to be perfectly optimized.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is simply get on the mats and work.

You can't optimize your way into being good.

You have to do good work, consistently, for a long time.