Hi, I'm Alois Rosario from PingSkills.
In our lesson on the activation level we talked to you about how your peak performance is
affected by your activation level and we talked about how in training usually your activation
level is a little bit low.
Today we're going to show you ways of increasing that activation level to get your training
to be much more effective.
Operating at your peak activation level will make your training more effective.
How do we do it?
Here's some ideas.
So firstly, make sure that you have a focus for your session.
What sort of things can you have as your focus?
You might be wanting to improve your forehand topspin in this session so all of your drills
are centred around improving your forehand topspin.
As long as at the start of your session you have that in your mind then all your drills
now have a purpose.
I'm trying to improve my forehand topspin.
The second thing that we're going to think about with our training is to make sure that
we have some challenging drills.
So we're going to set ourselves some drills that will push our boundaries.
For example if you can do a thousand forehands in a row, that's not going to be overly motivating
to just go out there and play some forehands and try to get them on the table.
We're going to start to make the drills more challenging by perhaps being a bit more random,
varying the positioning of our forehands, varying the speed, trying to get something
that's going to challenge our skill level.
So don't make them boring by having it at a very comfortable level for yourself.
So the second point is make the drills challenging.
OK.
Let's have a look at the third point.
Now you can have challenging drills but if you're doing them every day, day in day out
then again your motivation and your activation level is going to start to drop off.
So let's think about making sure that we vary the drills that we're doing each session.
Again this will keep us motivated, this will keep us activated, and this will keep that
peak performance starting to rise.
The fourth thing is that we want to turn our drills into some games.
So how are we going to make some games out of our drills?
We talked about perhaps doing forehand to forehand and seeing how many forehands you
can do with your partner and we're going to challenge the table next door to see if we
can do more than they can.
That's a simple little game that you can play.
You might also do some timed drills.
So for example let's do 3 minutes of our footwork drill and in that 3 minutes we're going to
see how many times we can complete the pattern in our drill.
For example if we're doing a forehand forehand footwork drill, in our 3 minutes we're going
to see how many times we can do that forehand forehand and complete it in the 3 minutes.
Again you can set that as a target for yourself so I'm going to try and do 50 patterns in
that 3 minutes or let's have a competition with the table next door and see how many
they can do in the same 3 minutes.
We're going to have a challenge and see who is better at doing the drill.
So the fourth point is to make some games out of your drills.
And then the fifth point is, and this might sound a little bit strange, but don't be afraid
to have a bet.
Now when we talk about having a bet, we're not talking about we're going to put $100
on the table and see who's going to win.
You can do all sorts of little things and games and bets so you might even have a token
trophy that each session the person that gets the biggest score in a particular drill takes
home the trophy or if Jeff and I are doing a drill and we're challenging each other then
it might be that if I do more of the drill, as I probably will, then Jeff has to buy me
lunch or he has to cook me lunch.
So there's some ideas on ways that you can have bets or challenges just so that you make
sure that you're putting something on the line when you're doing these otherwise again
you might not have that same motivation and we want to get that activation level up as
high as we can in our training session so that we are replicating our match situation.
So our fifth point, put something on the line.
So there we have 5 simple ideas for you that are going to make your training more effective
and get your activation level closer to your match day activation level.