Let’s Talk Balls!

 

 

Just in case anyone hasn’t noticed there is a football World Cup in progress, a chance for so many countries to get their best teams together to play each other in the best spirit of ‘The Beautiful Game’.

 

Football violence, excessive drinking and professional diving aside, this is a very wonderful time for so many people.

And so it should be.  🙂

 

But at the same time it does bizarrely remind me of students who ‘Take a break from their training’.  🙁

 

This is the easiest thing to do and the hardest thing to change back, certainly when we allow time to creep in.

 

There are two trains of though here:

First of all if we look at a long-term break from your training, trying then to go back to classes can seem hard because you start to think things like:

‘Everyone else will have moved on’

SO WHAT!

We’re talking about YOUR development, NOT THEIRS!

And we also start thinking:

‘What if I’m not accepted back?’

At least make the effort to find out!

 

As for people taking a short-term break, this I do not understand either, and this is where my connection with football comes in.

Training to me is like trying to push a heavy ball up a hill.

Sometimes you may have the time, strength and ability to make good progress and sometimes it may be

slow and even a struggle, but at least it’s always going up.

 

Taking a break is basically stepping aside and allowing that ball to roll back down the hill.

 

Every time you come back to class you have to retrain yourself, to focus on those basics again, to try and get back, ‘the edge’ you had before, and as for that thought, ‘Everyone else will have moved on’,

YES, because they kept hold of the ball!

 

So try not to be daunted by the hill, just take everything one step at a time and you will always keep moving up.

 

Sometimes that hill may seem steep but often it does ease and even occasionally levels off, but if you keep letting go of the ball, keep having to start again at the bottom of the hill, you will start to doubt your chances of ever getting to the top, and that is unfair to question your abilities.

 

Do not doubt yourself.

 

One day you WILL get to the top, you just have to keep going.