Greatly Improving Coordination & Athleticism Without Adding Time to Training
Simple but high effect progressions to make training sessions engaging & improve ninja skills WITHOUT adding *even 1 minute of gym time*
Contents Covered:
Hand-eye coordination & its benefits for health + performance
Brain Activity, Anti-Aging, and Athletic Performance
Drills progressed from easiest to *highly* difficult
“Novelty is key for general improvement - Specificity is key for specific improvement”
Video examples
Animals & “play”
Creativity & Takeaways
Train *everything* to the limits you decide to set is the motto behind my training philosophy. I think for health purposes we should have some engagement with every single quality possible in order to remain useful and athletic for life – but “hybrid athletes“ under my definition are athletes that “create themselves” into special subtypes of their own (strength focused, endurance focused, vertical jumping, acrobatics, etc).
Some basic qualities, however, are universally important and one of these is coordination, reactions, and proprioception. It’s extremely easy to see where these qualities come into play in athleticism (some even define coordination + proprioception as athleticism itself).
Like the rest of the nervous system, the brain and its connections to the body can be trained and improved. By providing challenges to our fine motor skills, our ability to execute highly complex and time dependent tasks in rapid coordination can get better in a general sense as well as specific sense.
As we age our loss of reaction speed & proprioception (understanding the body’s position & movement in space) arguably contributes more than anything to fall injuries in the elderly and sport performance injuries in youth and middle age.
Even if you choose not to measure your performance over time to see if you’re making improvements – though this will likely happen naturally by noticing that you’re getting a little better at a certain task – it is a good practice to include some sort of coordination training with difficult tasks that force you to utilize your fine motor skills in order to improve them and prevent them from declining as you age.
Forgive me for always repeating myself but new readers will need to understand this key concept:
Much of “hybrid athlete training“ methods are in part meant to replace the behavioral stimuli, we got in our youth and formalize them a bit into adulthood training. Thus, by maintaining the positive, youthful development challenges that we benefited from natural play as kids we can maintain our youth for life.
In this case - tasks like the drills in this post have been shown to improve brain activity and maintain neural/brain matter as one ages. Again, this demonstrates our “athletic-health” paradigm concept again, where training for “performance” is synonymous with health care.
It’s also important that we are efficient with our methods as our training approach to fitness here at Hybrid Athlete Fitness is more diverse than that of a standard bodybuilder. Thus, we have a lot of different types of training we like to include, and this can get messy or too much of a burden if you don’t train smart.
This post will go over a list of drills that you can incorporate into your training program to improve your reflexes/reactions and hand eye coordination without increasing your gym time by even 1 minute.
Several of these drills will be progressions from easier to harder which you are encouraged to challenge yourself with as you master each one. This is progressive overload for the fine motor control portion of the nervous system, and they will be ranked as such later in this post.
Recommendation:
The drills start “fairly easy” (can surprise people with difficulty) and WILL begin to get very hard. Use one that provides a moderate challenge as any task with an ~60-80% success rate seems to have the best balance between challenge to promote improvement without being too difficult to promote quality “reps”. (If the task is too hard you won’t be able to accumulate enough productive repetitions.)