Training The Eyes

    I once witnessed the strangest and most unnatural progression while teaching a guy to vault over a rail a few years ago. He first saw me do the vault, then asked about the placement of my hands, feet, and my hips relative to the location of my chest position, etc. Once he finally did the vault, he spent the next 5 minutes explaining and theorizing about what he had just done in order to perform better. I think he had to leave not much longer after that so he definitely had a higher talking to training ratio. This story is an extreme example of what I often see in people when they learn a new movement or sequence of movements. Of course you have to learn the basic mechanics of certain movements, especially if you've never really trained before. But once you've reached a level where you have a good base to draw from, you can draw on your abilities to learn new movements quickly by training your eyes.

     If you have a training partner, ask them to do a route while you watch them closely. The goal is to be able to perform the same route in the same way on the first try after seeing it only once. You probably won't get it the first time, work on it until you figure it out, then change the route and see if you can get it on sight alone, identifying every little nuance at a glance. It's another case of monkey see, monkey do and it gets you to internalize movement that you see immediately. I tend to do this with videos, and especially with tutorials so that when I actually get outside to practice something it's as if I've trained it a bunch before.

    We just had the monthly out in Sacramento yesterday. Jams are the perfect setup for this kind of eye training because you're bound to meet up with someone you don't know and you're not used to mimicking their movement. I like to spend time watching quality movement and often end up watching  a lot of the same things over and over again to get that visual training in. I use a similar visualization technique when I go to sleep, imagining certain routes and skills that I don't quite have yet but they're performing cleanly in my visualization. It's just another, less taxing way to grease that neurological groove.