Is physical effort enough?

Here's some valuable training advice by Matt Thornton, Brazilian JuJitsu and MMA coach and head of the Straight Blast Gym worldwide matial arts organization. I found it in an interview of his, included in the Functional JKD instructional DVD series. Check it out and see if it applies to you (the stranscription was done by me so there might be a few small errors, but the general content is there):

"I hear that sometimes, my students will complain that some people are natural athletes. It is true, there are definitely people that pick up things quicker, they do BJJ for a year or two and they're really good. But alot of it also has to do with the way you think: a lot of the people that complain about learning slowly are just lazy. They may work hard physically, but they lack the most important element you must have in order to learn anything, which is imagination. When they see me learning something new and a day later they see me doing it in sparring, what they don't realize is that between the moment I learned the technique and the moment I came out and used, I have been thinking about it. I go to bed at night thinking about it, I visualize it, I wonder where it would fit in the context of the whole game, how it could be used from different positions, so I can see it in my mind and then I can use it. It's not just the physical training, there's also the mental part and I think a lot of people are just lazy, they just don't do it. 'Oh, that's the move? OK, show where else you can use it', they say, instead of 'Hmmm, I wonder where else you can use that move, let me think about it for a minute and let me use my powers of deduction'. You can't possibly learn this way. It's too complicated, so you really need that imagination. The people I'm talking about usually don't listen to music and they don't read a lot. If they exercised their brain muscle, they'd learn a lot faster too'.

Here's something for you to keep in mind: if you thought that training in martial arts is something that happens exclussively in the gym, and after you exit the door it is all over, you're going to have a hard time to get really good at your game. Visualization and mental rehersal can give you a serious edge: according to football coach Andrew Caruso, "virtually all recent research has shown that five hours of physical practice and one hour of visualization is consistently better than six hours of physical practice!" [1] All you have to do, is use your imagination. Elite professional athletes all over the world reap great benefits for this. Why wouldn't you?

[1] Caruso, A. Sports Psychology Basics. Reedswain, 2004.

You can find out more about Matt Thornton and the Straight Blast Gym here. You can also find some very interesting articles about training on his "Aliveness 101 blog":