I’ve been saying for awhile now that my life right now is the Rocky montage. It feels like I’ve been training and working to improve forevvverrrrrr but actually it’s been a short time. And if I think of it as a Rocky-style montage then it is easier to bear.
So for my birthday tournament (more deets on that later) I decided to make a literal montage of my two years of training. While I don’t have a lot of video I’ve been lucky that my coach has occasionally taken training video so I can see what I am doing right and wrong. I’ve saved all those videos over the years, along with some security footage from the courts cameras, and came up with this little montage.
Unlike a Rocky montage though (where he trains in perfect form) I have never been so perfect and precise, as you’ll see. I can nail something in training and then months later totally forget it and do it poor form again. Real training is never so neat as a movie montage. If only!
But if my life is a montage, I’m only halfway through it. In life there is no ultimate victory match, no fight against a Russian. So while this video is a short montage, the true training in life will never end. But that’s okay. Because as frustrating as it is sometimes, it’s still very, very fun.
Well done, you have improved from beginner to intermediate and nice to see the before & after shots 🙂 As you said you have a long way to go but just enjoy the journey 🙂
I’ve been playing and coaching for 45 years and still learn something new each year 🙂
I won’t go down the road of giving you advice as you are travelling your own path so good luck but remember “practice makes perfect” but also makes permanent so make sure you do the correct practices 🙂
Haha, yeah. Actually you stumbled on the secret message of the video. In Rocky, as he does his training montage, he might stumble, or stop from exhaustion, but his technique and form is excellent the whole time. For me, my coach only took videos of me training when my form was poor, so I could look at it myself and see what his criticism of me was. (He would say something, like, my racket was too low, or I wasn’t crouched enough and I would say “no, I did it right!” and he would say “oh really?” and then take a video of me so I could see my own errors.) When I do something correctly he never takes a video, so don’t worry, my coach and I are very aware of it. 😉
I also tried to put in some shots of me training something correctly and then later in a game me f-ing it all up. That’s one of my “signature moves” nailing something in a training session and yet taking weeks or months to do it correctly in a game. Also, if you notice I say I have been training for three years yet I only have two years of footage. Those first shots in the video are actually after I’d been playing for a year and training for half a year, heh heh. I really wish I had footage from my first few months. I can’t even imagine how I played.
But that was the real purpose of my video, to show how messy and imperfect real training is. But also if you never give up and keep at it you can improve in spite of yourself. I think only badminton players that recognize form and technique will get that message. Glad one person picked up on it! 😉
Very nice progress ! I was a baddie from my school days but because of my career in a different line had a long break. Just started again and my body has changed a lot I feel like im learning it again. Cheers !!