The Mental Game: Shifting my perception of difficulty makes tricks easier!

"Baseball is 90% mental, the other half is physical."
   -Attributed to Yogi Berra

I have written about this before, but I feel the need to repeat it from my experience today.  We all know that the mental game is important.  Personally, I need to periodically step back from my day-to-day routine and look at my game from the perspective of 'what might be', as opposed to 'what I believe I'm capable of.'

Today I was challenged by my facebook friends to work on Rubberman, along with some strings I would not have probably thought to attempt on my own.  All these tricks are based on Atomic sets, which have always been challenging for me, even though I have spent the past several years actively working on them.  So in my mind, I have built up an aura of difficulty in my mind around the notion of Atomic tricks.  I have physically worked them to the point that I can hit them 70% of the time, but I was finding myself only working them once a week due to my 'perception' that they were high impact.  I was recently skooling Paradox Symp Whirls (rainbows) and caused a compression related impact pain in my right lower back.  In my mind, the Atomic tricks were as high-impact as the PSWhirls.  In retrospect, after careful physical analysis, I have to say that while Atomic tricks are more taxing on the hamstrings and hip related dexterity, that the impact is minimal because the set foot touches down almost immediately.

Now that I have reset my perception of Atomic tricks, I have allowed myself to obsess on them.  I can't stop doing them.  I'm hitting Leg Beaters, EggPlant, and Atom Smashers.  I'm hitting Atomic tricks from all kinds of sets, and I'm hitting all kinds of tricks out of Leg Beaters now, thanks to my facebook friends challenging me.  It has caused some stress on other parts of my legs, but as long as I don't over do it, I should be okay.  I'll always rely on my cross body tricks to some extent, but it is nice to escape that.  I want to be able to throw atomic tricks in mid string confidently and from unexpected places.

Shred notes: 1/23/2011
I also skooled juggles, particularly Seamless-Legbeaters-out of juggles.  I'll keep skooling it and I'll publish a juggling video again soon.  Imagine juggle-juggle-juggle-legbeater-blur-juggle-juggle-juggle-legbeater-blur.  Working on that kind of stuff.  Seamless-in juggle, seamless-out juggle.