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HOW MUCH TRAINING IS JUSTIFIABLE?

‘It’ll be all right on the night’ is the philosophy that a performance will be successful, overcoming problems earlier. Performers can be athletes, sports players, stage artistes, musicians, artists, writers or orators. The presence of an audience, other competitors or judges can possibly stimulate achievement surpassing what they had attained previously in training, practice or rehearsal. A performer who has a large home crowd on the edge of their seats usually does her best.

A performer can’t count on rising to the occasion. Having achieved a personal best in training is an advantage. Not all training is for fine tuning. Training can be done for preparation, technique development and refinement, physical testing, assessment, familiarisation, habituation to venue and climate, lowering of perceived effort, hypertrophy and to build self-confidence. Practice and rehearsal aim to anticipate performance and competition conditions. At an elite level, ‘It’ll be all right on the night’ is less acceptable and instead many performers follow long, intense training programmes.

In my novel ‘Time is Gold’ Maxi experiments with and learns to use Extreme Flow for an attempt on the world marathon record, coached by her physicist partner Jack and a team of experts in psychology, physiology, neuroscience and Zen. The story is futuristic and describes fine-tuning for top performance. Available on Amazon https://martinknox.com

USE IT AND LOSE IT?

USE IT AND LOSE IT?

Some species heartbeat rate averages and lifespans are shown in the table below.

SPECIES HEARTBEAT RATE

Beats per minute

LIFESPAN

Years

HEARTBEATS

during lifespan x109

Hummingbird 1200 3.5 2.2
Human 60 70 2.2
African elephant 30 70 1.1
Bowhead whale 200 10 1.1

In his book: Scale, Geoffrey West hypothesises that animals live for about 1.2 billion heartbeats, whatever their size, ranging from hamsters to whales. Is there an evolutionary process, or any other process, that could explain this similarity? Could heartbeat conservation cause longevity? Please comment here:

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