Blog Archives
TWO COACHING PHILOSOPHIES
Time Is Gold has a story of an endurance runner, Maxi who becomes a champion with psychology, biomechanics, neuroscience, zen and physics advice from her coaching team. Their dualist philosophies equip her to expand the limits of her endurance. Her mind and her body improve by traditional didactic coaching.
In Turkeys Not Bees, Megan becomes a world champion pole vaulter, by exploring her technique with phenomenology and self-coaching. With the help of her physicist boyfriend, she develops a kinaesthetic numerical model that she uses to improve, focussing on her lived experience without a coach.
These stories by Martin Knox apply academic theories to top athletes’ training and performances in elite competition, in romantic settings. Both women learn to train and compete in flow. Maxi relies on advice from experts whereas Megan analyses her performance herself.
Both are available on Amazon. Reviews: martinknox.com
TIME IS GOLD
In Winter runners analyse their personal bests and reset their goals for the next season. In the novel Time is Gold author Martin Knox shows how a runner’s performance time depends on the neuroscience of her mental engagement, by analogy with Einstein’s Special Relativity, a tested theory. This new theory explains some extraordinary performances in athletics and behaviours of wild animals which have evolved in their own time, without constraint by clocks. Everyone can learn that their time is their own from this story about Maxi exploring theories of endurance, in love with physicist Jack and competing for Olympic Gold.
Available from Amazon. Reviews martinknox.com
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
Will it be all right on the night?
‘It’ll be all right on the night’ is the philosophy that a performance will be successful, overcoming earlier problems. 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 who is able to achieve a personal best in training is advantaged. 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 elite levels ‘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
