Getting Started

I play pickleball.  (Go ahead and judge me.  I don’t care.  It’s fun.)  I play at the community courts where people at all levels can show up depending on the day.  In the last while, a person has been coming who has never played any sports before, ever.  She is learning a ton and, I think, having some fun.  It has made me think about the learning process for fitness generally.

Trying a new thing can be baffling.  All of a sudden we have way more body parts than we thought we did and they’re not where we thought they were and what is the score again?  We don’t want to make fools of ourselves (well, except me.  I’m good at it.), so we push ourselves to learn all the things at once.  This usually does not work.

 

Here’s what does work:  encouragement.  When we are new at something, we need to know that we’re doing something—ANYTHING—right.  Maybe we didn’t get the ball over the net, but we did hit it solidly.  Maybe we tried hitting the ball backhand instead of panicking.  Maybe we hustled to get to the ball.

 

Another thing that works:  focusing on one part of the task.  We can’t think about how to grip the paddle and where our feet are and bending our knees and keeping the paddle face in the right place and watching the ball all at the same time.  We need to pick one thing, maybe two.  We decide:  today I’m going to watch the ball hit the paddle and I’m going to follow through on my shot.  When that gets easier, we can try another thing.

 

One more thing that works:  forgetting the bad bits.  The last 27 serves went into the net?  So what?  We take a deep breath, we concentrate, and we hit the next one. 

 

Go play.