Reps.

I have spent so much of my life trying to get around doing the reps, but at the end of the day for many of the things I do and what I want it all comes down to reps. It wasn’t until I fell in love with the reps that I began to see the most improvement. Whether it was practicing my kickflips on a skateboard until I could do 5 in a row, playing a game hitting the 7 and the 10 pin every morning, or slogging away at open mics every night of the week. Reps are the building blocks of any skill.  

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” C.S. Lewis.

The most important thing with any skill comes down to just doing it. The human mind is an amazing thing, we have this ability to learn things. It just takes time and practice. There are so many little things that happen when we do reps.

I am a proponent of deliberate practice and repetitions. The way I approach any skill:

1. Identify the skill I want.

2. Break it down into small parts, find the smallest amount I can do at a regular frequency and build from there.

3. Incorporating a self-reflecting feedback loop.

o   This could be listening or watching sets.

o   Checking in after every set and thinking about how I can improve or get better? What worked well? Why? What didn’t work? Why?

o   Checking in with myself whenever I begin to feel comfortable and add a bit more challenge in some way.

4. Repeat!

I was reading about how to build muscle at the gym. I have not made the time to continue with it but I got a lot from the process. So a technique I read about was to start small and gradually add weight every week. I kept a journal of lifts, how many reps and weights. Once that lift got easier, I would increase the weight the next week. I slowly built up to more and more weight. The growth I saw at the gym was amazing. I have since applied this to my standup and seen a lot of growth. It is about consistency over anything. So if something is too hard I just cut back to an amount that is manageable, the same way I would if a lift was too much, I would go back down and just keep with the smaller weight until I was ready to move up. The showing up was the most important thing.

Sleep or days of rest. Sleep is a very important part of the process. So often I will be trying to do something over and over and I can't seem to do it. Then I set it down, sleep on it, then when I come back the next day I am able to do it like magic. This comes from the brain digesting the information and streamlining the reps while you are sleeping. When I practice something enough, my subconscious will take over at night and figure it out. I was recently trying to learn to play piano and had so many days where I couldn’t do it even a little bit, then a few days later I was playing and it felt like an out of body experience because I was just playing seemingly without even thinking leaving my brain available for other things. That’s why small chunks with rest in between is the best way to learn something.

The hardest part of this is that there is a lot of time spent on a plateau at the higher levels. At first we can notice a huge leap in skill, but as we do more reps we don’t see that game changing growth, it's more subtle. I find myself growing in ways I didn’t even know I needed to grow. The best way for me to get out of a plateau is to push myself a little, find a way of getting out of this much higher level comfort zone.

The thing I keep having to learn over and over is that to get really good at standup there really isn’t any other magic technique other than just doing the reps. Standup has a built-in feedback loop of if you are not funny you won’t get laughs, so the more you do it the more laughs you will get. Trust yourself and just do the reps. Follow what is fun and follow the laughs, that’s it. If I get too comfortable I just push myself in some way to grow that comfort zone. The secret is just keep showing up.

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Thank you for reading, You’re doing great.

Bjorn RG.