Imagine standing in your backyard. Maybe you’re holding a football, a golf club, or a tennis racket. You look at it, and for a second, you feel a bit of a sting. You remember the athlete you used to be. Or maybe, you think about the athlete you never got to be because you were too busy building a career, a family, and a life.
You look at guys like Philip Rivers. Even after retiring from the NFL, he looks like he has a "superpower." Every time he throws a ball, it’s perfect. It’s smooth. It looks like he isn't even trying. We call that "talent," but that’s a lie we tell ourselves to feel better about being average.
Even after the NFL, the "map" remains.
What if I told you that Philip Rivers doesn’t have a secret gene? He has a better "map" in his brain than you do. And what if I told you that you could download that same map in a few weeks?
The "Dad Body" of the Brain
Most guys who are gradually feeling signs of aging think the problem is their joints or their muscles. We think we’re just "getting old." But the real problem is that your brain’s "GPS" for movement has gone fuzzy.
When you try to swing a club or throw a ball, your brain is sending messy instructions. It’s like trying to stream a 4K movie on a dial-up internet connection. It’s laggy. It’s frustrating. And no matter how many times you "practice," you just keep practicing the same mistakes.
You're actually reinforcing getting worse when you practice with those messy instructions.
Practicing bad habits only burns them deeper into your circuit.
Once you accept and understand that, a replacement is needed or your frustration grows (since you know what you're doing—what almost everyone is doing—only makes you worse).
Before going further, it's also important to know that all great players have elite skills. It's physics-based. If players don't have elite skills, they can't generate enough consistency, power, and so on to be an elite player. People often mistakenly see those skills as 'talent'.
It's not.
Talent is the ability to LEARN those skills, just like someone who has talent in math can pick up math concepts faster and at a higher level than an average person. It's the same thing. Talent is the ability to learn the requirements for success in a certain domain (or at least, that’s what the gating item of talent is).
For sports, the foundation of talent is the ability to learn required elite technique. If you've heard the word 'fundamentals' thrown around in sports lingo, that's exactly it. If you don't have great fundamentals, you aren't going to be elite. So, for the adult athlete (or any athlete) to break through whatever plateaus they have, they need to become more talented.
Wait... "More Talented?"
"But, that's impossible!" You say.
Let's step back a sec. If talent is the ability to learn elite skills... then improving the ability to learn elite skills improves talent. Yes? Of course, yes! And the acquisition of elite skills directly leads to results improvement—often dramatic results improvement.
The moment talent is upgraded, performance plateaus shatter.
"OK. How do I do that?" You ask.
There's a short answer and a long (very long) answer. We'll go with the short one for now. You need to rewire your nervous system's movement pattern of the skill (example: golf swing). Some call that 'muscle memory'. You need to rewrite the muscle memory.
"Ok. But, I thought muscle memory means it's permanent or something... kinda like riding a bike?" You say. Kind of. But, here's the fun part.
Your brain is amazing. It's a learning machine. It is still the world champion of learning (even in the age of AI). If you give it the right 'inputs,' it will rewire your movement pattern (example: golf swing).
If you structure the inputs in a very specific way, it will rewire the movement pattern IMMEDIATELY. (A university case study shows muscle firing patterns changing after a few minutes with the method in question).