Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 17 May 2025
Sometimes less is more. After a day at work and feeling tired, empty, and even miserable, a long training session probably isn’t the best idea. There might be a couple of productive minutes in the session still, but pushing through a long session will likely result in many more unproductive minutes as well. Those bad minutes can put doubt in your mind, might lead to an injury, or in the worst case, ingrain some bad habits. Practice doesn’t make perfect—practice makes permanent. Good practice is the key to perfect. If we could practice perfect, we probably wouldn’t need practice.
So what’s too much? Highly individual. It depends on how near our limit we are training, physical and mental state, total training load over a period. The level of skill is also a determinant, but that also ties into how near our limit we are training. And that limit is a combination of skill in what we are training and our physical capacity. The physical capacity is our base and foundation that we are building upon.
In the best case scenario, we would always train with a coach on our side who could tell us when enough is enough. Second best is to have a plan for the session before it starts and stick to it. Not start to add more things on a bad day. We can probably feel what state we are in before the session. If we’re smart, we’ll listen to the signals our body gives us and plan accordingly. On the not-so-good days, plan for 15–30 minutes. Try to keep the line short—short in this case is relative to your skill. On better days, plan for 45–60 minutes. Start with some warm-up drills, then go on to the most demanding drills, and then finish with some easier drills. If you stay too long in the demanding drills, you will see a drop in performance and be tempted to start doing stupid things. Sometimes you succeed, but most times you won’t. Plan to end every session with a good feeling by planning to succeed.
Some days everything will just work and you could probably go on for a lot longer than usual. These days, it probably is like Yngwie Malmsteen says: “more is more.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHZ48AE3TOI
When I was competing in weightlifting, quite often I trained stupidly—or idiotically. But sometimes I had moments of clarity. Like calling it quits after setting a new personal record. A record lift and go home. Those periods were also the most productive ones. Translating that to fly casting could be to call it quits early on a day where you enter a new distance bracket. Go home or move on to something else.
Better to leave on a high note. Save the good feeling for the following sessions.
Cheers, Rickard
PoD: Keep your training on a level that keeps you wanting coming back for more, like Ronja.