Rickard Gustafsson | Saturday, 6 September 2025
When you want to improve in some technical activity it is good to think about technical aspects. Why and how things work or not. Look and analyse what top performers do good, what they do and still perform good. Everything a top performer does isn’t the most optimal thing to do, sometimes they do perform good even though they do something a bit wrong. But sometimes you pick up bad things from this, when you do you hopefully quickly find that it wasn’t good for you and can move on. Sometimes you can really get into trouble just because of thinking.
One time when I was competing in weightlifting I did fall asleep when riding home on the train and dreamt about a big change in my technique. I dreamt that I had switched which leg I should put forward in the split jerk. Split jerk - when the weightlifter has cleaned the bar to the shoulders and from there jerks it overhead. This is a movement that you cannot think about doing, it just has to happen or you will be too slow. At least on working weights. This dream did affect me for, if I remember correctly, a couple of weeks. My conscious and subconscious mind was affected. My regular split didn’t work well or felt right, switching legs didn’t work either. All it took to get better was just time. And I didn’t switch legs in the end.
Before the competition in June I had some unsure details in my distance technique. I haven’t really sorted all the details out yet, and this weekend I have a competition. So I have been thinking a lot about technique. This is not the time to do it. At least I should know that now. So at the beginning of the week I was a it all over in my mind about how I shall cast in the competition. But during this week I have gotten an involuntary break from casting and been too busy to actually think about casting. I think that has been good, things have sorted them self out subconsciously. Breaks in your training are be good. I think I’ll have couple of weeks off from distance casting after the competition. And as we are in the best period for seatrout fishing its a good time for stepping down parts of my training.
Can we avoid thinking ourself into trouble? I don’t really know, but I know as our experience grow we get more resistent to it. And I don’t think that we should avoid exploring new things in our sport. As I find that watching others perform a movement is a really good method for learning the movement. One problem here as you are less experienced it is hard to know which videos are worthy to explore. In our algorithm driven content providers we don’t get feed the best videos, we get served the videos from the creators best at promoting them self.
Cheers, Rickard.
PoD: I had to find a picture showing a split jerk and if you do an image search for that be sure to set your content filters to a safe level. The picture is taken at the split second where the barbell is ”weightless” and the lifter is pushing under the barbell.