Stephen Curry, considered one of the greatest NBA shooters of all time, owes a lot of this success to a unique practice regimen devised by his trainer, Brandon Payne.
Payne’s philosophy is focused on improving “neuromuscular” efficiency – training the connection between mind and body. One such novel workout requires Curry to wear a pair of military-grade strobe glasses that strobe at different speeds, impairing vision, while Curry dribbles a basketball with one hand and catches a tennis ball with the other. Take away that stressor on the senses during the game and Curry’s reaction times are faster.
Overloading the brain and body during practice and then contrasting it in order to get immediate feelings of improvement are what Payne does in his skill work with Curry.
As Diamond Leung, a journalist, wrote about Curry’s regime, he realized that there was a lesson in all this for him and us. Thanks to all the stimulation from our devices, we are already wearing strobe glasses and are in the midst of a struggle to focus on any single activity long enough to carry it out with imagination, verve and precision.
The Curry workout is perhaps the ultimate call for mindfulness.
When I’ve got something intricate to work on, I now tend to visit coffee shops with bad Wi-Fi. That forces me to keep working on the task at hand, even if I’m stuck for a little while. It also gives me a chance to peel back the project to first principles every now and then, and to do some sustained, free-form thinking about what I’m trying to accomplish… it’s hard to know when breakthroughs will happen. Getting rid of sensory overload doesn’t instantly guarantee success. But it improves the odds. – Diamond Leung
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Source and thanks to: Mercury News article on Stephen Curry and Brandon Payne
A Learning a Day 