December 14
How to respond to getting it wrong?
Playing with speed
Whilst Level 3 is where I’m pushing myself at the moment, I like to mix in a little Level 1 and 2 at top speed to see how I do. Since I realised recently that Level 3 was not causing me complete havoc any more I thought I would have a go at doing it at speed.
Gah!
This was tricky. The difficulty however was less to do with the movement itself (though at speed I did get lost many, many times) but in keeping up the speed. Whenever I wasn’t sure what was next I found it nearly impossible to make a move that I wasn’t confident in. Rather than keep going, even if I knew I’d mucked it up, I would freeze until I had worked out what the next move was.
What can I do when things go wrong?
Part of me thinks that this isn’t really a problem. I can go as fast as possible and get frozen every so often and it will still be more taxing that going through it slowly. I do get some moments where I’m able to flow through a tricky situation and others where repeating it on the same side and/or then repeating on the opposite side makes the pattern clearer and I can see it in my mind more clearly.
However, I had originally been aiming to keep up the pace and just go wrong if I went wrong, and that didn’t work. Rather than just move my arms and keep going, even though I was very confident that I had gone wrong and would therefore need to repeat this section, my arms would just freeze, if only for a second, until I worked out the next move. I’m wondering if this is where using the DVD would be useful – since I can jump back in by following the DVD when I freeze and just skip where I get stuck for now, repeating this over and over until I get stuck less often.
On my own though, I know that I’m able to go back and repeat and repeat as much as I like an area that catches me up until I feel like I’ve at least got a better grasp of it and then move on (I don’t want to spend hours waving my arms around – they start to ache after a while).
Anything over Level 3 and the DVD won’t be available anyway. But presumably the keep-pushing method is what happens in a class environment. So what do you reckon – is it better to immediately stop and work it out or try and keep pushing through?