How to develop anticipation in your sport?
How to Develop Anticipation in Your Sport: Be One Step Ahead. Combat sports are an excellent illustration of the importance of anticipation, which requires patience and a calm mind. Anticipation can be done at two levels: beginner and expert. At the beginner level, anticipation is intercepting the attack when the opponent's body initiates its movement. At the expert level, anticipation is intercepting the attack during the opponent's decision-making, before the movement is initiated. To achieve this, you must develop your intuition.
Intuition is the immediate knowledge of truth without the aid of reasoning
It can be an innate quality in the fighter or can be developed over time. To apply intuition, you must have a good understanding of yourself and your opponent. Listen to your body sensations and the feeling you have of the opponent. Try to capture the heart and mind of the combatant with whom you come into contact.
Anticipation must be done depending on whether the opponent is more emotional or intellectual. The anticipation of an emotional fighter is easier to feel because the emotion is intense. The intellectual fighter is more difficult to feel because they work less in emotion. It will have to be analyzed more rationally.
An internal radar
To be able to anticipate, you must succeed in getting a deep sense of the opponent. Try to detect one's strengths and weaknesses, both physical and mental. We can feel deeply, in our bowels, the opponent's intentions. This vital biological faculty is part of the defense mechanisms that we have since birth. All living things have this ability to sense danger thanks to an internal radar that sounds the alarm and activates our body to trigger an immediate defense response.
How to develop anticipation?
To develop anticipation, stand with your eyes closed, facing a partner who will attack you with great intensity and conviction. Try to feel the moment when the partner will initiate their action. To get there, it takes mental calm and great concentration. The challenge is to reproduce this feeling in combat, with your eyes open.
This openness to others requires a lot of listening. We must also pay full attention to the opponent. Attention should be focused exclusively on the opponent. You have to be one with the other to feel their emotions and intentions. This union with the other allows understanding of rhythm and makes intuition finer.
To respond adequately to the attack, you must enter the rhythm and distance used by the opponent. These notions must be felt and learned from the first seconds of the fight.
To succeed in anticipation, the body and the mind must be available at all times
The spirit must be free and detached but focused and ready to react to any situation. During movement, the body must always be able to protect itself or to score a point. To do this, the limbs and the body must be well positioned. It is necessary to practice making movements in stable and malleable positions with flexible and rapid transitions, always having the guard well placed.
Anticipation tightens the pace of the fight and makes it more subtle. Stopping and blocking are defensive attacks that rely entirely on anticipation. Likewise, dodging, withdrawals, and displacements are most often caused by a prediction of the trajectory of the coup or the intentions of the opponent.
The phenomenon of anticipation remains mysterious. We can speak of telepathy or intuition, which goes beyond the simple analysis of manifest signs in the opponent. Still, since telepathy and intuition are themselves very mysterious phenomena, they do little to help us understand anticipation.
How does the brain calculate the trajectory of a ball thrown by an opponent?
The brain only considers the beginning and end points of the ball's trajectory, using the start point to determine its general trajectory and the end point to correct any initial estimations. The intermediate trajectory of the ball is not analyzed by the brain.
In the case of a strike, the brain is capable of anticipating an opponent's moves with great accuracy, especially with ample experience. Even the slightest maneuver by the opponent can be enough for the brain to anticipate the entire move.
Perceptual anticipation is a crucial skill in most sports, as it allows athletes to predict the movements of objects and people around them. Beyond sports, predicting movements is a fundamental function of our visual perception since our environment is in constant motion. However, our cognitive system faces a significant challenge since the time it takes to process visual information means that when we see the world, it has already changed.
Despite this challenge, we can catch a falling object and place our hand where it will be rather than where it is when its image enters our retina, thanks to the cognitive mechanism of perceptual anticipation. This mechanism evolves as we acquire expertise, particularly in the field of sports.
Cognitive processes
We project ourselves into what we will see next second, and several cognitive processes are responsible for this phenomenon. There is a common anticipation mechanism that allows us to extend the movement of any object, but there are also specific mechanisms for each domain. This second hypothesis suggests that we do not use the same mechanisms to anticipate the movement of a car as we do to predict the trajectory of a balloon.
Numerous studies support this hypothesis, demonstrating that anticipation depends on the knowledge we have acquired in a specific field. Acquiring expertise enhances our anticipation skills, as our experience increases our knowledge about a sport, allowing us to predict what will happen during an action in a shorter time. This rapid phenomenon is automatic, adapts to various situations, and represents the key to success in activities where anticipation is crucial, such as team sports.
As a result, our cognitive mechanisms utilize our past experiences to anticipate what will happen without our conscious awareness. The more we become experts in a field, the more refined these mechanisms become. Athletes are the prime example of this, as they can receive a pass from a teammate, even if the stadium's spotlights go out during the game.
To learn more, read: https://mentalaccelerator.com/resource/lucidity/get-clarity-in-your-sport