The guys you had and the work you put in were far more important in achieving the level and success Nexus reached than any cash or equipment or external help. What did the guys do between those two weekends of training a month?
The model above is one that has worked in sport although i appreciate it is a long way away from paintball and the historical demographic.
I'm thinking back to your original question, "can a team make it by training for a year" - a model like this has more of a chance of working than a bunch of mates who already play who work 9-5 jobs, some have a mortgage, some rely on heir parents, some live 200miles from the others, etc, etc who are going to train together two weekends a month. If an action requires somewhere in the region of 10,000 quality repetitions to become 'automatic', the quality of practice has to be high and the exposure to that practice has to be frequent. Training 4 days out of 30 should actually have had minimal impact in the grand scheme of human performance so what Nexus achieved is even more impressive.
@Stan - With no disrespect intended whatsoever - One of the many aspects of paintball that gets in the way of a team/player's progress is BS .. I've mentioned this before when people who think they know about paintball indulge themselves and the people listening to it have no real way of knowing its BS - if it
sounds good, it
must be good is the current way of deciding ....
And one of these nuggets is the idea that muscle memory needs 10,000 repetitions [or whatever number people wish to plug in] to engrain it into your technical portfolio.
I think it's because people tend to accept what sounds ok because it's much easier to do rather than question it and then have to do the necessary research.
You give me a player on Saturday morning and by end of Sunday he's be able to execute the snap-shot to the required standard ... And if what I say is true then the real number isn't 10,000, it's around 100 plus or minus 25 ...
However, that 100 practice actions need to be set up correctly such that each action is separate from the one before. If you do this then it prevents players from mindlessly repeating the required action one after another like a metronome on cocaine.
You optimise [steepen] your learning curve by ensuring players don't just do it mechanically - each practice action has to be done individually.
And IMHO, there's no such thing as 'muscle memory' in the way it's portrayed by some people ... it's true to say that after 10,000 repetitions your muscle-set would have gotten used to performing the same action but that action is wholly controlled by a bunch of neurons extending from the brain/mind down through the spinal cord ... the muscles cannot move in a controlled fashion unless the mind is doing the controlling.
It's not muscle memory at all that underwrites improvement, it's the brain/mind memory of someone who's been prepared to listen and do what's asked of him/her.
Think about this - the way that language is processed and executed is an extremely complex set of neuronal actions because it recruits multiple areas of the brain that all need to be executed perfectly if the words are to come out correctly ... the sheer complexity of muscle control of the vocal chords, mouth and tongue is mind-boggling when you think about how easily we all do it.
Now, if I ask you to learn a phrase in French with the appropriate pronunciation [accent] then how many times do you think it would take before you did a reasonable job in mastering that phrase?
It would take no more than 20 minutes if you concentrate ...it may not be perfect but it will be good enough for a French person to understand
And so, when you compare that with trying to master a snap-shot - the snap-shot involves nowhere near the complexity of neuronal action required to talk like a frog.
This means, if you wish to improve then it's not as hard as some people think if you know what you are doing and you have players with the right mindset.
