Hmmm. Don't have one? Don't feel too bad - I'd be willing to bet good money that over 90% of your fellow readers don't either. Even I only had a rough idea in my head of what I was wanting to achieve over the next few months - something I had to sit down and commit to paper before I could go ahead and write this article without feeling like a hypocrite!
So why is it that ping-pong players who will happily spend hours every week at their club or on the Internet chatting away to friends and competitors about table tennis, won't spend 15 minutes preparing a plan to improve their play? Could it be that they don't realize the benefits of making a concrete plan? Or are there other reasons at work?
Benefits of Making a Ping-Pong Plan
Some of the advantages of making a plan include:- Finding more time to train and play. Working out a schedule of your week allows you to determine exactly what free hours you have to train, and can help you to avoid accidentally committing to other things that would affect your training time.
- Efficient allocation of scarce resources. This is a fancy way of saying that if you only have a couple of hours of training time per week, it's important to have a good idea of exactly what you want to get done in that time. You don't have any spare hours to waste in training things you don't need.
- Focus - both in matches and in training. Having a plan for your matches give you a starting point for your tactics, so that you don't go out and play aimlessly. Having a good training plan gives you direction over the next few months, so that you have something to aim for. In both cases, if your plan turns out to be less than perfect, you can reevaluate and try to improve your plan. Without a plan, you are likely to drift along, making less progress than you should.
Reasons Why We Fail To Plan Our Ping-Pong Play
When simple logic indicates that making a ping-pong plan is common sense, but most of us still don't spend the time to do it, that suggests that the reasons for not making a plan are not fully logical. I think our human emotions and perceptions tend to get in the way of our rational brain at times. Here's a number of reasons why ping-pong players don't bother to plan ahead, even though common sense says that we should:- Fear of Inadequacy. If we don't give 100% effort and we fail, we can always say that we could have succeeded if we really wanted to try hard enough, which is a way to soften the blow to our egos. But if we really do put in 100% and still fail, we have shown ourselves to not be up to the task. The problem here is that we tend to forget that in both cases we are still a failure as far as everyone else is concerned - they don't care whether we could have tried harder. And by not trying as hard as we can, we increase the chances of failure as well!
- Laziness. For many players, it is simply more fun to stick to playing table tennis and searching for the magic rubber and blade that will fix all their problems. They don't want to have to put in the mental effort of thinking about their game - that is too much like work.
- Paralysis by Analysis. It is human nature to want to get as much information as possible before making a decision and setting a plan, in case you make a mistake. But when you take this too far, you never get around to drawing up a plan, because you are always afraid that you may have missed something, and so you keep on searching for more information and opinions. And since there is no shortage of information and opinions out there, much of them conflicting with each other, the more unsure you get that you are on the right track, so the more you think you need further data before making a plan.
- Self-Image. When you go to the effort of making a proper plan, you have to confront the bad areas of your table tennis game, as well as the good. Some players just can't handle having to acknowledge that any part of their game is weak, so they would rather not plan at all, so that they can continue to ignore their weaknesses.
- Fear of Responsibility. The process of planning places the duty of getting things right squarely on your own shoulders. If you plan and fail, there isn't anybody or anything else to blame, since you should have taken everything into account. In today's culture of blaming others, this is a scary thing for some people to have to deal with.
- Fear of Peers. In some parts of today's society, effort and striving is not cool. The cool thing is to be able to succeed without any real effort or without even particularly wanting to succeed in the first place - as if success or failure doesn't really matter because all that stuff is beneath you. Planning is a public admission that you really do want to succeed, and that it does matter to you whether you win or lose. To some people, that just isn't cool, and they couldn't bear it if their friends and peers realized that deep down, they do care.
