Today I want to spend some time talking about the concept of Progressive Resistance. Progressive resistance is the idea to accelerate your learning by picking the right level of resistance.
With too little resistance our skills are never challenged. With too much resistance our skills are challenged too much. The key is finding the right amount of resistance such that we can complete the goal, task, or objective and still find meaningful growth in the struggle.
I realised this when I was learning how to do an armbar.
It is just impractical to go from never having done an armbar to immediately wanting to do an armbar on a fully resisting opponent. There’s just no way I was going to get it. Progressive resistance to the rescue.
This is how you apply the concept of progressive resistance in learning how to do an armbar:
First practice without any resistance (0%). Ask your training partner to just let you do the moves over and over again without any resistance. Why? Because your brain needs to learn the new movements. Your brain needs to learn how to fire the right neurons together.
Once you’ve done that 30 times or so you can start adding slight resistance (10%). Ask your partner to provide very weak resistance such that you feel that he is fighting against you a little bit, but you can still easily finish the movement. You’ll immediately notice tons of small new details that weren’t obvious at 0% but are at 10% resistance.
This is the main loop that you want to cycle through. You first practice without any resistance, go through the motions, and once you feel comfortable at that level of resistance you push to the next. Slowly you can increase the resistance to 20%, 30%, etc., adding more and more complexity along the way.
After practicing this for a few weeks and having increased the resistance every time you can finally ask your training partner to give it a full 100%, but because you’ve been training at 80%-90% resistance your chances of hitting the armbar against a fully resisting opponent are far greater than were you to immediately jump from 0% resistance to 100% resistance. The power of progressive resistance in action.
The key lesson is that to learn effectively you need to find the right level of resistance, not too little, not too much.