The training continues

Ok update on our training schedule...

Most of the team have been trying to do some personal mid-week training during the week and we have been doing weekly fitness training to build endurance and core muscle groups. At the end of the day we play paintball not only for fun but because the end result is that we all become fitter. And for 30+ year old adults this is pretty important if you want to live a healthy life.


When you're running around RD, the size of the field is not an issue in terms of your fitness but on a tournament regulation sized field where the bunkers are further apart and the field is a lot bigger - fitness, speed and agility are going to be an issue especially after 7-9 games of a tournament. Not only that, for a 2 day tournament, if your team does make it into the Sunday play-offs pulling up fresh the next day ready to do it all again is going to be very important. This is not even taking into account the fact the everyone's using electronic markers and there is much more paint flying in all directions so the adrenalin levels are on overload. It comes down to this... if you are tired you don't think clearly... if you don't think clearly you are useless to the rest of your team during a game - that few seconds reaction time and slower adjustments to become aware of what's happening on the field could mean the difference between winning and losing...

A few of the guys I've jokingly given weight loss goals... this is more like a personal goal for themselves to take up...

As the reps for the fitness training increases we'll be working more on basic paintball skills... because the fundamentals are all important - until what we practice becomes second nature our team will not improve...

Last Sundays training was great... although all players showed up at different times everyone still put in their fitness session before we ended having some skirmishes with other local teams. My main aim for the skirmishes was to train the guys to get to spots off the break... they did this quite well and as the games went on their confidence to take pre-planned positions increased. Comments from players from other teams also helped work out why certain players were shot...

Next stage will obviously be how to work as a team to take advantage of good field position... the mental side of speedball is probably the hardest part of speedball to master. To be able to play the game as a team, co-operate and to play with purpose will take some time. Keeping your form in game and being able to second guess your opponents moves is something that only seasoned players can hope for. For now we're taking a leaf from the Warfreaks playbook to simply have fun and not concern ourselves with winning so much.

This week we're going to stick with personal training and doing our own drill sessions - a few guys have new family members on the way and we have to be careful about our spending. I think our families will appreciate that we spend one entire weekend with them (seeing that every weekend after that will be a paintball weekend lol)