In the comfort zone of the couch, or in the thick of the scrum, bad habits can get the better of us. Here’s how to hit the reboot button, and kick those habits out of your way
Clicking your pen during meetings. Talking with your mouth open, biting your nails, smoking, spending too much time on Twitter, sleeping with your makeup on. What’s your bad habit? There are plenty out there, that’s for sure. One website lists 187 bad habits, and those were just the “Most common”!
Mine? Food-related, of course. You don’t get this body by sticking to celery and sparkling water. My better half could probably list close on 187 of the suckers, but to my mind, coming home from work and easing into the cheese and biscuits, along with the constant nibbling that tends to accompany my TV time on the couch, are the two biggies.
The two main causes of bad habits, say the experts, are stress and boredom. To which I can relate, but of course, that may be scratching the surface, with much deeper issues potentially at play. Issues that tend to be tough to think about. Issues that require incredible honesty with oneself in order to make any change.
Recognising the causes of our bad habits is crucial to overcoming them. The only thing keeping me from “Jabba the Hut” status is the level of willpower I was lucky enough to inherit from my dad. So once a year, I take a firm swipe at those nasty habits.
Am I addressing the root cause? I’m not sure, but it is a coping mechanism based on a fair amount of introspection, honesty and self-awareness. And I’m cool with that.
Enough about me, though. Today I want to talk about a bad habit caused by stress of a very different nature. One initiated through two 900kg forces coming together with a fair amount of vigour – the scrum.
Keeping that collision on the same plane is incredibly difficult, especially given the tight modern-day jerseys and lack of binding space. The very basics of physics suggest that it is going to go either up or down. And we then task the poor baobab trees disguised as a props to hold it up.
Hence the scrum becoming a horror show of resets. A sad guessing game within a game that allows teams to milk both penalties and yellow cards from referees unfairly asked to sort the mess out themselves. But that is a column for another day.
It’s a tough gig being a prop. As a scrum coach, one of my primary jobs is to make sure these guys get into good body positions, allowing the transfer of power that comes from the back 5 efficiently and effectively.
This year I had a tighthead prop who had developed perhaps the worst habit a guy in his position can have – a skew back. One that instead of looking like an ironing board, was tending to look like a plane taking off. Especially when the pressure was on.
And with the opposition loosehead looking to get under those ribs and turn you into a champagne cork, employing a body position like that is a bit like sending out an invitation to an all you can eat buffet – a place where props can really do damage.
And while he knew he was doing it, had seen it happening in the game clips, and had worked on it both in a team and individual environment, I just could not get him to break the habit.
Enter our strength and conditioning coach, along with his snazzy new app offering body-position analysis using core joint vectors created from video clips. It allowed us to spot a change in ankle flexibility that saw our man unable to raise his hips when the pressure was on. Hence the shoulders slipping above the hips.
And while it was not all about the ankle, it did give us something other than the habit to focus on. So together with an offer to buy him a beer for every scrum that collapsed rather than went up (as said, physics decrees one or the other), we eventually got him into a headspace that allowed him to break the habit.
I am not sure you just eliminate a bad habit, though, instead focus on replacing it. Bad habits provide some type of benefit in your life, hence a simplistic “Just stop doing it” rarely working. To me it makes more sense to replace your bad habits with a healthier or better behaviour that addresses that same need.
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