Get the training done! - Tango training log

micro training - systematic video - figures
manage the repetition frequency
your learning speed

Quite early in my tango life I bought a camera and started to collect videos from various tango workshops. Since then I have also wanted to refresh those memorable moments with interesting teachers and activate again the moves. To reach that goal I needed something convenient to maintain and organize my activities. The spreadsheet below seems to do the work!

The videos and activities!

My learning content comes from the workshops and courses I have participated and it includes also interesting videos from friends, youtube, and net courses. These items fall naturally into two main groups of figure and technique videos.

The basic aspects of movements as walking and turning or rhythms which do not come naturally to me are called for micro training. Because I do just 1-4 physical repetitions of each per day I can run quite a number of them daily.

Among the figures, I spotted a number of top favorites, which I really want to have with me to the pista. I decided to work more on them so I watch the videos and do the physical repetitions for more weeks than for the other groups. I call all the other figures for the reference group and I watch them regularly but less often.

The scientific evidence supporting visual learning has convinced me so I have included systematic video watching as a part of my training. I have an active state of mind when watching and I check the same videos during a whole week. After a rest period, they are activated again!

There are physical repetitions alternating with video watching. Usually I run the physical micro training in the morning as well as the video watching sessions. Later in the afternoon, it is time for the figures!

The spreadsheet is driving my training!

 This simple type of spreadsheet below is the aid I needed for collecting and maintaining the important information. In the beginning, it was easy to have control over the weekly work but when I got more rows I started to use the filtering option. In this way, it is easier to focus on the rows chosen for the week and hide away the other ones. Take a look at the information available on the sheet I use today.

(Picture only)          

The records for physical and video activities are included in the numbers for example 2.0015 where two/2 stands for physical activities and fifteen/0015 for how many times the video was reviewed.
Weekly repetitions are shown in columns - total and per row
Accum column - total for the year and per row.

             The same information but in concentration!

         

 

The total for week 37 year 2020 is 24,0009 - Physical repetitions were 24 and video reviews 9.
Every row shows the numbers for repetitions I have done ( 2,0015 ) and they accumulate to a total number of activities so far during the year, on top of the sheet! ( 116,0063 )

To see the numbers growing and to be able to create a continuous flow of training marks on the log table keeps me active. When I feel for relaxing from training the idea of unticked boxes pushes me to the activities again. This helps to bridge some short-term dips but if the feeling is more persistent I have changed something. I skipped some activities for weeks, start to work on other aspects of content. I continue changing until I feel happy with the new scheme. So far I have had two rounds of these changes - After about three months focusing on Achaval/Soares content, I had a break from mid-December to February. Other videos were in focus then! During the last week of the break, I was eagerly looking forward to starting the Achaval/Soares work again. Now in May, I get signals again for a new pause or change of content and I am curious how the daily routines will organize themself! What content is going to feel meaningful to work with!

Solo-training         

In my case, this has been SOLOtraining which means that I am free to place the activities wherever I want and when suitable! Usually I decide on Sunday what I feel for and what needs to be reviewed. Sometimes I plan for an easy week with few activities but weeks can be challenging too!

The physical part of training includes two types of activities. The figures I do include my moves and I am also leading the virtual follower's steps simultaneously. The short micro training is more about how my own body moves so I am just sensing my body and listening to my muscles! It takes maybe 5-10 minutes and fits in easily to my morning routines. Sometime later on the day, I run the figure groups on the spreadsheet. For figures and videos, I need to plan my time.

Learning speed

An unexpected result of these training records has been the information of how long time I have to work on different things until the skill starts to show. For most of the moves and figures, the number of repetitions has been surprisingly low. The level of performance is not of a champion but fully reasonable for a social dancer. When the figure or a move feels ok then just check the number of repetitions and ther you have your learning speed!

How about you? 

Want to stabilize your training? 

Do you want to know your learning speed?

Time to test maybe? 

If you want to know how to freeze the columheads try this video, starts at 1min  HERE!

I use a similar spreadsheet for a figure library and teacher notes. All of it you find HERE!

Why not support your training with mental actions on the sofa!

Many artists, sportspersons mix their physical training with mental activities - so WHY NOT in tango? To systematically and regularly review the class summaries and repeat, rehearse the movements in your mind will support your development! I describe below how I do today and you can pick what you think could develop your dance.

All stuff at one place keeps me organized

As I mentioned earlier I am in the process of collecting all my workshop content and youtube favorites to a google sheet that I call for Figure Library. I am halfway now with a few hundred entries. Having all this stuff in one place gives me better control on my coming learning. In the Library I have given every figure a name or a short description that identifies it. We are used to it - we started with ochos and americanas, didn't we! For me just reading the list of the figures activates the memory and reveals parts I have forgotten but it's easy to click the url and see the video again. When the library got larger it has been easier to use google mail to organize the review process!

Fast rehearsing with Gmail!

I choose the entries I want to work with and copy the two Library columns - figure name and url - and paste it to a gmail and send it to myself. When I open the mail I can read the names and recall the sequences. There are also corresponding video thumpnails at the bottom of the mail and this offers the fastest way to run a video review. You click the first one, it opens and starts to play at the timestamp by a click on the space bar. After one or two seconds I move to the next video by clicking on the arrow at the right side. 

If you want to repeat click the letter J which takes you a few seconds backward. You can also check possibilities with  H L > < for easier navigation. Sorry to say but sometimes they don't respond - I don't know why - but a click on the video seems to activate the controls again.

This works really well for videos when you have only one figure on it. Sometimes I have several, but gmail offers just the first one on the list. On my lucky day I saved the earliest occurrence first and then I could continue to watch until the last timestamp was shown.

If you want to maintain 100 figures, maybe your content for one year,  you create just four emails for rehearsing. These emails have an individual URL address that you can paste in your calendar or you can save them in a folder at the Bookmarks bar. Just choose the day when you want to work on them! . . . . and this is scalable! In four years you have maybe 400 interesting figures to keep alive for the practica. What do you think?

All above is for youtube videos but I have saved facebook videos as well. However for them I don't have the time stamp function. I have read somewhere that this option exists but I have not managed to activate it. So today I save the figure with information about the moment it starts. Primitive but keeps me going!

Tango gym or repertoire training?

This training of figures is not for bringing all these patterns to a pista. It is based on a different way of thinking. It has lot of similarities with the gym or pilates workouts where I build my muscles and keep my flexibility by repeating a variety of movements. During those workouts I can do moves which I never use in my everyday life but the time I spend on mats and machines has had a positive general impact on my life. In the same way figure training has had a positive impact on my dance, increased the variety of different movements, mobility as well as my readiness for some new combinations in my dance.

My goal

When I start to work on a group of figures I have given them a starting skill value 0. To complete this level I have to know and be able to take the leader steps AND in my mind match them to the followers corresponding movements. This is the only limit I have clear now so the following levels will be defined later. There will be training to fix the figure to different music and to be able to keep the figure going on with distraction. After that I think I am ready to introduce them to a follower at a practica. This is the goal and I don't force these figures to turn up on a milonga flor. My experience so far is that they sometimes show up as fragments on a milonga and some easy ones can turn up as they are during a tanda.

My Solo training heading to the PRACTICA

After said that my practice is build up like this! I update weekly the material I want to review and train. There are technique videos, music training, groups of old figures and sometimes totally new figure groups. I also decide how much time I have for this training.

During the week I watch the videos once a day and review the figures in my mind. Even this means 10 repetitions a week. There are a few fundamental movements I physically do every morning and I keep them going for weeks before a change. A figure group which I know well can be run once or twice a week solo at home. With other words there are a lot of visual and mental activities on the sofa and some footwork on the floor!

My Figures library & Co

I wrote earlier about my collection of figures to show you how I save and easily find back to my favorite figures. But still, these figures are not the chosen ones! That collection is a kind of waiting room for nice moves. I collect and maintain these rows for the day I want to have some new movements or variation on the old giros in my daily dance. Some of these suggestions will never advance to the spreadsheet I call for FIG library. On this spreadsheet I keep the figures I have seriously worked on! Most of the videos show moves from my workshops but my favorites from youtube channels are also included.

FIG library

For these videos I like to have some more information. Sometimes it has been interesting to check the year and month when the steps were initiated to my dance or when I  was working on them for the first time. It has been fun to check what was going on in 2009? What teachers I had then? Just use the filter for that column and you have the information. There is also a column to group the figures, usually about 20-30 rows/items to go together, based on the teacher but sometimes on a theme as canyengue or something. These groups I can easily dance through during a tanda on a practica. At the beginning I made an MP3 file telling me every 20s a new move and for a tango tanda 26 was a good number. Today I try to memorize the lists instead.

The column NUMBER is useful when I have filtered a selection and need to know how many items fit the criteria. No counting of rows but I just place the cursor on the column top letter and in a click I can read the result in the right down corner. Easy and fast!

When I decide to work on a figure in the Collection I cut-copy it and paste it to the Fig library. With other words I add it to the Library and remove it from the Collection.

You maybe want to have all your stuff on one sheet and it is totally up to you. If you change your mind later you can separate them into two sheets. You can still keep them together in the same workbook. There is a tab for each of them as you see at the bottom of the picture.

If you click the picture above it opens up in a new window and you see it clearly!

 

Teacher Notes and other observations

It was too easy to forget what the teacher has told me during a private lesson or on a workshop. I maybe had the correction in mind for some time but afterward I just continue in the old way. Now I write a line for everything I hear from her or him and I read these notes regularly to remind me of the changes needed.

There are labels like body lead attitude abrazo . . . . .
The second level labels are Hand arm foot leg hip timing . . . .

When I read these notes I remember vividly what it was about and hopefully it will develop and come to daylight on some milonga in the future!


Today I am also experimenting with a new sheet for repetitions of the groups in the FIG Library. It is annoying to participate, pay the fee, traveling and stay but forget the most of the content later on. This sheet is for my solo training and it will carry information about my activities so I know what content I have repeated on a specific week. I can easily check if something needs to be repeated again and in this way I don't forget a group of favorites! Coming back about this when I feel that it is working ok!

I use here also the freezed headings and filtering functions. This video shows shortly how!

To keep in touch with your tango steps!

It was a frustrating experience when I couldn't find back to a loved youtube figure I had seen a month or a year earlier. The solution below has been running for three years now and it has helped me many times so far! Some periods I don't use it at all and then suddenldly it is updated with several new lines per night.  It is allways visible and easy to access! I hope it will save time for you too!

I am a PC user and the collection is created on a google spreadsheet. On the screenprint below you find the headings and labels which have helped me to identify a video clip again. Most of my links are from youtube but facebook items and other internet addresses can be saved also.

This spreadsheet is for instant records, to save the moves I like when surfing around. I have created separate sheets for the figures from workshops and one for my teachers observations and advices. I have this split because the number of entries is growing surpricingly fast on each of these sections!

This is the version I use  for the collection! The column headings and labels you find here have served me well during the years.

To manage this collection of links I use some basic functions you find below but the most important of them is to create a backup every now and then!

Watch the video or read the text!

Your choice!  :)

EASY ACCESS and FILTERS

To have easy access I have placed an icon on the bookmarks bar - when the site is open you just drag the icon to the bar as shown on the picture. Ater that you will easily find the site and save your new steps. When my collection had grown to contain several hundreds of rows the filtering function has helped me out! I use the most simple version of it and it is very intuitive at that level.You create a filter by placing the cursor on the row for column titles and via DATA menue you find the option! At the same place you can get rid of it and reactivate it again later.

FREEZE the HEADINGS

Frozen headings have also been easy to apply. It keeps the column heads as well as the lable suggestions visible when the collection grows!

Put the cursor on the row number you want to keep visible and make the rest in VIEW menue

TIMESTAMPS

When you save a youtube address with timestamp you will land on the figure right away.
Facebook offers the same; addresses with timestamp!

Right click the video window and choose the time option!

BACKUP ! ! !

One terribly day in the future a backup can be useful to have and it is easy to fix today! I just send my figure collection, library and teacher notes to another email address. All in one mail as an EXCEL file.  That's all!