I haven’t written a new blog post in quite a while, and I wanted to give an update on what I have been up to in the past few months. I have started writing about my specific training on my Chess Notebook blog and that has taken some of the time I dedicate to writing for beginchess.com.
I have modified my trianing program so that I focus my study on specific content and I don’t jump around from book to book and topic to topic. This new focused training was working well until one week ago when I started missing training sessions, to the point where I have been almost two weeks without following the program. I continue to work 20-30 minutes on tactics, so I don’t lose my tactical vision, but I have decided to take another 1-2 weeks off training.
I believe that the disinterest has to do with over-training which has led to a training plateau. I plan on writing an update to the training plateau post where I will deal with “muscle confusion” in chess training. I think this P90X style training schedule, will keep things fresh and training plateaus will be delayed or avoided altogether…so stay tuned for that.
Leave a comment if you have unique ways in which you deal with training plateaus.
I don’t have a way to deal with training plateaus, BUT I’m trying to build an app for the iPad that does this. (warning shameless plug ahead) I wrote an app to help newbies learn chess, but I want to expand this to take players from the absolute beginning to a competent player… SO… I thought I would ask you… what would you like to see in an app to help you master chess?
Thank you
Matt
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/newbie-chess/id393950721?mt=8
I would suggest that it revolves around critical positions. A good example would be the 300 key positions that Lev Alburt mentions in his “Chess Training Pocketbook”. GM RAM also contains key endgame and positional positions that should be learned by all players wanting to improve.