Craft training

Sports training, endurance and duress

Talk to any sports psychologist and they will likely tell you that good sportsmen and women, those who know the highest limits of exertion and the accomplishment that that brings, train both the body and mind to accept the physical and mental torture it takes to go beyond certain limits. To exert both in the extremes of their particular sport and then to further exert specific dynamics within those spheres brings about a duress training that sets them apart from all others. WIthin the body, beyond the skin and bulging veins and muscle, this type of exertion changes the bone structure as well as the surrounding support from sinew and muscle. Without this discipline in training, the body is indeed unequal to the task of the extreme sport. Hard training is as essential to the athlete as the breath of air to his body: And it’s no different to train the hands of a working man or woman to produce excellence in thier work too.

Hand training versus whole-body training

One factor separating sportsmen and women from craft artisans is that all crafts demand focus on first the hands and fingers and then the arms and mainly upper body movement. Sports never demand the fineness of economic motion and movement in the fingers and hands required for craft and so it’s the use of hands and fingers that separate the training standards and demands of training the body to achieve standards of excellence. No other sphere of work, recreation or sport demands the intensely refined rote practice and repetition of craftwork and it’s this that we woodworkers, amateur and professional alike, pursue.

Stamina and endurance training

When I was a young man I was aware that the hands of the older men I worked with seemed different than other men. I was always reluctant to shake hands with them because of their grip. These hands didn’t look big, fat or muscly. Neither did their sleeve-rolled arms. There wasn’t much fat there on the arms and hands, but certainly not excess muscle either. One thing that I noticed was that these men worked physically hard. They also worked steadily and seldom took a break to gain breath, yet though mostly middle aged, I could scarcely keep up with them in the daily tasks of work and in fact rarely did. Even after five years they could still drive nails with half the hammer blows I needed to sink the nail and saw through planks faster than I without flagging as I often did. I know now, 40 years hence, that they were highly trained in no less a fashion than a gymnast or runner, a tennis pro or a rock climber. The difference was that accuracy gave them a power in their work that I didn’t yet have and a stamina that accompanied the self discipline of the long distance runner. These things could not be had with being driven to endurance train.

The hands of an artisan

I mentioned before their hands. It was knuckles and fingers as much as hands really. Not gnarly yet sinewy. These men held their hands and arms differently, touched wood surfaces like no other person did or does. They look at grain in like measure to touch with the eyes that which cannot be felt and to see beyond the surface fibres that which lay in wait beneath the texture and the growth lines. They look, lean and touch. They feel the surface as if their nerve endings are antena transmitting unseen and unheard traces of information. Substances of sense are related in information so minute even the finest electric sensors could not detect the same measure.

Training concluded

Training in this measure defies the strategist runner and the whole-body soccer player. It’s more akin to the dart thrower and the snooker player on the one hand and the refined boxer and marksman delivering the hands to the strike on the other. He strikes with his plane and smooths his surface wood by thousandths of an inch. He delivers the cut of the knife and finely honed chisel to divide the wanted from the excess. He seldom falters in pressure and precision and his work stands equal to the wood he uses. These are the defining lines of craft training that demand endurance and these set the master woodworker apart from the machinist and the amateur from the professional. Master woodworkers are amateurs; they do it because they love it and whether they get paid or not they still do it! They do it at weekends and evenings after a hard day at the office. Gold’s gym holds nothing for them. They want exercise not emptiness. Owning a muscle with no useful purpose seems, well, empty and futile to them. A famous author, one of them most read authors in the world, wrote:

“My hands have supplied for my own needs and the needs of others.” He also wrote, “…make it your ambition to lead a quiet life minding your own business and working with your hands.”