For our purposes, Jeff frequently draws on a distinction between "workout out" and "training." Imagine two people go to the gym. One shows up and does whatever he feels like doing: maybe some benchpress and curls one day, maybe some deadlifts the next day. The other guy comes in with a plan: specific exercises in a specific order for a specific purpose. Both guys are putting the time in, but one is far more likely to get where he wants to go.
So, the question becomes: when we study chess, are we training? Or are we just working out?
Why a Plan Matters
Let me stick with the fitness analogy just a little longer. A person's goals determines the shape of a given workout. Someone who wants to lose weight will train differently than someone that primarily wants to gain strength, or someone that wants to build endurance, or someone that wants to build muscle. It's not just the exercises that change, but everything about those exercises: how many reps, how many sets, how long the rest time, the tempo it is performed, etc. A bodybuilder and a powerlifter both do the benchpress, but they do it in very different ways.
If you don't know anything about fitness, you might be surprised to learn that gaining strength and gaining muscle are not one and the same. There is certainly some carry-over, and building one will help the other, but the training styles are very distinct. No one will confuse a pure strength session (heavy weights, low reps, long rest, very high intensity) with a hypertrophy one (less heavy, medium reps, shorter rest, focus on volume). Your body literally feels different after each one of these.
Do you see why this becomes important? You can do the right exercise, but if don't do it in the proper way, you won't get what you want. Further, some exercises combine much better than others. Other exercises correct weak links, allowing for faster and safer progress. Still other exercises serve as progressions or stepping stones to other, more difficult exercises. If you get all this right, you greatly speed up your progress; get it wrong and you stand still.
This is why you need a plan, or what Jeff Cavalier would call "training" instead of "working out." Your training plan tells you exactly how to get where you want to go, and not just today, but over several months. It will lay out when to train and when to rest, what to eat and how much, when to increase intensity and when to take time to recovery.
It is a lot of work, most of it upfront, but here's the upshot: if you follow your training plan to the letter, it works. You get where you want to go. It works. There is no day-to-day guess work on what you need to do. You just follow the plan. It works.
Training Chess vs "Working Out" At Chess
Most people don't have a training plan for chess. This isn't a huge surprise; most people don't have a training plan for fitness. Believe me, I used to work in the fitness industry. I know. Both industries face the same problem, actually: a constant barrage of one-off products (a new diet vs a new opening book) with little thought on how it fits into the overall process. Customers get pulled from one product to the next, never full committing, never getting the results they want... but I'm in danger of ranting. Let's get back on track.
Personally, I'd say virtually all my chess work in the last two years falls squarely on the "working out" side of the spectrum. Here's a typical day: solve a few tactics, do some Chessable reviews, play a few games and analyze one or two after. Maybe read a few pages from a book. Repeat day after day. Where am I going? I'm putting time into chess, but there's no coherent plan, no defined goal. I'm just spinning my wheels, treading water rather than going anywhere. I have a good excuse (law school), but I cannot pretend that I have been "training" as I've defined it here.
To hammer this point home, let's take an example, say tactical puzzles. Just like the bench press, we can do these in a number of different ways to get different results, depending on our goal.
- Want to improve pattern recognition? Then do lots of simpler tactics arranged by theme. Focus is on high volume, high speed.
- Want to improve calculation? Then dig into a few really complicated positions. Focus on accuracy and completeness. Don't move on until you see everything.
- Want to improve visualization? Focus on endgame puzzles, especially King and Pawn positions. Fewer pieces lets you calculate farther. You can progressively add more pieces as you improve.
- Want to learn new themes, such as all the various checkmate patterns? Then create a list of what you want and focus on each one until you have it down.
- Want to simply maintain your current abilities? Spending 5-15min on any of the tactics sites, doing random problems, will keep you fresh.
Almost everyone trains tactical puzzles, but do they give thought to any of this? I don't think so. Most people think, "I know I need to train tactics. Everyone says so." And so they go to a tactics site and click Start. There's no plan. There's no goal. It's essentially random, which is why most people get random, inconsistent results.
Define Your Goal
Most people don't have a defined goal. When I worked with clients, the words I heard by far were, "I want to get in shape." This is a lousy goal. It has no specificity. Everyone has a different definition of fit. Do you want to run marathons? Walk up the stairs without getting winded? Look good in the mirror? Play with your kids without becoming a sweaty, gasping lump? Move your body without pain? Each one of these require a different focus, a different exercise protocol.
The same is true for chess. The number one goal is, "I want to get better," or "I want to get to X rating." These are lousy. What does it mean to get better? Do you want to blunder less? Calculate further? Not feel lost by move 12 in every game? Learn how to play without Queens? Avoid time pressure? Similarly, each one of these requires a different approach.
What specifically do you want to improve about your chess? In three months time you can massively improve one area. Your rating might not move an inch, but you can train yourself to blunder less or calculate 1-2 moves further or learn common plans or follow a time-keeping system. And if you keep doing this, if you keep improving these skills and sub-skills, your rating will eventually jump. How can it not?
Ratings Are Milestones, Not Destinations
It's perhaps worth expanding on this further. "I want to hit 1000/1500/2000," is not a good training goal. It can be wonderful motivation, and seeing your rating climb definitely feels good. Focusing on the rating in isolation, though, is misguided, because there is no such thing as a X-rated player.
Hear me out. I'm rated around 2100-2200 on the major sites. That tells you roughly where I am in relation to other players, but it tells you nothing about me specifically. I understand chess at a pretty high level; I also struggle at endgames and make mind-numbing blunders in dry positions. I might play someone at my rating who is the polar opposite: an endgame expert, a super grinder, but struggles at understanding middlegame planning. We have the same rating but the opposite skillset. To get better, we need to focus on different things.
We can use our rating as a proxy to see whether we are moving in the right direction, but our rating is not, by itself, something that can tell us much of anything about ourselves. Hence why our goal needs to be more than, "I want to hit X-level." Duh. Everyone wants to hit the next level. We need more than that.
Creating a Chess Training Plan
At this point, we probably all agree: training is good, "workout out" is not. Excellent ... but how do we apply this? How does a reader take this article and apply it to his or her own chess improvement? Excellent question ... and I do not have all the answers, but I will try.
If you want the 'grand plan', one that breaks down what you should study, when and for how long, that's tough. There are a few books and online courses, such as GM Kuljasevic's "How to Study Chess on Your Own" and GM Smirnov's "Self-Taught Grandmaster", though I'm not certain how applicable these are to most players. The traditional approach has been to hire a coach and let them do it for you. Assuming you get a good coach, that definitely works.
Creating a grand plan by yourself likely doesn't make much sense, simply because you don't know everything. An IM could probably figure out what they need to work on; a 1200-club player probably can't do that. Similar to how if you have never stepped foot in a gym, you probably won't craft an effective workout plan.
What you can do, though, is create a smaller training plan on a single goal or sub-skill. If your goal is to improve pattern recognition, for example, then you can create your plan. Perhaps you buy a themed tactics book and work through it. Do the chapter on forks, drill it. Then practice a bunch of easy fork puzzles online. Do that for a few days, isolating that one pattern, and then move on. Aim to spend 10-20min 4-5 days a week on this, with the goal of internalizing 80% of the chapters within three months.
This gives you clarity. You know what to do each day. It doesn't mean you can't do other things, but this is your focus. It doesn't set the bar too high, but it makes you stretch to reach the 80% goal. Even if you put in the bare minimum of 10min a day, 4 times a week, that amounts to eight hours of focused pattern recognition practice after three months. That will 100% have a positive effect on your game, and that's the absolute minimum.
Finally, I'd be remiss if I did not mention my friend NM Matt Jensen's ChessGoals site. He offers free 12-week study plans, which are backed up by data surveys. In essence, it lists the types of activities that people have done to go from beginner to intermediate and beyond, and it charts it out across three months. These plans are more broad than I would like (that is, they have you do several things once or twice each week, rather than having one primary focus), but the feedback suggests they work and the price can't be beat. Definitely worth a look, and you could use it as inspiration when crafting your own plan.
Conclusion
"If you fail to plan, then you are planning to fail." That's perhaps harsh, but I imagine most chess improvers place too little attention on their training plans. Many don't have anything resembling what I have written here. I would encourage readers to consider implementing this: set a specific, defined goal, figure out how you plan on reaching this, set a rough schedule and then go at it as your primary chess focus. This should give a better return on the time investment than "working out" does.
I have some thoughts on what a "grand plan" might look like, but they are in very rough form and would take quite some work to make presentable. I have it rather low on my blog priority list, just because of the work involved. I will write it someday ... though if enough people ask nicely, that might bump it up in priority...
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