I joined a kickboxing club about a year ago. When I first joined, my initial assumption was that we would warm up and drill maybe for 30 – 40% of the time, and spar for the rest of the session to emulate the experience of the ring. To my surprise though, this assumption was completely wrong.

It turned out that we trained and drilled for 98% to 100% of the training sessions. In fact, sparring work accounts for only about 1-2% of the total training session. When you watch a training session of any type of sports team, you’ll find a similar pattern, where the majority of the time is spent on drills and not the actual practice of the sport.

Why is that? I’ve come to learn that the drills teach you the technique and, perhaps more importantly, condition your body for the activity. Drills are in essence, micro-sequences for specific techniques that complete a routine. Doing them repeatedly teaches you and your body to execute the routine without having to think when you’re in the moment. So when quick decisions are made of which action to take mid-game, the body is well-adapted because it went through the conditioning.

The same goes for trading

Simon Brown used to give us homework after his trading presentations. We had to pick a bunch of stocks and place stop losses, or we could use TradingView’s replay function to place stops on historical price charts. Another option was to use any of the trading simulators to trade historical data. I used to do these simply because Simon said so.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned that those were drills.

These pieces of homework trained and conditioned my eyes to see the market patterns and how to react in certain situations. Even when I was trading a smaller account and I thought I was actually trading, I was still just doing my drills – but also training and developing other parts of my trading, such as my psychological approach, money and risk management, and emotional management.

Because it’s so easy to start trading, we often rush off to trade and call ourselves traders. But we never realise that to be really good at it we need to go through our drills.

Drills may be gruelling and boring most times, but once you get it, you truly enjoy all of it – the drills and the trading itself.

Traders share a peculiar characteristic: they’re fiercely competitive, but only with themselves. In practice this means that they see every outcome as an opportunity to learn, and they’re brutally honest about both their failures and successes. This also means that they’re hungry for knowledge. They don’t sleep easy with unanswered questions. And they’re seldom satisfied with just one answer.

Njabulo Nsibande is a founder of Village Trader, and Sakha Ingcebo investment club. His interest in trading began in 2016, alongside a rash of Instagram ‘fx traders’…

Find him on Twitter: @njabulo_goje.