This troper and her brother were already playing at Expert level in the ''GuitarHero'' series, but weren't ''that'' spectacular at the games otherwise. Then we bought ''Guitar Hero: Metallica'', which is pretty much an entire game made up of ThatOneBoss songs and worked our way through it. A few months later,''Smash Hits'' came around, and the two of us outright ''demolished'' the entire Expert band career mode (Guitar + Bass), five-starring all but two songs. If you can beat ''GH: Metallica'', you can handle pretty much anything else the series can through at you.

I once thought about running 100 laps around my block every week. I then slapped myself with not stupidity.

Ever try training as a pro wrestler. Think about it this way...HUNDREDS OF HACK SQUATS.

This is how I prepare for math tests. Go through all the problems in the chapter, and more. My dad told me that he prepared with even ''more'' problems and discipline, because he had to (you'd understand if you went to his schools).

A friend of mine once took it upon himself to teach me swordsmanship with various types of swords- broadswords, katanas, rapiers, and so forth. Said teaching involved actual live steel swords. Sharp ones. He was at least careful about it- the only reason we really used steel swords is because we didn't have any reliable fake ones. In a fit of irony, the one time we used wooden trainers instead of steel ones (since neither of us owned a real broadsword), he smote me in the side of the head, breaking my glasses and leaving a nasty knot on my temple for weeks.

I did the same, only it was me on equal ground with another friend and it was practice sparring rather than instruction. The weapon my friend was using? A BROADSWORD! a blunted broadsword, but a broadsword nonetheless. My weapon? Said weapons sheathe. I lampshaded the danger involved in this after getting struck in the shoulder with the weapon heavily enough to leave a bruise. "If that had been a sharpened sword, I'd be dead now." In hindsight, a really stupid risk to take.

To this troper, the worst training is that kind that is completely unnecessary and pointless. For example:

Before deploying to Iraq, I had to take a familiarization course on the M-16 rifle, a weapon I've used for 20 years. To make matters worse, the course was online and you had to get 100 percent to pass. This would have been acceptable if it had contained information that was valuable, but the questions required you to memorize arbitrary information, such as the order of safety rules ("the first safety rule is...") and the names of positions, like "ready rest" and other things that you'd never need to know. Ever.

In another military course on report-writing, the instructor went through everything on the template. At first, it made sense, especially when covering things like what format to put the date in and how to file the report, but at some point, the instructor should have said, "The rest is self-explanatory," but he didn't, so he went through every single thing, like, "Where it says 'last name,' put your last name."

In the early 90s, I was in a military course that had a requirement to teach two hours of familiarity with a Jeep. At this time, Jeeps had already been phased out of service in most places, so this school only had HMMWVs (Hummers). The training material had not been updated and the instructor had already been warned about teaching anything that was not part of the curriculum. What did he do about the Jeep issue? He pulled the HMMWV up and parked it and then gave us the instructions on the Jeep as if it was a Jeep, knowing most of us would never see another Jeep. It was so bad that he would say things like, "Okay, in the Jeep, there will be a clutch and you press it all the way to the floor before starting the vehicle. This one doesn't have a clutch, but if it did, it would be right here."

In yet another military course, the instructor had a habit of trying to get involvement from the students at the wrong time. He'd ask questions that none of us would be able to answer, which were also often irrelevent. For example, in a first-aid course, he holds up a needle and says, "Who can tell me what gauge needle this is?"

Clearly everyone seems to think that only physical challenges qualify. This troper has a retired music professor as an English teacher, and she can remember long stretches of her schooling where she practiced three or four hours a day. You think physical stuff is hard? Try listening to the same bar of music ten times slower than it's supposed to be played for five minutes straight, over and over and over again.

This troper went through a lot with crew training. In the course of 5 months, I went from a 12 minute 2K to a 10 minute one. I'm not very strong, but that was the greatest improvement of anyone on the team, and I literally wore weights all the time to strengthen up, and i started running the 1/4 route to the bus stop at a full spring with 20+ pounds of textbook on my back, even in 7+ inch deep snow. I'm also the due who had the drill sergeant nasty for Tae Kwon Do.

This troper's brother did crew team at a university one year. Their coach's CatchPhrase was "If you're not talking to God, you're not pulling hard enough."

This troper took a 'weed out the week' variant of TrainingFromHell in her computer science teacher. In a second-semester course, the professor was speeding through all the basic concepts of object-oriented programming to also include second- and third-year boolean algebra and data structure concepts, spending one hour to go over concepts that later classes would spend entire weeks on. It doesn't help that the professor in question redirected all questions to our neighbors. And we lost at minimum one hour a week to testing, where we only got 25% credit for having a right answer ("correctness"); we had to get the other 75% through proofs, book quotations, or other such justifications. Out of fourty students who started the class, only 12 were still enrolled two months later; of those half failed. (This troper only passed because she ignored the suggested text in favor of a ''For Dummies'' textbook...)

I'm currently rehearsing for my 3rd Shakespeare play, ''MuchAdoAboutNothing'', after having done ''AMidsummerNightsDream'' and ''RomeoAndJuliet''. ''Midsummer'' introduced the cast to the director's love of yoga and breathing/vocalization techniques, none of which are done for non-Shakespeare plays. ''Romeo and Juliet'', however, was hell. The yoga went on for much longer stretches, along with aerobics, crunches, and push-ups. We also discovered that the assistant director is part of a theatre run by an apprentice of Tadeshi Suzuki (http://www.suzukiclass.com/) ; for the uninitiated, various strenuous poses that are held for as long as the director wishes you to hold them, along with fast-paced sitting and squatting pose changes while saying lines of dialogue to learn how different body postures influence speaking. The final rehearsal ended warm-ups with the cast gathering into a circle and saying something they like about themselves and something that hate, which ended with almost every member of the cast breaking down into tears. ''Much Ado'' will not be having a crying circle, but two particularly vulnerable cast members began crying during an exercise on being yourself around everybody in the show, and we still have 1.5 hour physical and mental warm-ups before rehearsal, along with the last five rehearsals having a "speed run" to try and finish the entire 2-hour show in 45 minutes or less (with myself and Claudio speaking at hyperspeed to get through our monologues), followed by a full runthrough at normal speed. Funny enough, it works. Our performances are, honestly, amazing, and we will have successfully put on a Shakespeare play in 56 hours of rehearsal.

To emphasize, ''none'' of this is done for other plays. The musicals have short aerobic and stretching sessions and some vocal warm-ups, but that's it. By performing ''Romeo and Juliet'' and ''Much Ado'' over the summer, the director is able to take advantage of longer rehearsal times without worrying about cutting into time spent on homework or at school. 2-hour rehearsals can be stretched into 4.

A fairly mild example: this troper once had a dance teacher at school who also worked at a local dance studio (famous, incidentally, for embodying this trope). Said teacher had a strict rule about not talking in class. One day, when the students wouldn't shut up, she made good on her continually threatened punishment of arm exercises. These involved holding one's arms out, up, or both for about 20 minutes, and if anyone lowered their arms, everyone had to start over. Needless to say, they talked much less after that.

This troper recently began training to be a pro wrestler. 2 other guys who came for a tryout but didn't bring a down payment stuck around to watch me anyway. I don't think they're coming back.

This is a large part of how This Troper learns to play new competitive video games, especially Halo 2 and TeamFortress2: round up some more experienced buddies, open up multiplayer, and get roflstomped over ''and over'' '''''and over''''' until I start picking up on the strategies they use and come up with ways to counter them.

One of the PE exams this troper had to go through in middle school was running several laps around a poorly paved city block in the middle of the day. When all was done and most of the class were laying on the ground sweating, the notoriously douchey coach told this troper (who was, and is still considered nerdy, but was among the most physically fit in the school) that he missed a couple of laps. Being a bit too exhausted to think clearly, this troper immediately told the coach to commence reproductive activities with himself (obviously not in those exact words), earning him a punishment consisting of 50 consecutive push-ups. No, I didn't make any of this up.

A jog plus 50 pushups=training from hell?

Currently, his daily exercise routine consists of 50 push-ups and 25 sit-ups. Both are usually done after electric guitar exercise (which tends to give his fingers blisters, and sometimes cuts) and. his daily reading of his Russian dictionary.

Sounds like a sub-par high school wrestling practice.

VMI's resurrection week. Mentally easy, because you've already been there for about 6 months. Physically not as much. Your upperclass "friend" (dyke in vmi lingo, don't ask) will usually make you do 2011 pushups spread through the five days, in addition to PT and push sessions every mourning, lunch afternoon and evening. At the end of the week, comes breakout, a very long day of nothing but sandbag workouts, marches and "sweat parties" starting at 4:30 or 5 that ends very late in the afternoon. Not the worst thing in the world, but leads to the happiest evening of your life.

Preseason training for sports at my school is almost always difficult. More so when it's your first year on a high school level team, most everyone there was on said team last year, and you have a severely torn thigh muscle that's difficult to walk on but somehow you manage to make it through practice with. Because it was the week of tryouts the athletic trainer wasn't around to give advice and I chose not to sit out from anything even though it ended up preventing my leg from healing for most of the season. But the point- it was pretty darn painful.