Practice makes perfect is a myth as perfect is unobtainable. Much more accurate is practice makes permanent in that the motor skills you’re practising become so ingrained and natural that nothing can get in their way. One of the biggest dilemmas we face in sport is that to get something to become truly permanent you have to practice it A LOT (estimations suggest around 20 hours a week) and yet doing the same thing over and over will soon become boring. The solution is not to compromise on the amount you practice but vary the types and intensity of the training blocks. One of the simplest ways of doing this is to introduce some mental rehearsal into each practice session where you are either watching clips of how to do it correctly or imagining the same.
Another excellent way of preventing boredom is make sure every training session is challenging. If you don’t already know how to do this then I suggest asking how to add Pressure and Harder Practice to your current regime. It’s gold. GJM
Monday, November 30, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
I bet you over-practice what you’re bad at
So you played / participated in an event on the weekend and it didn’t go well. Come Monday you decide you’re going to practice all the things you did poorly and ignore what you did well.
Sound familiar? Well it is and it’s a very bad idea for two main reasons. First, by practising what you’re not doing well you’re actually reminding yourself over and over again that you suck. Imagine if after school you got a select group of kids and made them only do extra maths practice. They would think it must be because their maths skills are poor.
Secondly, by practising what you did poorly on the weekend you are risking swapping your strengths for your weaknesses. One of our aims as sport psychologists is to remove strengths and weaknesses from the picture. How do we do this? You spend your time getting better at the elements of your sport / performance area as they relate to their importance. For example, only about 5% of tennis shots are lob shots so regardless of how good or bad you are at playing the lob you’ll want to spend 5% of your practice time on this shot.
Exact ratios for each sport are rare (golf expected) so please feel free to email us your thoughts for your sport or add a comment below. Cheers, GJM
Sound familiar? Well it is and it’s a very bad idea for two main reasons. First, by practising what you’re not doing well you’re actually reminding yourself over and over again that you suck. Imagine if after school you got a select group of kids and made them only do extra maths practice. They would think it must be because their maths skills are poor.
Secondly, by practising what you did poorly on the weekend you are risking swapping your strengths for your weaknesses. One of our aims as sport psychologists is to remove strengths and weaknesses from the picture. How do we do this? You spend your time getting better at the elements of your sport / performance area as they relate to their importance. For example, only about 5% of tennis shots are lob shots so regardless of how good or bad you are at playing the lob you’ll want to spend 5% of your practice time on this shot.
Exact ratios for each sport are rare (golf expected) so please feel free to email us your thoughts for your sport or add a comment below. Cheers, GJM
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