How to improve

[timothy42b]

Hire a sports psychologist:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10413200.2016.1162224#.VzogMvkrJD8

 

[Brychanus]

This was really interesting, thanks - I think many of us have lived through some version of this cycle (and probably many of them) in DG or otherwise (Fig. 1 from the paper)

 

[Sard0nyx]

This was really interesting, thanks - I think many of us have lived through some version of this cycle (and probably many of them) in DG or otherwise (Fig. 1 from the paper)

I think the road to assurance is rockier than shown. I think the graph could dip down lower before it goes up

 

[Brychanus]

I think the road to assurance is rockier than shown. I think the graph could dip down lower before it goes up

This made me think of the difference between people who are modifying an already established skill such as in the focus of the article vs. a brand new one. It was interesting that Carson & Collins talked about integrating changes into the athlete's existing framework.

For newer skills we probably get something closer to an Ebbinghaus curve. If you don't practice a new thing, memory can decay quickly (and completely). Maybe the cases they're considering in the Carson article start on the X-axis at the beginning of Analysis having already gone through lots of prior Ebbinghaus curves to establish their existing skill level.

On the flip side, it could be part of why it's so hard to train a "new" swing once someone has been doing things one way for many years - they might have to throw out their old framework rather than adapt within it.

 

[Sard0nyx]

This made me think of the difference between people who are modifying an already established skill such as in the focus of the article vs. a brand new one. It was interesting that Carson & Collins talked about integrating changes into the athlete's existing framework.

For newer skills we probably get something closer to an Ebbinghaus curve. If you don't practice a new thing, memory can decay quickly (and completely). Maybe the cases they're considering in the Carson article start on the X-axis at the beginning of Analysis having already gone through lots of prior Ebbinghaus curves to establish their existing skill level.

On the flip side, it could be part of why it's so hard to train a "new" swing once someone has been doing things one way for many years - they might have to throw out their old framework rather than adapt within it.

I cant make changes to my form without rethinking what my intentions are and changing my swing thought. Otherwise little tweaks even though you can feel the change don't show up on video or slow motion that well.

 

[Sheep]

This was really interesting, thanks - I think many of us have lived through some version of this cycle (and probably many of them) in DG or otherwise (Fig. 1 from the paper)

I am perm stuck in awareness. hahahaha

 

[Sheep]

I cant make changes to my form without rethinking what my intentions are and changing my swing thought. Otherwise little tweaks even though you can feel the change don't show up on video or slow motion that well.

Learning something is litterally the practice of re-practicing something of re-practicing something.

Essentially bashing it into your brain to make it second nature.

The problem is, our bodies are lazy.
Our brains our lazy.
But they are trainable.

They say 10,000 hours on average, But.. i mean it depends on the task and your experience with previous similar tasks.



This is a pretty good video on it.

 

[Brychanus]

Pretty good video. I can't help it as an academic so:

The 10,000 hour rule was inspired directly by the late Anders Ericsson's early studies in learning and training. It was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 book "Outliers." Unsurprisingly, the story is both more nuanced and more interesting than that. Ericsson himself does a great job taking the reader through it in Peak. It is one of my all-time favorite books in psychology.

Anders was a fantastic writer and Peak is a very vivid, easy read. If arguments about nature and nurture interest you, in my opinion, his is one of the most important books ever written. He was also one of the rare examples where he applied his work in numerous contexts in the real world with clear results that people noticed and paid for. We lost a giant when he died.

What Anders was really saying was that roughly 10,000 of what he calls deliberate practice can make an expert. Peak basically developed his argument - with a career's worth of evidence - that "it is now quite clear that the number of hours of merely engaging in activities, such as playing music, chess and soccer, or engaging in professional work activities has a much lower benefit for improving performance than deliberate practice"." In its "practice" article, Wikipedia does an ok job describing what Ericsson meant by "deliberate practice," but it's really worth reading his entire book. Not everything about what Ericsson did is resolved, but in this psychologist's opinion it's worth it to learn how to learn from him.

 

[Sheep]

Pretty good video. I can't help it as an academic so:

The 10,000 hour rule was inspired directly by the late Anders Ericsson's early studies in learning and training. It was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 book "Outliers." Unsurprisingly, the story is both more nuanced and more interesting than that. Ericsson himself does a great job taking the reader through it in Peak. It is one of my all-time favorite books in psychology.

Anders was a fantastic writer and Peak is a very vivid, easy read. If arguments about nature and nurture interest you, in my opinion, his is one of the most important books ever written. He was also one of the rare examples where he applied his work in numerous contexts in the real world with clear results that people noticed and paid for. We lost a giant when he died.

What Anders was really saying was that roughly 10,000 of what he calls deliberate practice can make an expert. Peak basically developed his argument - with a career's worth of evidence - that "it is now quite clear that the number of hours of merely engaging in activities, such as playing music, chess and soccer, or engaging in professional work activities has a much lower benefit for improving performance than deliberate practice"." In its "practice" article, Wikipedia does an ok job describing what Ericsson meant by "deliberate practice," but it's really worth reading his entire book. Not everything about what Ericsson did is resolved, but in this psychologist's opinion it's worth it to learn how to learn from him.

The 10,000 I believe was just a good guess/benchmark.

Generally if someone has just done something that long, they are proficient at it to a high degree.
And yes, deliberate practice vs other things is a whole different topic.

But a really interesting one. I wanna bang some keys on the keyboard about it right now, but. People are not particularly interested in my opinion here. hahaha So I'd just be wasting keystrokes on my keyboard over it.

 

[timothy42b]

The article I posted was shared with me by a music professor I know.

By weird coincidence I got an email from another musician source this week with Five Lessons on Deliberate Practice. Of course this one is trying to sell courses, and this isn't in as much depth as the sports psychology one, but you might find something of interest.

I notice they suggest we need to change coaches as we progress. Hmmm.

We’ve isolated 5 main points relating to deliberate practice (taken from this Harvard Business Review article) that could make the case for changing how you approach your practice time:



1. Engage an expert coach and progress to different coaches as your ability progresses. In all cases of research into experts, it was discovered that the ability of the coach in question was critical to the progression of the student. Experts in a field will be clearly recognised as such by their peers, for example with OAIM, our tutors have won Fleadh and TG4 Gradam Ceoil awards as well as having, in most cases, a Masters if not PhD level music pedagogy and are well known, professional players.



2. Set a specific practice goal per practice session. It is very easy to fall into the routine of practising scales almost mindlessly, but what separated the experts from others was the fact that they were very precise about what they wanted to achieve with each practice session and concentrated deeply during their sessions to achieve those goals. With our 50 Tune - Sets Challenge - students have a deadline and deliverable, i.e., ‘submit a video of you playing three tunes @75% speed by 23rd April’. With this goal students can work out how much time they need to learn each tune. So daily practice becomes essential, but not just daily practice but daily practice with a very particular goal in mind, eg, learn phrase 1 of tune 1.



3. Constructive Feedback. Listening to yourself as you play is one thing, getting someone to listen to you and give you feedback is quite another. For users of self-directed learning systems, such as OAIM, the recommendation is to record your practice sessions and listen back to your playing, being critical of where mistakes are made and noting them for the next practice session. Having to submit a video for the 50 Tune Challenge is a great way to manifest your practice goals. You simply won't submit the video until you're happy with how you sound. Also, many students have remarked that looking over their videos over the duration of the 50 Tune Challenge was a real eye-opener for them with regard to how much they had progressed.



4. Practice Periods. Deliberate practice involves two kinds of learning: improving existing skills and developing and extending one’s skill range. A carefully planned practice schedule will combine elements of both. The focus is on quality, not quantity. Our format of teaching phrase by phrase really utilises this aspect of learning. You can begin a practice session with a phrase already learned and then move on to learning the next phrase. Phrase by phrase all the way!



5. The goal is to ultimately become your own inner-coach. The self-directed ethos of OAIM really encourages the development of your own inner-coach combined with the expert tutorials. You are also encouraged to move on to different teachers at different levels and also to learn from teachers of different instruments. These are all ways of adding in a constructive level of difficulty to help you 'up your game'. The OAIM Search Function is based on the ethos of challenging you outside of your comfort zone. Tunes or courses can be sorted by instrument, key, tune type, level, tutor, melody and technique; or any combination therein. It’s a deliberate way of pushing the envelope and encouraging you to continue to take your playing to the next level and ultimately tap into the expert within.

 

[blayed]

One thing I feel isnt mentioned enough is that despite loads of practice, you can get worse over time. Weird stuff can drift in and out of your form (for example) for no apparent reason. Or sometimes you fix one thing but that causes a cascading effect of issues downstream, kind of like removing the one piece of duct tape that was holding together the engine. It can create this very frustrating game of whack-a-mole. In the long run you're better for it though

 

[Brychanus]

One thing I feel isnt mentioned enough is that despite loads of practice, you can get worse over time. Weird stuff can drift in and out of your form (for example) for no apparent reason. Or sometimes you fix one thing but that causes a cascading effect of issues downstream, kind of like removing the one piece of duct tape that was holding together the engine. It can create this very frustrating game of whack-a-mole. In the long run you're better for it though

One thing I find that helps with this is to deeply encode the moves so it literally feels like "riding a bike" when you hop back on!

 

[RowingBoats]

One thing I feel isnt mentioned enough is that despite loads of practice, you can get worse over time. Weird stuff can drift in and out of your form (for example) for no apparent reason. Or sometimes you fix one thing but that causes a cascading effect of issues downstream, kind of like removing the one piece of duct tape that was holding together the engine. It can create this very frustrating game of whack-a-mole. In the long run you're better for it though

I get this, but also if you just fully grasp the one-leg drill, that alone resolves 90% of the nonsense that can creep in imo.