Using deliberate practice to improve our skills (and perhaps become experts one day)

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Practice is important in developing any skill. Certainly, genes do make a difference, but even those who are born with exceptional talent need to hone their skills to truly become experts in their field. Think of high-performing gymnasts, for example: one may have exceptional flexibility, but that’s not enough to perform a complex floor routine to a T — several thousand hours of practice underlie each and every masterful performance.

What is deliberate practice? According to the original Ericsson paper, deliberate practice is a highly effortful, structured activity led by a coach or otherwise expert teacher, which has the explicit goal of improving performance in one’s domain of expertise. Understandably, this is quite a mouthful, so here’s a quick list of what’s needed for deliberate practice, according to a 2019 update to the framework by Ericsson and Harwell:

1. Deliberate practice is individualised training, led by an expert teacher/coach.
2. Deliberate practice must be done with a clear short-term goal in mind, which must be challenging but possible to achieve.
3. Deliberate practice should include immediate feedback — that is, you should know immediately how well you did during an attempt.
4. Only tasks that can be repeated can be practiced deliberately.

Additionally, deliberate practice is only deliberate if you pay attention to what you’re doing (that is, you’re avoiding automaticity), and if you’re putting in maximum effort. Theoretically, this should means that deliberate practice is often not very enjoyable by itself, but interestingly, in sports, professionals tend to enjoy even these highly tenuous activities (Baker & Young, 2014).

According to Eccles and colleagues (2021), what this boils down to is that although not everyone may be genetically built for expert performance, everyone can improve their skills. As long as we focus on this personal development aspect of performance, deliberate practice is one hell of a way to get better in something.

Illustration by Sophie Keresztes

Effort and attention aside, three of the four above criteria are fairly easy to meet, even for us mere mortals. Let’s say you want to increase the number of push-ups you can do without stopping. If you start with a clear goal, like reaching 30 push-ups, you’ve already made a good start. Feedback is basically built into such a goal: you either achieved it or you fell short; that said, you can manufacture feedback about other things as well — like whether you were able to keep the correct posture during your attempt — by recording yourself, for example. And of course, push-ups can be repeated an infinite number of times. Getting a coach to help you with your push-ups, though? For sure, if you can afford a personal trainer, or if you’re a member of a sport club that has a coach who’s willing to help. Otherwise, things may get a little problematic.

Fortunately for us, ‘purposeful practice’ has also been shown to be effective in improving physical skills (Ericsson, 2020). What’s purposeful practice? Basically, it’s deliberate practice, but without a coach. As long as the practice involves a goal, high effort and attention, and can be progressively adapted to whatever it is you want to improve, it counts. Indeed, all forms of self-regulated practice (which includes both deliberate and purposeful practice) have been shown to improve competition performance in elite athletes, according to a recent review by McCardle and colleagues (2019).

So then, what do?

Now that we’ve all had our collective sigh of relief, let’s have a look at how to do this whole deliberate practice thing. According to Eccles and colleagues, there are 7 key principles to follow:

1. Adhering to established training techniques. That is, if there are tried and tested methods to increasing your push-up limit (which there are), you should follow those. No need to be avant-garde.
2. Using your existing skills. Basically, start from the basics. If you want to improve your push-ups, you first need to know how to do a proper push-up, and then build on this skill to become better and stronger.
3. Pushing your limits. Improvement involves pain. Pushing for one more rep, for a pace that’s a second quicker, and going beyond your limits are all pre-requisites to performing better.
4. Mental representations. This fourth point is mainly applicable to more complex tasks that involve memory, but the idea behind this point is that the more efficiently you recall information, the better your decision-making will be (from which performance follows). Almost all tactical decisions fall under this category, like when and who to pass to in football (the European kind), but also pacing in running, maintaining the correct form when lifting weights, or any other activity where imagery may be involved.
5. Feedback. It’s extremely important to always get accurate feedback on where you’re at in relation to your goals. That said, it’s equally important that you take this feedback into account and modify your practice accordingly. If your hips are too high during those push-ups, you gotta try to lower them the next time.
6. Effort and focus. Why are these two important? Because of automaticity. The very core of the original deliberate practice concept is that experts become experts because they avoid performing skills automatically, and instead try to find weaknesses to improve upon, even when their skill execution is already satisfactory. Distraction is not always bad, but you can’t improve something you’re not paying attention to.
7. Specific goals. Something like ‘I want to run faster’ is not specific enough; in order to plan your practice, you first need to know how much faster you want to run (e.g., ‘I want to run a kilometre under 4:30’), and preferably a timeframe (‘I want to run a 5k under 28 minutes by my 22nd birthday’ — this may or may not be a reflection of my actual goals).

That said, Eccles and colleagues also outlined a few things to bear in mind, which also build on Ericsson’s original definition:

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1. Deliberate practice is not just any practice. Repeating an exercise solely for the sake of repeating it is not it, chief.
2. It’s important to pay attention to all aspects of the skill we’re trying to improve. It might not be immediately clear where improvements could be had, but this is precisely why deconstructing skills to its most basic components could come in handy.
3. Deliberate practice is not about ‘out-practicing’ others. More is not always better, simple as that. What matters is quality: if you practice something for half an hour but pay full attention, it will almost invariably improve your performance more than if you practiced mindlessly for 90 minutes (I’ll admit to serially ignoring this advice myself, though).
4. Even if you can’t apply all of the above principles, you should still try to practice as deliberately as possible. As a wise supermarket chain’s slogan once said, ‘every little counts.’

…What’s the catch?

Of course, I can’t let you go without a few words of caution. Here’s a few quick-fire myths about deliberate practice and expertise:

1. Some of you may have heard of the ‘10k-hour rule’ — that is, you can only become an expert in a certain skill or domain if you practice is it for at least ten thousand hours. It’s simple, it’s catchy, but not necessarily true. In some domains, less is enough, and in others, you need more. And even then, the amount of practice needed to become n ‘expert’ differs from person to person.
2. Deliberate practice is not a magic pill (we still haven’t invented any of those). When it comes to becoming the best of the best, you unfortunately do need some of those good genes, and of course, your social environment plays an important role in your performance too (see for example Lombardo and Deaner, 2014).
3. I briefly alluded to how deliberate practice is different from ‘just practice.’ This, however, doesn’t mean that other types of practice can’t improve performance. According to Coutinho and colleagues (2016), for example, unstructured practice and competition can be just as important for skill development. Indeed, many would argue that competition, deliberate practice and unstructured practice work in tandem to produce expertise (MacNamara et al., 2016).

Taken with a grain of salt, however, deliberate and purposeful practice are admittedly some of the best ways to improve any skill — physical or otherwise.

Enjoyed this article? Make sure to check out this recent article of mine, and leave a comment with your thoughts!

References:

Baker, J., & Young, B. (2014). 20 years later: deliberate practice and the development of expertise in sport. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 7(1), 135–157.

Coutinho, P., Mesquita, I., & Fonseca, A. M. (2016). Talent development in sport: A critical review of pathways to expert performance. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 11(2), 279–293.

Eccles, D. W., Leone, E. J., & Williams, A. M. (2020). Deliberate Practice: What Is It and How Can I Use It?. Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, 1–11.

Ericsson, K. A. (2020). Towards a science of the acquisition of expert performance in sports: Clarifying the differences between deliberate practice and other types of practice. Journal of Sports Sciences, 38(2), 159–176.

Ericsson, K. A., & Harwell, K. W. (2019). Deliberate practice and proposed limits on the effects of practice on the acquisition of expert performance: Why the original definition matters and recommendations for future research. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2396.

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363.

Lombardo, M. P., & Deaner, R. O. (2014). You can’t teach speed: sprinters falsify the deliberate practice model of expertise. PeerJ, 2, e445.

MacNamara, B. N., Moreau, D., & Hambrick, D. Z. (2016). The relationship between deliberate practice and performance in sports: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(3), 333–350.

McCardle, L., Young, B. W., & Baker, J. (2019). Self-regulated learning and expertise development in sport: Current status, challenges, and future opportunities. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 12(1), 112–138.