How to Practice Effectively
Get the most out of each practice hour.
Mastering any physical skill, whether it’s serving a volleyball, playing a musical instrument or doing a 360 on a snowboard, takes practice.
Practice is the repetition of an action with the goal of improving. With practice, we learn to perform with more ease, speed and fluency. And there is no way around it, the only way to improve a skill is to practice. But there are some practice methods that lead to your goal faster, so it makes sense to figure out how you can practice as efficiently as possible.
Practice
Practice makes it easier to perform an action, by changing our brains and bodies. We strengthen the nerve signals for the actions we take over and over, which makes them easier to perform. By improving a little bit every day, it’s possible to eventually become fluent. With enough practice, the movements become automatic, and you can perform them almost without thinking.
There’s no magical number for how many hours, days or years it takes to master a skill. But we do know that it’s not only the number of hours that matters. The quality of the practice is equally important. The body doesn’t know what is right or wrong, so it will learn what you teach it. If you perform an action imprecisely or with less quality, this is…
