Elements of deliberate practice
- Deliberate practice exercises are granular
- exercises are designed to simulate real word (contest) situations
- deliberate practice is painful and requires mental toughness. It should push you to your limit.
- Uses well-established training techniques, if they exist in the field you are practicing
- Preferably under the guidance of a coach when possible
- deliberate practice involves modifying existing mental models of a skill.
Designing drills
- When coming up with new skills, ask "what captures something that players will have to do in a real match?"
- Watching videos of people doing what you want to do can help give you ideas of skills, and how they are done.
- Once you develop an exercise, see if you can use the skill in a real world situation. If not, tweak the drill.
Deliberate practice vs. Holistic simulations
Deliberate practice is doing drills of specific, granular skills. Holistic simulations (In martial arts, known as randori) are activities that simulate the entire sport or skill. Drills are a science, practice is an art.
- Deliberate practice drills can't teach the holistic skill of putting everything together. You still need to simulate the whole activity.
- Drills can't teach 'sensibilities.' Those can only be learned through a large volume of real world experience. What are sensibilities? It's how your body reacts before your mind knows what its doing. (tacit knowledge)
- Deliberate drills cannot prepare you for randomness, unlike more holistic simulations.
- play. Consider the difference between running scales on the guitar and playing your favorite songs. What's the point of building expertise if you can't have fun with it?
Examples of breaking down a skill into deliberate practice
There are times in a Judo match when you realize that you cannot throw your opponent, and your advantage might lie with attacking them on the ground. In order to do this you need to:
- Bring them, legally, to the ground
- Be fast enough to get to a dominant attacking position on the ground
- If necessary, to keep them on the ground (which means to keep them on all fours)
- Execute the newaza technique (be it pin, choke, or armlock). Source: An Expertise Acceleration Experiment in Judo, CommonCog