California Polytechnic State University baseball team got involved in an interesting experiment.

The goal of this experiment was to find out what kind of practice regimen would improve players batting skills the most. Players who participated were highly experienced individuals. To determine what kind of practice produces better results, they were divided into two groups and each of this groups followed different practice routine.

Why am I talking about baseball? Hold on, everything will become clear soon.

Hitting a baseball is a very complex skill that takes years to master. Not only you have to recognize what type of pitch is thrown at you and how the ball will move, you also have to time and aim your swing so you hit the ball at the perfect moment. From the time ball leaves pitcher’s hand, it takes only about half a second for it to reach catcher’s mitt. There is no place for thinking, everything has to happen almost automatic.

If your goal was to improve someone’s batting skills, how would you do that?

In the experiment, part of the team practiced in a way that many people would consider as the most logical one. Batters had to hit 3 different types of pitches, where each was served 15 times in a row and then they moved to another one. This was a form of blocked practice in action.

The second part of the team practiced in a more chaotic fashion. They also had to hit 3 different kinds of pitches, but this time they were randomly distributed across the block of 45 throws. If you were a batter, you would have no idea what kind of pitch is coming next. As you probably remember from my previous article, this is a form of interleaved practice.

The whole experiment included two practice sessions a week, continuing for six weeks.

During the batting practice, players who practiced in a blocked fashion showed massive improvement. With each repetition they became better at making contact with the ball and it became easier for them to anticipate how the ball will move. The second group however didn’t show that much of an improvement. At the end of 45 pitches they still struggled to hit the ball. Anticipating the type of pitch and movement of the ball was much harder, since they didn’t know what kind of throw is coming.

The interesting thing is that at the end of experiment, players who practiced in a random fashion displayed much better results than those who practiced in a blocked practice. What seemed like a massive improvement at first, didn’t lead to a long-term durable learning. The results are even more fascinating if you realize, that all of the players were skilled batters before the experiment had started.

Why current performance is misleading?

“The rapid gains produced by massed practice are often evident, but the rapid forgetting that follows is not.” Make it stick

When you practice the same thing over and over again, you are becoming better and better with the task at hand. Your current performance is improving, you are making fewer mistakes and your moves are more fluent with each repetition. It is easy to start believing that you have mastered something when your performance seems flawless.

But as you can see from the baseball experiment, fluency and ease of your performance is not a good indicator of actual learning. Quite the opposite.

If you are practicing a riff, arpeggio or scale for 20 or 30 minutes, you feel like you are getting more and more familiar with the movements. And that’s true, because at that moment everything is stored in your short-term memory. Your current performance is great, but it is unfortunately short-lived. For learning to occur, the information stored in the short-term memory has to be consolidated into a long-term memory. But repeating the same thing till you are blue in the face is the least effective way how to do that.

If your goal is to acquire a durable and flexible knowledge, you need to allow some forgetting to happen. It may seem quite counterintuitive, but that’s what research proved time and time again.

If you space out the repetitions of your flashy blues lick during a practice session, each time you come back to it, it feels like you have to put some effort to retrieve it from the memory. The more effort you have to put, the better the learning.

But don’t get me wrong. Fluency of your performance can be sign of mastery, but only when you don’t need 15 minutes to get to that state. If you revisit an old song that you haven’t played for months, and you still can play it without a mistake, that means a true mastery.

Want to experience massive progress? Slow down your learning

“Learning that’s easy is like writing in the sand, here today and gone tomorrow.” Make it stick

I believe that every aspiring guitarist desires to have knowledge and skills that she can count on when it matters the most. Everybody wants to play in front of crowd of people without being nervous whether they can manage to bring their A game. Unfortunately, most aspiring guitar players don’t know how to acquire knowledge that will enable them to perform well when it matters.

But since you are the reader of this blog, you now know better. You do not have to rely on trial and error approach and hope to become great by accident. There is a lot we can learn from science to improve our learning curves.

If you want to build knowledge and skills that you can trust, you need to slow down your learning. Make your learning and practicing more effortful by embracing “desirable difficulties.” (term coined by cognitive psychologist Robert A. Bjork) Desirable difficulties will make you work harder, but results will last much longer.

Here are few ways that you can incorporate into your guitar practice routine in order to make it more challenging:

Space out repetitions of the same lick, riff or scale. Vary how you approach to-be-learned material (rhythmic variations, different starting point, etc.)Click here to learn more on how to make any exercise insanely efficient. Mix different practice tasks (remember that to learn something well you need to make your brain work to retrieve slightly forgotten information.) Move on before you are satisfied with your performance. Consume less and create more (put your knowledge into practice)

These are some of the most finest practice strategies that you can implement into your guitar workout. Scientific research proves that these are much better ways how to acquire durable skills and knowledge than those you’ve been taught to use.

Give it a try and let me know how it worked out for you.

P.S. If you want to discover more about how we really learn, check out this fantastic book: Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. (aff)

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