Why is practicing so important

Start slow and increase speed later 4. Practice repeatedly with frequent breaks 5. Visualize the skill to help reinforce practice. Check out this TED-Ed video for more info on the fascinating processes that neuroscientists are beginning to unlock. Subscribe to receive weekly updates of MindShift stories every Sunday. Search-Icon Created with Sketch. KQED is a proud member of. Some students were much more capable of noticing and correcting their errors, and played better on the second run-through of a piece, while others actually made more errors on subsequent run-throughs.

Based on their data, the researchers suggest that teachers stop during lessons and ask students to reflect and comment on the accuracy of what they just played.

This could then be the basis for teaching students strategies like mentally singing the opening phrase before playing, or looking at the music to identify potential trouble spots, or remembering to think about the tempo or key before they play.

Their other suggestion was to occasionally take a momentary time-out in lessons and ask students to demonstrate how they would practice a tricky section. To see how they approach listening and problem-solving — to essentially practice practicing in lessons. Students were also not so great at noticing errors and monitoring the quality of their playing. Spend time demonstrating or modeling specific practice strategies during lessons, that students can try using at home during the week.

Find ways to help young learners reflect on the quality of their practice time. Because these are not necessarily things that students will intuit on their own — and the researchers suggest that the tiny differences that start to appear even in the very first practice sessions accumulate over time and could very well be the difference between a student who practices harder, is more confident about their learning ability, and achieves at a higher level, and a student who lags behind.

And that rush of adrenaline and emotional roller coaster you experience before performances is totally normal too. Performing at the upper ranges of your ability under pressure is a unique skill — one that requires specific mental skills, and perhaps a few other tweaks in your approach to practicing too.

And learn how you can develop these into strengths of your own. And begin to see tangible improvements in your playing that transfer to the stage. So excited to share this article with my students and their parents and also to work on applying the suggestions better in my studio.

Thank you! In spite of my degree in violin performance, and in spite of significant post-graduate work, I was in my 30s when I truly learned how to practice, which I had to teach myself. It was very humbling to realize how much time I had wasted over the years in the practice room. Because of this fact, How to Practice was one of the first things I taught when I had a teaching studio.

I used to tell my students it was my job to make my job eventually unnecessary. Still, I found the students who actually used the techniques few and far between. To me, there is no more important skill for young musicians the whole teach a man to fish idea. Two of my teenage children are competitive swimmers, which means I have been volunteering at swim meets for over a decade. My volunteer job is to monitor races and ensure that swimmers follow legal stroke technique.

I have received hours and hours of training — lecture, video, discussion, observation — on what constitutes proper, legal technique. I can tell you exactly what the butterfly should look like: the kick and the pull, and how the arms have to be synchronous, and how the touch and turn need to work.

I know all about how to swim butterfly. Not even 25 yards. While the age-old saying suggests that practice makes perfect, researchers have found that practice alone doesn't necessarily lead to success. Instead, experts suggest that the right kind of practice is what really matters when trying to optimize learning and increase skills. While actual hands-on experience is often touted as the only way to learn a new skill, it leaves out another very important type of rehearsal—mental practice.

Mental practice involves imagining the procedures you must go through to perform a task. For example, a pianist might mentally practice a piece of music while an actor might mentally rehearse his role in a play.

One study found that medical students who combined mental practice with hands-on experience did better when performing real surgery than those who had only relied on physical practice and textbook reading.

Researchers have also found that the way a person practices influences how well a skill is learned. In a study, a team of researchers analyzed data collected from more than , participants as the players learned new skills playing an online game called "Axon. In the game, players guide a neuron from one connection to the next by clicking on possible targets. The purpose is to test how well participants perceive information and make decisions as well as how quickly they act. What the researchers were interested in, however, was what kind of effect practice had on game performance.

While some players practiced the same amount as others, they displayed much higher scores than the rest. By analyzing the data, the researchers were able to see that these high-scoring players had spaced out their playing sessions more, suggesting that they spent more time investigating how the game worked than the lower-scoring players. These spaced-out explorations early on paid off in better performance later as the players became more skilled.

So how can you practice in a way that will effectively foster skill development? Here are some ways you can make your practice count.

While practice might not necessarily make your skills perfect, it certainly is still an important piece of the learning puzzle. By balancing methods that include mental rehearsal, hands-on practice, exploration, and other forms of learning, you can optimize skill development and become a more efficient learner. Becoming an elite expert in any area takes years, and practice is ultimately just one piece of the puzzle.