A Better Way to Practice

This is one of the cooler articles I've seen recently... And it originated with a clarinetist. (That's any individual who plays the clarinet, if you surprise.) I'll 'fess up -- I found out approximately her work because golfdigest.Com wrote approximately it.

Golfers regularly listen to music after they exercise. And seemingly both musicians and golfers technique exercise all wrong -- as a minimum, they do in the event that they really want to see lasting development.

According to the bio on an article by Dr. Noa Kageyama at bulletproofmusician.com, Dr. Christine Carter has played at a number of places like "Carnegie Hall, the ancient cloisters in Avignon France, the Sydney Opera House, the Heritage Theatre in rural Newfoundland, and a Baroque Palace in the South of Germany. She completed her Doctor of Musical Arts at Manhattan School of Music, where she now teaches the Woodwind Lab." Those are pretty good credentials.

What she says, in golfing terms, is that standing on the range and shotgunning balls with the same club until you get it right isn't an effective method for improvement. Musicians often practice the same way, playing a difficult passage over and over until they get it right. In both cases, you think you're making progress because you eventually get it right during practice. It sounds logical.

But according to Dr. Carter, "Practicing in a way that optimizes performance in the practice room does not optimize learning." That's NOT the way you actually perform, either on a stage or a golf course, so the skills don't necessarily carry over. She recommends mixing it up with what she calls a blocked or interleaved practice schedule. As Dr. Kageyama puts it in his original article:

"In a random practice agenda, the performer ought to keep restarting specific obligations. Because beginnings are usually the hardest component, it'll now not sense as snug as practising the equal factor time and again once more. But this venture lies on the coronary heart of why random exercise schedules are greater effective. When we come returned to a task after an intervening task, our brain have to reconstruct the motion plan for what we're approximately to do. And it's miles at this second of reconstruction that our brains are the most energetic. More mental hobby results in extra long-term gaining knowledge of."

So next time you head to the practice range, don't just hit wedge after wedge, then 9-iron after 9-iron, etc. Don't hit the identical club twice in a row; as an alternative, blend them up the manner you would gambling a normal spherical of golf. If you would normally hit each club 10 times, you can still do it; just don't hit the same club twice in a row.

Dr. Kageyama's article, Why the Progress You Make in the Practice Room Seems to Disappear Overnight, can be found at this link.

And the Golf Digest summary article, You've Been Practicing Golf All Wrong, and There's Science to Prove It, can be found here. But I'd advise reading them both, as the original article is far more detailed.