Originally Posted by
WayneFlint
Very interesting herb im going to look those books up, a very interesting subject speed, so whats the principles behind the ''deep'' or ''deliberate'' practice?
whats your conclusion having read the books? cmon herb enlighten us
im very interested to hear what you think having read the books.
im a big believer in feel, like scrap says people can react better/quicker to feel, failing having the experience to spot somthing even the most inexperienced people will have a much quicker reaction to somthing if you can get feel involved.
...
The way i see it when you break down what people refer to as speed it usually involves 3 or more different kinds of speed, boxing for example there is speed of perception, seeing somthing and noticing it quickley, then next comes the reaction to the perception the speed involved in this stage is to do with selecting the best suited reaction to the situation what you have percieved, then finally comes the physical speed which is what scraps stretches are all about, ...
I remember watching a very interesting documentary about sight and somthing called blind sight, ...
WayneFlint, you seem to be on track with all of this.
First: My reaction to the books -- my specially in life is Learning How To Learn both for myself and others. This is THE thing I do best of all, and I have made a lot of money showing people how to do this (so there is a lot of outside evidence that I am good at it) and yet I didn't know all of this stuff explicitly.
Don't get me wrong: A lot of people will read one of these books and have the reaction, "Oh, I knew all of that" and then miss the detail and full value. I knew some of it to some extent but these books make it absolutely explicit and usable for actual training design.
Bottom line: The research and book are (almost completely) correct.
Several key components to "Deep Practice"
- Get the whole picture first (i.e., know where you are going and what the result will look like when you get there, e.g., watch pro's do it)
- Chunk it down into learnable components (e.g., practice parries),
- SLOW it down (practice just fast enough to be on the edge of success/failure, neither to easy nor too hard)
- Join the chunks together smoothly and speed up so that you are never finding it "easy" nor impossible to perform
- Immediate feedback -- build the practice so that you can immediately tell if you are succeeding or not
- Build the above practice so that you can get in HIGH VOLUME (thousands) of repetitions -- design to reduce the dead time or gaps between practice reps, especially on the key elements (e.g., practice tennis serve by hitting entire BASKETS of tennis balls, use pitching machines in baseball to get thousands of chances at bat, high volume footwork or parrying in boxing)
- Concentrate on getting it right -- deep mental involvement
There is perhaps more, and the above is just about "Deep Practice" there is more on the concepts of "Master Coaching" and "Ignition" (how to ignite a participant, a team, or a whole group of young people so that they achieve both enthusiasm for practice and eventual success).
Reading the books is a necessity (I can't shorten it much, without writing my own book) and well worth the time. You will learn real practical material from each and EVERY one of them, but if you are like me you will still be searching for more (right now I have started ANOTHER book that covers this material, "The Genius in All of Us".
You are absolutely correct about there being multiple components to "speed" (at least 3 probably more):
No amount of pure 'exercise' will ever train the "speed of perception" and that may be the most important component. This is one that is almost always sports (and even context) specific. People who are not "tennis pros" don't even "see" (or process) what is necessary to get into position to return a tennis serve.
(And blind sight is related here as well.)
Then you must train the "response" neural networks to fire off the correct physical response AND to coordinate that response as well as continued feedback you are receiving so as to make the final adjustments.
And yes, the PURE "speed of the muscle" is another. Turns out that this last one is far less important that we thought. E.g., The guy who was KNOWN for being the fastest Table Tennis player on the British Team had the slowest response times (to computer generated exercises.) This isn't unimportant; it is just that being AHEAD of the game with perception is far more key.
On the concept of "feel" many of these "Deep Practice" exercises will be specifically designed to BUILD that feel in the shortest time and with the least practice possible.
But a word of warning and ENCOURAGEMENT:
As exciting as these books are and as powerful as they will be in helping you learn better and faster, you will will need to design exercises and practice strategies and DO THE WORK. Lots and lot of repetitions.
They important difference is that you will be wasting very little time if you do it this way.
You may even find such practice to be less fun (at times) or more tiring -- this is because you will be stretching your capabilities and building new ones a higher percentage of your practice time.
Currently I am designing (and redesigning) ALL of my own practice and my students' practice through explicitly using the models of "Deep Practice", "Master Coaching", and "Ignition".
--
HerbM
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Re: Interesting explanation of improving speed!
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