Making Practice Effective

Tips for making your practice more effective

These are just some ideas for making practice more effective, so that you don’t waste hours (taking longer to become an expert), but the list is by no means complete:

• Review your performances, good and bad(I now I keep saying this, and I will keep saying it!)
• From that, keep working to make your strengths stronger
• Turn areas for development into training goals, linked to your performance goals
• Seek every opportunity for feedback – from your coach especially, but others too (being mindful of the possibility of conflicting advice)
• Use video – if you have access to video analysis, use that as often as possible, but at the very least have someone record races for you to watch
• Keep and look back at information about your swims – build your ‘database’, monitor your progress and look for patterns in your performance
• Become a ‘student’ of swimming and take more responsibility for decisions about your training (offer solutions to your coach, not just problems)
• Know why you are doing what you are doing. If you are working on aerobic development, you know that taking extra rest simply diminishes the value of the set, whereas skipping rest can diminish the value of a speed set
• Focus on the detail. Just how far off the wall are you kicking? Where exactly is your hand catching the water? What were your actual times / HR for the set?

If you have tips of your own, if not to break the 10000 hour rule, to make more efficient and effective use of your ‘deliberate practice’, please share them as a comment.

Ericsson, K. A., Prietula, M. J., & Cokely, E. T. (2007). The Making of an Expert. Harvard Business Review (July-August ).