Hello listeners, it's Friday, April 26, 2024, and you're joining another episode of The
Science of Self, where you improve your life from the inside out.
Today we're diving into the power of consistent action, with a concept from Peter Holland's
book, The Art of Practice.
Meet Daniel.
He's the kind of guy who had loved the story about Milo that we looked at earlier.
More than anything in the world, Daniel relishes the feeling of physical mastery.
He loves feeling strong, resilient, and capable.
He loves the sensation of staring down a challenge and conquering it with nothing more than his
bare hands, so to speak.
And so for a few months now, he's been building his strength at the gym day by day, and working
on his self-discipline and confidence in the process.
He has the routine all lined up.
He works out hard six days out of seven and rests on Fridays.
And each day is devoted to a particular compound lift, which he trains to failure as often
as he can.
He's getting especially good at squats, and is well on his way to being able to squat
twice his body weight, a goal he never thought he'd achieve.
Basically, Daniel is strong.
One day, his little sister challenges him to come to her ballet class.
It'll be fun, she tells him.
Daniel agrees reluctantly, but guesses there could be certain upsides.
Within just 15 minutes of the warm-up exercises, however, Daniel politely excuses himself, red-faced
and gasping for breath, as he tries to conceal the fact that his thigh muscles are on fire,
and he's close to falling over and never getting up again.
He looks on as the class continues breezily moving through their développés and rendez-vous.
He doesn't understand it.
Isn't he strong?
What happened?
The issue here is that Daniel isn't really strong.
It's more accurate to say he's good at doing the thing he keeps training himself to do.
Go to the gym, adopt a particular stance, position a standardized bar across a particular point
on his shoulders, then move through a very specific sequence of motions, maintaining
the very same form every time, then putting the bar down again, then going home again.
Daniel is extremely good at this, along with the few other lifts he's mastered.
But his mistake is to focus so exclusively on this small set of tasks that he's allowed
himself to think that this is identical to building strength.
Daniel only attends the ballet class, a thing he assumed he'd do with ease.
He's suddenly attempting something completely novel.
He has to move his body in unfamiliar ways, using different muscles in different ways,
to achieve control and poise in a manner he had never before thought to develop.
And despite having muscly legs like two thick tree stumps, he can't do it.
Scholars at Johns Hopkins have found that most people tend to focus on repetitive practice
when trying to master a skill, such as endlessly shooting hoops from the same spot on the court,
or going through the same list of vocabulary words over and over again.
They may create a false sense of their own competence, that is, until they enter an unfamiliar
situation.
Hopes one day they encounter a basketball net that's not the usual height or size,
or they have to talk on the spot to a native speaker without knowing what the conversation
is going to be about, and they freeze.
Suddenly, all that mastery seems to fly out the window.
Researchers suggest that practicing a slightly modified version of the task you want to master
can lead to faster and more effective learning.
By varying your practice, you can learn and improve more efficiently compared to just
repeating the exact same thing multiple times in a row.
The study explored the idea of re-consolidation, which is when existing memories are retrieved
and then strengthened and modified with new knowledge.
Lead researcher Pablo A. Chelnik at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine explained
that,
What we've found is if you practice a slightly modified version of a task you want to master,
you actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing
multiple times in a row.
Our results are important because little was known before about how re-consolidation works
in relation to motor skill development.
This shows how simple manipulations during training can lead to more rapid and larger
motor skill gains because of re-consolidation.
The goal is to develop novel behavioral interventions and training schedules that give people more
improvement for the same amount of practice time.
Experts in a control group who didn't practice a modified version of a task actually performed
25% worse than participants who did switch up their practice.
Luckily for Daniel, the researchers emphasize that it's only minor adjustments that are
needed to get this improvement.
So Daniel might find that his weight training program is improved by just slightly changing
the way he does his ordinary lifts.
This might mean using bars of different thicknesses, practicing with and without gloves, working
with and without chalk, training sometimes inside and sometimes outside, wearing different
shoes or workout gear, or even attempting slight variations on form.
This helps him to improve faster and get more done when it comes to these specific exercises.
But what about Daniel's main goal, to be strong?
If Daniel can find ways to incorporate other completely different kinds of training into
his routine, he may find that he achieves this broader goal far more quickly.
For example, he could incorporate more flexibility and isometric exercises and work on his cardiovascular
fitness.
He could start including free-form exercises that challenge his body in a more holistic
way, such as rock climbing, co-steering, martial arts, obstacle courses, calisthenics,
or even parkour.
By being challenged and developed in all these different ways, his strength is more comprehensive
and robust than the linear strength he'd develop in the gym alone.
Let's explore another example to get a good idea of how to apply this principle, both
to improve the immediate task at hand and also to improve more general capacities.
We'll consider the example of preparing to deliver a specific speech on a set date.
Step 1.
Rehearse the basic skill.
Naturally, you need to start somewhere, so get back to basics and figure out the main
skills you need to perform the specific tasks you're practicing.
In this example, this may mean running through your speech once, in full, under exactly the
same conditions as you expect to deliver it for real.
You might not be able to get to the exact location, but let's say you're able to find
a big hall that's roughly the same size with a podium and set up not unlike the one you'll
face on the big day.
Your first practice is just to go through the speech in this way a few times without
making too many mistakes and without getting too nervous.
Step 2.
Wait and consolidate.
Researchers believe that the best results came from allowing for a minimum of six hours
between practice session variations.
In this example, that should be pretty easy.
You give it a rest and stop practicing for the day and plan to return the same time the
next day to do your next practice session.
Step 3.
Modify your practice session.
Time to mix it up.
The next day, you try a few different approaches, such as speaking slightly faster or slower,
breaking the presentation into smaller parts, or practicing under different conditions.
Maybe you experiment with different gestures and tone of voice, slightly switch the order
of some of your slides, or position yourself differently on the podium.
Step 4.
Modify and refine.
Keep going.
Don't stop after just one round of variations.
Keep practicing with different tweaks and adjustments.
Each time you practice, focus on refining specific aspects of your speaking, such as
vocal variety, body language, or storytelling techniques.
You want to keep the variation slight enough that it's still essentially the same speech,
but you're doing what Daniel did when he slightly changed the type of bar he used or
switched up his gym shoes.
You're just exploring that narrow little zone around the skill you're developing.
Step 5.
Don't forget to cross-train.
What else might help you indirectly strengthen the skills you're trying to master?
Only you can answer this question, but in our example, we can imagine that things like
learning breath control, relaxation, and mindfulness exercises, practice with elocution and enunciation,
or simply methods for boosting confidence.
Here's where you can get creative with mental rehearsal, too.
By the time you've run through the above process a few times, you really will feel
like you know your speech inside and out, and that you can tackle it, even if it should
suddenly throw you a curveball on the day.
Because you've not only practiced the skill itself, but also trained a degree of flexibility,
you are more resilient and more creative.
On the day you get up to the podium to make your speech, and you're struck by the fact
that it feels like this is the hundredth time you're doing it.
You're not nervous at all.
You can deliver that speech with your eyes closed.
On the way up to the podium, however, you suddenly trip on a cable that isn't ordinarily there,
but is on this occasion because of the lighting that's been set up for the event.
You stumble, and without thinking about it, make a quick joke that has people roaring
with laughter.
None of it was planned, but because you're so relaxed, you quickly recover and make the
best of it.
You get to the podium, smile and make your speech.
On the spur of the moment, you decide to subtly change the first part, just based on the mood
you're in and your intuition for what you think people might like.
The audience loves it.
You've taken a step toward not just being a great orator, but someone who can calmly
and confidently speak even without notes or prompts.
Because of the way you trained in flexibility, you're not thrown by the unexpected and actually
end up overshooting and learning more than you even set out to.
Flexibility is not just what you do, but how you do it.
It's a mindset.
As you practice with subtle variations, you're also teaching yourself to be limber and adaptable.
You are simultaneously teaching yourself a kind of resilience and aliveness to the moment.
When we practice, we can sometimes set up artificial scenarios and ultra-safe setups
that don't really reflect the real world.
But when you deliberately switch up what you're doing, you develop a kind of mental suppleness
that makes you stronger in the face of the unknown rather than more vulnerable.
Throw in a wild card now and then, try something new, like your little sister's ballet class,
and be willing to think on your feet.
At the same time, don't get too confident training a very narrow range of skills.
Keep reminding yourself of what that skill looks like in vivo.
Know when to take a break.
Let's revisit an important point from the previous section, the value of taking a rest.
Though it may seem paradoxical at first, sometimes the best way to do something is not to do
it at all.
Imagine that you're working your way through endless chemistry questions in an attempt to
practice for the exam you have coming up in a few weeks.
Time is short, and you're doing your best to cram.
You wake up early, seal yourself in your study, and get stuck into paper after paper, answering
tricky practice questions so that when you're facing the real exam paper, you'll know exactly
what to do.
By four p.m. that afternoon, your brain is mush, but you keep going.
You encounter an especially challenging glitch that you just can't seem to work out.
The problem is, you keep getting a particular kind of question wrong, but you don't know
why.
It's driving you mad.
Finally, you give up and concede defeat and head to bed at midnight, exhausted.
In the morning, you wake up and go to your study again for round two.
Next time you look at the questions that stumped you yesterday and think to yourself,
oh, I get it now, and you solve it.
Has something like this ever happened to you?
It turns out, you might not even need a long sleep overnight to get similar aha moments.
We all sometimes make the mistake of thinking that it's only active and conscious effort
that yields results.
That's what makes us stay up until midnight, hacking away at a problem.
But rest is vitally important.
The big rests and the small ones.
A study conducted by researchers at the National Institutes of Health reveals the critical
role that resting plays in the process of learning new skills.
Contrary to the common belief of continuous practice, the study found that taking short
breaks during learning may be just as crucial as practice itself.
The research involved recording the brainwaves of healthy volunteers as they practiced typing
numbers with their left hands, followed by short breaks.
Surprisingly, the volunteers' performance improved primarily during the rest periods,
with brainwaves indicating memory consolidation happening during those breaks.
The changes in brainwaves, specifically in the right hemispheres and neural networks
associated with movement planning, correlated with the improvements seen during the rests.
This is an important point.
The learning itself was happening outside of the practice session, not during.
According to study lead Leonardo G. Cohen, senior investigator at NIH's National Institute
of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, everyone thinks you need to practice, practice, practice
when learning something new.
Instead, we found that resting early and often may be just as critical to learning as practice.
Resting periods of rest, such as sleeping overnight, are extremely valuable, but the
researchers wanted to challenge the idea that this was the only way to consolidate learning.
When the team analyzed their data, not only did they discover that improvements were made
in rest periods, but they also discovered that the gains made during the shorter waking
rest periods between practice sessions were greater than the gains made between daily
sessions, i.e., after the participants returned the next day and did the tests again after
a night's sleep.
That means that smaller rest periods were more powerful than longer periods of sleep.
During a rest period, the brain is consolidating everything it has learned during the more
active phase of practice, and this is observable in the changes of brain waves patterning
in the brain.
The research team was especially interested in using their findings to help people who
have experienced stroke to rehabilitate and relearn the skills they lost.
While they have not tested whether their conclusions would work for ordinary people who want to
better master their chosen skill, it's worth paying attention to how you schedule your
own break time when you practice.
Instead of practice, practice, practice, it may be more effective to practice, rest, practice,
rest.
It may be that taking even micro breaks of around 10 seconds during your practice can
help your brain properly absorb what it's learned.
After every repetition you make, pause a little.
During that moment, it will be as though your brain quickly replays a compressed memory
of what you've just experienced.
The researchers discovered that the brain literally goes over a version of what you've
just practiced, only about 20 times faster, taking just a few seconds.
Interestingly, they also found that the first few practice sessions tended to be the most
critical for this process.
If you just barge ahead without taking breaks of any size, you never give yourself that
chance to consolidate and may find that you tend to forget huge chunks of what you've
already covered.
You may even notice that after a long, hard study session, you seemingly can only remember
the last few minutes of it, for example.
That's because the more separate instances of rest, the more effectively you learn.
If you rest only once, you effectively consolidate only once, and it doesn't matter how long
that rest was.
Thinking of rest in this way reframes a break as a hidden rep where you're actually giving
the idea time to sink in.
It's like gradually pouring water into a potted plant.
You pour some, wait for it to soak in, and pour a little more.
This spacing effect not only feels more comfortable, but will help you learn more quickly in less
time without you needing to burn yourself out.
There's value in medium rest periods too.
According to Time Magazine, the perfect break is having a 17-minute break after 52 minutes
of practice or work.
Built into this, however, can be many dozens of smaller 10-second breaks after each new
chunk of information or repetition is encountered.
Then, on the biggest scale, you have longer periods of deeper rest when you can sleep
each day.
And that's all for today on The Science of Self.
If you're looking to delve deeper into the art of practice and mastering any skill, Peter
Holland's book offers a wealth of insights.
For more resources and to explore additional ways to improve yourself from the inside out,
head over to the author's website at bit.ly.com.
Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next time.