How you can make practice perfect*

Practice is crucial to becoming great at something.

However, to improve, players could engage in numerous types of practice. These include:

Maintenance practice: Practising an aspect of performance that can already be performed.

Naive practice: Repetition after repetition.

Play practice: For fun and enjoyment.

Competition practice: Against an opponent.

Purposeful practice: Defined goals, monitoring, feedback and challenge.

Deliberate practice: Requires cognitive or physical effort, does not lead to immediate personal, social or financial rewards, and is done with the purpose of improving performance.

You know you have been involved in deliberate practice when the following happens:

• You have had to think hard and/or physically exert yourself.
• You have not done it for immediate gratification.
• You know you have done it to try to improve performance.

The theory of deliberate practice suggests that the amount of time an athlete engages in it determines their eventual attainment.

However, expert performers in sport have likely engaged in all of the different forms of practice mentioned above to get to where they are.

The main difference between these practices and deliberate practice is the targeting of specific, objective measures of performance, and the evaluation of practice. Hence, practice is deliberately planned to enhance performance.

What is difficult about deliberate practice?

There are three constraints that learners must overcome to engage in deliberate practice consistently.

Motivation

Performers must be primarily motivated to engage in practice to improve performance and not for some other reason, like enjoyment or social interaction.

Understanding players and their “why?” is critical. For example, do you know why they are coming to training?

Not all players will aspire to be elite performers. Some are playing for the social interactions with friends and peers, and some for the health benefits.

Your training sessions should align with these needs. Yet, you can still encourage those who want to focus on deliberate practice while others don’t.

Resources

At the start of a player’s sporting journey, parents’ interest aids the transition from initial playful involvement to more structured forms of deliberate practice.

Parents provide much of the financial resources to secure facilities for practice. This highlights the importance of educating and working with parents throughout a development program, like feeding children the right foods, transporting them to training and paying for the membership of various teams and clubs. 

This helps put players on a level playing field when competing. But coaches must have empathy with players who are struggling for whatever reason.

Effort

Deliberate practice requires high levels of cognitive and physical effort. But it also requires rest.

The best training adaptations require a balance between the effort required to move the performer to the next level of skill and the rest required to recuperate from this high level of training effort.

It is a disservice to players if coaches embody an "always grinding" attitude. Rest and recovery are vital from a physical point of view to ensure adaptation occurs but also so learners can sustain deliberate practice to improve performance.

An organisation with greater resources and at a higher level can combine coach observations with video analysis of elite performers to better highlight the issue for the playing squad.

However, it is also important to note that in a school or grassroots environment players should not only practice deliberately. A school environment is an excellent place for learners to compete and play in various contexts, with sporadic exposure to practising intensely.