Practice ought to be fun. Why else would you do it? And what is more fun than that sensual feeling of a center strike, or seeing ball after ball disappears into the distance, gun-barrel straight…like a frozen rope.
And all of that stuff is great - it is a skill if you can just walk up to a golf ball, strike it out of the center of the club, and hit a dead straight shot (or a fade/draw) on demand.
But this isn’t what most of us can do. Most of us will buy a bucket of balls and start whacking away until we see signs of life - signs that the dispersion is narrowing. And finally, as we near the end of the bucket, things start to feel good. And since things feel good, we don’t stop. We keep smashing away with the driver or keep wearing a hole in that 7 iron. And we finish the session thinking, “That felt good. I must be improving!"
In a way, the problem is that it did feel good - in fact, it was probably too easy! You see, while the end result was amazing, the process of getting there was not. The first few shots would have been tricky - your brain would need to be really engaged to work out what to do, and to process feedback. In the next four or five shots, even though the results are improving, your brain has pretty much worked things out and is less engaged. For those last 10 shots, the results are great, but your brain has stopped listening and is on auto-pilot. Learning has effectively stopped. Things are too easy.
What you really need are desirable difficulties. Here’s Dr. Robert Bjork to tell us all about it.
-gtrMM
How to make practice difficult
So upping the difficulty helps us to learn and improve over the long term:
- Spacing between practice sessions
- Interleaving practice tasks within a session
- Variability, where the location, targets, shots, and clubs are changed between shots
- Feedback, where tools like video cameras and trackman provide intermittently rather than continuously
But not too difficult…
Importantly, difficulty in and of itself is not the aim. It would be easy to make a task too difficult, such that it is impossible for you to come up with an answer because you don’t have the knowledge or experience necessary to do so.
So the name of the game is to make a task challenging enough that it is not easy, and effortful, focused, deliberate attention is required to achieve the required goal. The minute that this sort of effort is not required, it is probably time to level up on the difficulty.
Managing desirable difficulties in golfBeta
We can track some of these key elements in golfBeta:
- Design tasks with three different levels of difficulty which adapt to how well you perform these tasks
- Built-in variability and interleaving of tasks in all of our practice sessions
- Keep track of every session you have completed - plan out the next one with a sufficient gap to maintain the difficult level