What You Practice Is as Important as How You Practice

Practice allows performers to develop and refine their skills through repetition and feedback. A solid practice session helps performers identify what changes to make and what actions to amplify. 

Over time, strong practice sessions promote self-confidence and create a muscle or intellectual memory that contributes to efficient and automatic performance. As the old saying goes, “Practice makes perfect.” 

What is often overlooked in practice sessions is not the importance of the preparation, but its focus. What a performer practices, in what sequence, and with what feedback matters as much as the commitment to practice does. In too many instances, performers practice the wrong skills or do so without the critical feedback necessary to correct mistakes or enhance positive actions. 

Without guidance or oversight, it is common for performers to practice things that don’t make them any better. They naturally like to rehearse those actions and skills they are best at and that give them confidence. 

But this misses the point. Knowing what to practice and designing drills and feedback to improve in those areas most critical to performance lays the foundation for future success. 

This is why coaches play such an important role for those who desire to improve. Directing performers to those areas where practice is most needed is a game-changer. Areas for practice aren’t always about weakness. In many cases, it is best to practice foundational skills or fundamentals regardless of their ease or comfort. 

Great coaches offer performers well-designed practice sessions and often devise inventive drills to make people better more quickly. Examine the practice sessions of a world-class performer in any arena, and you will likely find unique and difficult practice drills no one else has ever heard of. This is typically the work of a great coach. 

The so-called deliberate practice methods of some well-known athletes are baked into sports lore. Steph Curry practicing his jump shot with a cover over the basket so he can’t see the end result. Pistol Pete Maravich dribbling a basketball from a moving car up and down his street. Serena Williams spinning the ball over the net from less than a foot away. Roger Clemens pitching to a plastic frame with strings hanging down to cover the plate at different corners and edges. 

What a performer practices matters as much, if not more, than the practice itself. And the best performers have found one or more drills that develop their skills faster and better than the practices used by their competitors. Great coaches design those drills. If only perfect practice makes perfect, then designing what drills to practice matters most.