The Inverse of the Two-Hour Practice Problem for Athletes
Yesterday I made the case for why coaches must not blindly set the practice schedule for two-hour practices (or whatever amount) and just stick with that schedule no matter what. The reality is that once a group of athletes lose focus and concentration practice is no longer effective.
On the other hand, what can an athlete do if a coach doesn’t care about them losing focus? Unquestionably, every athlete at some point or another will have a coach who simply refuses to change. So, when an athlete is in that situation, they have no choice but to endure a boring two, three, or even four-hour practice.
At this point an athlete has two choices:
- Waste their time.
- Learn how to focus and concentrate longer.
Obviously, option two is the only option for those athletes who want to be elite. This is why learning how to focus and concentrate longer than others is the #1 differentiator between good and great athletes. This is also why some athletes can start playing a sport in 9th grade and by their senior year be far better than someone who started in kindergarten.
How Elite Athletes Train Better than Everyone Else
If you are familiar with the research of Anders Ericsson, then you know a little something about the 10,000 hours rule of thumb. This rule of thumb is an oversimplification of Ericsson’s research. But it’s still a nice little reminder of what it takes to be elite… An absurd amount of time.
What’s more, this extreme amount of time investment must not be on developing random skills. Instead, it must be spent on what experts call deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is a specialized form of practice to improve a very particular aspect of performance. Correspondingly, that aspect of performance must be a key ingredient to the process of improving.
This requires a tremendous amount of patience doing what looks like boring, repetitive drilling by an outside observer. However, this drilling is not boring to an elite athlete on a quest to improve. This is the mental skill that separates how elite athlete’s train.
Elite athletes have a deep fascination about the process of improving. This fascination is so strong that they don’t get bored when the process of improving requires repetitive drilling tasks that bore others. This is a mental skill I call mastering mental monotony.
Mastering Mental Monotony
Mastering mental monotony is the ability to stimulate and maintain intense focus while toiling through tedious work. To put it another way, this is the mental skill that deals with overcoming boredom. As Geoff Colvin writes in his book Talent Is Overrated which confirms the research of Anders Ericsson:
It seems a bit depressing that the most important thing you can do to improve performance is no fun.
All athletes know how monotonous it can be to do repetitive drills at a consistently high level of correctness. This monotony increases when you must do these repetitive drills for two, three, or even four hours, 5 days (or more) a week.
What’s more, if you allow the boredom to cause a decrease in the quality of your repetitive drilling, instead of getting better you may actually get worse. This is because you will create bad habits by doing the right thing the wrong way over and over. The only way for practice to be deliberate practice is to do the right thing the right way, over and over regardless of how boring it becomes. Correspondingly, the research suggests there is no way to consistently deliver elite performances without this type of deliberate practice.
In short, if an athlete does not have the mental skills to overcome monotony while training, then that athlete will never be elite.