The Mistake Coaches Make with Beginners in Practice

The Mistake Coaches Make with Beginners in Practice

When a coach is working with a beginner in a sport, there is a tendency to want to help them get up to speed on their fundamentals as fast as possible. As the saying goes, practice makes perfect. So, coaches try to get beginners to practice as much as possible.

However, the inverse of practice makes perfect is imperfect practice makes imperfect. Correspondingly, the more a beginner practices imperfect fundamentals, the less perfect they get. This is the mistake coaches make.

Beginners may be able to get a few reps of one technique right with a lot of practice, but they won’t get a lot of reps of multiple techniques right. In other words, beginners need more of less not less of more.

Doing the right thing the wrong way is not progress. When working with beginners, coaches must prioritize concentration on doing the right thing the right way, even if that concentration only last 5 to 10 minutes. Unquestionably, 5 minutes of doing the right thing the right way is far better than 2 hours of doing the right thing the wrong way.

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