Are You Practicing Too Much?

Everybody has heard the phrase “practice makes perfect” but how much should you really be practicing? There are times when it seems impossible to focus and trying to force yourself to keep on going may be doing more harm than good.

No one can achieve greatness without practicing their craft but there are a lot of theories out there about the amount of hours you need to devote in order to reach perfection. Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hour Rule” holds that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice are required to become world-class in any discipline. This has been a popular mantra among musicians and artists for a long time but is 10,000 really the golden number? One recent study says no.

This study tested practice in the form of finger tapping sequences. This may sound easy but the more complicated these sequences become, the more difficult it is to remember them. The results of this study showed that participants who practiced fewer repetitions performed the sequence more accurately. The magic number in this example was just 37 repetitions, which is hardly 10,000 hours. That’s not to say that practicing less is actually better, just that when it becomes hard to keep your head in the game it’s better to take a break than to log one more hour of practice.