Anders Ericsson (not pictured above… it’s some other guy) was a pioneer in the field of motor learning and produced some excellent research on the topic. In a study of classically trained musicians,1 he calculated that it took 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert. Those that surpassed that threshold landed gigs in prestigious symphony orchestras, and those that accumulated less total practice time wound up as music teachers or as “merely” good players. Follow-up studies in other professions seemed to show a similar pattern and threshold.
This led to the notion of the “10,000 hours rule” which was made popular by Malcolm Gladwell. In his book Outliers,2 Gladwell tallies the deliberate practice undertaken by a a number famous people before they became famous. The Beatles and Bill Gates serve as evidence to support the idea that, in any pursuit, it takes 10000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert. That’s not to say that in only takes 10,000 hours, and everyone can excel at anything after treating it as a full-time job for 5 years;3 there’s also aptitude, luck, circumstance, access to teachers/mentors, genetics, financial and social support, availability of resources…. The “rule” is that you can’t be called an expert at something until you’ve accumulated 10,000 hours of deliberate practice at it. And adding another 10,000 hours on top of that won’t make a dramatic difference because you’re already a (near-perfect) expert.
The 10,000 hours rule can be broken if the first 4000 are high quality.
The 100m sprint is arguably the most complex sport skill: 600 muscles must be perfectly coordinated to instantaneously produce maximal force and relaxation across a series of about 25 unique strides. There is a reason the worlds fastest humans garner more prestige than all the other track and field disciplines combined. It may be surprising to learn that Usain Bolt broke the world record after only about 2500 hours of training as a sprinter.4
Because it is just going straight ahead and lasts less than 10 seconds, maybe sprinting can be mastered more easily than Beethoven’s 5th. What about sports that require multi-directional movement (athletic speed), ball control and shooting (technical speed), as well as reading and reacting to defenders (cognitive speed)? You can’t compare apples to corvettes, but let’s try anyway: Fine motor skills, breath control, teamwork, timing, and peripheral awareness are needed to play piccolo for the Sydney Philharmonic Orchestra and to play field hockey for the Australian National Team. The latter also requires gross motor skills, reaction to opponents, multi-object tracking, decision making … so it is probably safe to say that being a world-class field hockey player requires at least as much skill acquisition as being a world-class musician. By extension, both should require a similar minimum threshold of accumulated deliberate practice to get there.
Why then, did each of the players on the Australian national team only need to accumulate less than 4337 hours of field hockey practice throughout their lives before becoming world and Olympic champions?5
This same study showed that basketball players needed about 6000, and netball less than 3500, yet classical musicians (and Bill Gates, and The Beatles) required 10000. Ericsson used the term deliberate practice to include things like effort and focus to work on weaknesses with the goal of improvement. This same definition was used in the analysis of Australian athletes. So both professions practiced appropriately for developing their respective technical skills, but the athletes somehow mastered their skills much more quickly. And with total practice hours that would land a musician a job as (gasp!) “only” a teacher.
Examining how the structure of a music rehearsal differs from how a good coach runs a practice provides a probable explanation for the faster rate of learning possible in sports. Music is a sequence of notes that must be followed, therefore when learning a piece of music, that sequence must be repeated over and over. When just a few bars are repeated again and again, it represents what the motor control and learning folks call blocked practice distribution. If the whole song is played through, it would be termed variable practice distribution.
Blocked and variable practice are effective in the early stages of learning a skill. However, as one becomes moderately skilled, the productiveness of blocked and variable practice is diminished. That is to say that minimal performance improvements can be achieved despite many hours spent training this way. At this stage, random practice distribution should take over. Random does not mean that the coach does things haphazardly or without a plan. It means next thing the players have to do is not what they just did, or what always comes next. Consequently, they can’t just go through the motions mindlessly repeating the same thing over and over (or overthinking and overcorrecting a miss –which carries the risk of screwing up a successful motor programme) because they have to do something else that requires attention before revisiting that first thing. For our field hockey or basketball players, this would entail not shooting from the same spot twice in a row, and not following the same sequence of locations. Each new, unanticipated location demands more focus from the player on the shot, which translates into more learning. Even if practice isn’t as pretty, next-day and game-day performance will be better than if a blocked or variable distribution was followed. Automaticity of practice is traded for automaticity of performance. Good coaches know this,6 and adjust/progress/arrange their drills to match the skill acquisition stage of their players.
Random distribution can’t be easily applied to music practice because —unlike a basketball game— a concerto should be predictable. After all, classical music is not improvisational jazz. Likewise, perpetual repetitions (blocked practice) and predictable sequences (variable practice) should be used sparingly when training players in unpredictable sports requiring improvisational and reactionary movements.
– CG
1Ericsson, K.A., Krampe, R.T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review 100(3), 364-406.
2Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. London: Penguin Books.
3Sometimes in the sports world you hear of a “10-year rule” in a similar vein because high performance sport is often a part-time job with about 20 hours each week dedicated to practice, training, film study, etc. (20h x 50 weeks x 10 years = 10,000h). But as the next two references point out, athletes may only need a third of that if they practice optimally. Subtle tweaks that coaches can apply to triple the effectiveness of their practices are a big part of Goodman Speed’s Introductory Course.
4Haugen, T., Seiler, S., Sandbakk, Ø., & Tønnessen, E. (2019). The training and development of elite sprint performance: an integration of scientific and best practice literature. Sports medicine-open, 5, 1-16.
5Baker, J., Cote, J., & Abernethy, B. (2003). Sport-specific practice and the development of expert decision-making in team ball sports. Journal of applied sport psychology, 15(1), 12-25.
6and there are piles of research that show this.