By Cameron van Rooyen
It wasn’t too long ago that I wholeheartedly believed in the famous 10 000-hour rule. This rule suggests that any learnt skill can be mastered by devoting 10 000 hours to it. This equates to approximately three hours a day for about 10 years. I mean, no matter what sport or discipline you are in, the record always sings the same tune “to make it in this sport, you’re going to have to grind, you’re going to have to make sacrifices and you’re going to have to PRACTICE A LOT.”
Now, whilst there is truth in all of that, many athletes have found success in a far shorter period of time, while others needed double or even triple that to reach theirs. What sets them apart? We can all agree, the best way to learn a skill is through replication, but what mode of repetition is the right one and what factors influence our skills progression.
Honestly, when is too much training a bad thing and why do some athletes burn out and become stale? The answers, I believe, lies in defining the differences between training and practising and learning how to balance them effectively. Firstly, in my mind, there has to be a difference. Training involves all the technical aspects of the skill (in music this would be learning notation, scales, finger techniques etc.) Practising, would in tale putting all those aspects together (like creating or perfecting a song). In golf, we don’t see this every day.
Queue. Mid-handicapper Fred, with a 7-iron in hand. Blasting balls into the abyss. Sure, he is making his takeaway look good but he is doing the same thing that he was doing two hours and 600 balls ago and he has not even aimed at anything. Now, this might be a tad extreme, but trust me there’s a Fred out there somewhere. The point is, Fred, thinks he is ‘practising’, but all he is actually doing, is moving in and out of his ‘groove’ or rhythm, as we call it.
To play good golf, you don’t have to be perfect, you have to be consistent! Furthermore, you have to play the game in front of you, which, I’m sure everyone knows, is almost never played on a flat surface and to my knowledge doesn’t only require a 7-iron to play. Grinding out your drills is good, but drills are exactly that, just drills. There is no application of that skill or feel in a real game situation. How often do golfers go to the range just to work on technique, more so, how many weeks or months are spent on the same drill? Surely when you’re hooking every tee shot 40m left, it’s time to stop using that ‘fix your slice in one swing’ drill?
Practising – is practising the game you want to play and training is developing the skills set in order to do so. That is why I think it’s so important for us to play more and train less. We do this when we are kids and it should almost never stop. We as humans learn best when we explore. Ask your best golfing buddy how often they play next time you’re teeing it up. Odds are, they play more than twice a week and if not, they are practising or doing some other sport.
Yes, some people are just talented, but you’ll find that an individual like that, most likely had a very active and playful childhood. Playing, in its rawest form, develops greater spatial awareness and increases cognitive states which together allows an athlete to be creative in their performance. This is what we call ‘flare’ or playing with confidence. Training a feeling or result until you have it perfected only works in small doses. Once you’ve got it, go put it to test, and go and practice it. If we look at a typical round of golf, most adults can only hit a driver on 14 out of the 18 holes. That’s 20 percent of a possible 72, and that’s only if you’re a scratch golfer and playing well. For anyone not off of zero, and for most other clubs, that percentage is way less. So then why do we spend hours hitting the same club at the range, using the same drill over and over again? Is it because practice makes perfect?
Do you know that Tiger famously throws his ball into an unfortunate lie during a practice round? He is there to practice the game, not the perfect. When developing a young golfer, my primary focus is FUN. Kids mainly stay with a sport for two reasons. The first, their friends. The second, is fun. I believe this is so because as a child you are still developing and growing and I think playing is nature’s way of exploring that development. In the beginning, the goal is to become an athlete, to be in control of our bodies and be comfortable with the world around us. This we do through multi-movement exercises, coordination drills and just playing other sport.
As kids get older, they will naturally fall into one discipline, this is inevitable. What we need to do is facilitate growth. Hitting 600 balls a day, with the same club doesn’t achieve that. Making something fun does, because fun things are usually new and new things increase skills. There has to be a true balance between training and practice. There will be times when it is required to hit bucket after bucket and there will be a time where it’s needed to play 36-holes in a day. It just depends on when and how? It’s a matter of quality repetition and variety when we practice more so than perfect.
This gives us a platform to excel, rather than a sport we become stale in. This is pretty much the number one reason talented kids lose interest. Perfect practice can make perfect but only if you forget about the ‘perfect’ and focus on practice.
