Phone call with Dr. Len Hill and Deliberate Practice takes shape

Talked with Dr. Len Hill today for about an hour about deliberate practice and golf.  Dr. K. Anders Ericsson gave me his contact info, saying he would be a good match for talking about The Dan Plan.  Dr. Hill is a psychologist who studied under Dr. Ericsson at Florida State University.

I have learned a great deal from the conversation with him and last week’s conversation with Dr. Ericsson, as well as from reading about deliberate practice in papers and in Geoff Colvin’s book, Talent is Overrated.  The entire plan is now formed around the idea of deliberate practice.

In a nutshell, deliberate practice is concentrated effort aimed towards improving the task at hand.  The explicit and ultimate goal of this practice must be for constant improvement.  If at any point you are not working on improving an aspect of your training, then you are not participating in deliberate practice and are also detrimentally affecting your performance.

I will publish a link to one of Dr. Ericsson’s papers for anyone interested in reading more about deliberate practice.  For an entertaining read, pick up a copy of Talent is Overrated or Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.  Both are good books and shed some light on why and how certain individuals push the barriers of possibilities.

For me, this means my training hours are going to be much more limited than I originally thought.  I had planned on doing 50 hours of training a week on golf alone, but after my conversation with both Drs. I’ve come to realize, and my coach agrees, that there are limits to the amount of continuous concentration.  The research has found that people max out at about 3 to 5 hours of training in any given session.  That said, there can be more than one session in a day and in fact musicians often split their day into a morning practice and an afternoon session, with a long break in the middle of the day to “refresh” the mind.  Our plan is to go for a three to four hour intense learning session in the morning, have a long lunch and a nap in the early afternoon and then go back out for a two hour session in the late afternoon.  The one major variable there will be the concentration levels.  Both Drs. Hill and Ericsson agreed that practicing without full concentration not only does not help, but actually can hinder progress.

The plan, then, is set for now.  If anyone has any questions about deliberate practice please feel free to ask, I can at least point you in the right direction for information.

There is a lot more I would like to write about this and there will be plenty of time, but for now, I must go to sleep as 5am is not far enough away..

Tomorrow is a good day to start finding some golf clubs.