Improving Your Martial Arts Practice

Below is an excerpt from an article which posits that variability, not repetition is the key to mastery. The full post may be read here.

Bruce Lee is reported to have said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” With all due respect to Mr. Lee, he might have been wrong about this one.

Variability plays an essential and oft-neglected role in mastering complex skills. Considerable research shows that practicing in varied contexts with varied methods and performing with varied task constraints results in more robust learning than simple repetition.

Below, I’d like to review some of the key research supporting the role of variability in learning and suggest how you can apply this to your career and studies.

Contextual Interference: Same Method, Variable Situations

Contextual interference occurs when you practice the same skill, but vary the situations in which it is called for.

For instance, you could practice your tennis backhand by being served backhand shots repeatedly. Alternatively, your coach could mix things up: serve you backhand shots interspersed with balls that require a forehand shot.

Or imagine preparing for a calculus exam: you could study all the questions that require the chain rule, then all the questions that use the quotient rule. Instead, you might shuffle these questions together so you can’t be sure which technique is needed.

Contextual interference improves the transfer of learning to new situations. There are a few reasons contextual interference works:

• Identifying problems correctly and ensuring the correct technique is associated with the problem. A major difficulty in learning isn’t getting knowledge into your head—but getting it out at the right time. Practice that repeats the same technique in narrow situations may result in skills that aren’t accessible when you need them.
• Putting similar situations side-by-side helps you compare them. Seeing two problems that look similar, but require different solution methods, makes it more likely that you’ll attend to the key distinction between them.
• The extra effort needed to retrieve the right response may be desirable. According to psychologist Robert Bjork’s influential theory of memory, more difficult retrieval results in greater memory strengthening than easier retrieval. Thus, more variable practice is likely more efficient practice.

Abstracting the Deep Structure: Same Idea, Different Examples

Variability plays a role in abstracting the deep structure of seemingly different situations. Experts tend to perceive the deep principles of a particular problem. In contrast, novices tend to get distracted by the superficial features.

Physics experts, for instance, tend to look at problems and see “conservation of energy” or “forces must be balanced if an object isn’t moving.” In contrast, novices tend to look at problems and see “it’s one with a pulley” or “it’s an incline-plane problem.”

The exact role of concrete versus abstract representations in thinking is controversial in cognitive psychology.

Some theorists argue that we reason through storing multiple, specific instances of ideas. Others argue that we erase the specifics, leading to generic stereotypes of situations we deal with. Regardless of whether thinking is fundamentally concrete or abstract (or some mixture of both), seeing multiple examples is central to learning.

A central principle of the highly-successful teaching strategy, Direct Instruction, is to present students with examples that span the full range of possibilities for a concept. So instead of teaching students to recognize the letter “a” by showing students the exact same letter, we would show “a” in a variety of fonts and typefaces. A student learns that all of these as represent the same “thing” by being exposed to multiple, varying examples: