Practice, Practice, Practice

From the Sports Illustrated article:

"It started with musicians. For a 1993 study, three psychologists turned to the Music Academy of West Berlin, which had a global reputation for producing world-class violinists.
The Academy professors helped the psychologists identify 10 of the "best" violin students, those who could become international soloists; another 10 students who were "good" and could make a living in a symphony orchestra; and 10 students they categorized as "music teachers" because that was their future career path. The psychologists conducted detailed interviews with all 30 students, and certain similarities emerged. All of them had started taking regular lessons at around age eight, and all had decided to become musicians at around 15. And regardless of their skill levels, the violinists in all three groups dedicated a whopping average of 50.6 hours each week to music -- whether taking theory classes, listening to music or practicing and performing. "

"Then a major difference surfaced: The amount of time that the violinists in the top two groups spent practicing on their own was 24.3 hours each week, compared with 9.3 for the bottom group. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the musicians rated solitary practice as the most important aspect of their training, albeit a much more taxing one than activities such as group practice or playing for fun. Everything in the lives of the violinists in the top two groups seemed to orbit around training and recovery from training. They slept 60.0 hours each week, compared with 54.6 for the bottom group. But even the hours spent practicing alone didn't differentiate the top two groups. So the psychologists asked the violinists to make retrospective estimates of how much they had practiced since the day they began playing. It turned out that the top violinists had begun ramping up their practice hours more quickly. By 12, the best violinists had a head start of about 1,000 hours on the future teachers. And even though the top two groups were spending identical amounts of time on their craft at the academy, the future international soloists had accumulated, on average, 7,410 hours of solitary practice by age 18, compared with 5,301 hours for the "good" group and 3,420 hours for the future teachers. "Hence," the psychologists wrote, "there is complete correspondence between the skill level of the groups and their average accumulation of practice time alone with the violin." In essence, they concluded, what might have been construed as innate musical talent was actually the product of years of accumulated practice. "

"Remarkably, the psychologists found that expert pianists had, on average, accumulated a similar number of practice hours as the top violinists, as if there were a universal rule of expertise. The researchers used these weekly practice estimates to suggest that expert musicians, regardless of the instrument, have had 10,000 hours of practice by age 20, and that skilled performers have engaged in greater quantities of "deliberate practice," the kind of effortful exercises that strain the capacity of the trainee. In other words, the kind of practice that is often done in solitary."

"In their now-famous paper, "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance," the authors extended their conclusions to sports, citing the Starkes occlusion tests showing that learned perceptual expertise is more important than raw reaction skills. Accumulated hours of practice, they suggested, were masquerading as innate talent in both sports and music.
The lead author of the paper, K. Anders Ericsson, now professor of psychology at Florida State, came to be viewed as the father of the "10,000-hour rule" to achieve expertise (though he himself never called it a rule) or the "deliberate practice framework," as it is often known among those who study skill acquisition. Ericsson and other proponents of the framework went on to suggest that accumulated practice is the real wizard behind the curtain of innate talent in fields as diverse as sprinting and surgery. ***** "

"As genetic science became more prominent, Ericsson worked genes into his writing. In a 2009 paper, "Toward a Science of Exceptional Achievement," Ericsson and his co-authors wrote that the genes necessary to produce a pro athlete (or a pro anything, really) "are contained within all healthy individuals' DNA." In that view, experts are differentiated by their practice histories, not their genes. The media interpretation of Ericsson's work has often been to say that 10,000 hours are both necessary and sufficient to make anyone an expert in anything. No one, the idea goes, achieves expertise with fewer hours, and everyone achieves expertise with that amount.

"But it is not enough for scientists to say that practice matters. That point is entirely uncontroversial. "There isn't a single geneticist or physiologist who says hard work isn't important," says Joe Baker, a sports psychologist at York University in Toronto. "Nobody thinks Olympians are just jumping off the couch." "

"Scientists must go beyond saying that practice matters and attempt the difficult task of determining how much practice matters. By the strictest 10,000-hour thinking, accumulated practice should explain much or even all the variance in skill. But that is never the case in research on elite athletes.
In some instances, as with sprinting, sports scientists suggest that early training that is hard and specific leads to the dread "speed plateau," in which an athlete gets stuck at a certain top speed. The athlete is better off diversifying his or her early sports experience. (Two-time NBA MVP Steve Nash grew up playing hockey and soccer and didn't get his first basketball until he was 13.) And for all the athletes who cut their teeth on decades of sport-specific training, there are still those like Jon (Bones) Jones, the UFC light heavyweight champion, who take up a sport on a whim (or, in Jones's case, when he got his girlfriend pregnant and needed money) and within months are dominating seasoned professionals. "

Gunslinger Practice:

Practice matters, but it needs to be effective practice.  I started this sport at age 68 and do not 10,000 hours left in me.  Too often we spend a lot of time practicing missing.

The kernel for us herein is that our practices should be "that skilled performers have engaged in greater quantities of "deliberate practice," the kind of effortful exercises that strain the capacity of the trainee. In other words, the kind of practice that is often done in solitary."

There is a myth that you have to learn to go fast before you learn to be accurate.  Mentors have their students slinging wax all over the place, many times teaching the flail.  They waste hours of practice and wax teaching a skill that later has to be unlearned if the gunslinger is going to be competitive.  DON'T PRACTICE MISSING!

My guess is that the average person can commit a quick and accurate draw to the subconscious in less  than a 1,000 rounds.  That is probably about 5 hours of intense and effective practice.  That will make a individual into a serious competitor. Not necessarily a champion, but one that is more competitive than 75% of our shooters.

Joint practice sessions probably don't accomplish much because they are just fun matches where really what we are doing is practicing missing.  Chasing the clock, grailfever, probably does not accomplish much.  Again we are practicing missing in the name of pursuing speed.

Remember we can practice bad habits or skills as well as good habits and skills.  As most seasoned shooters will tell you, it takes more effort to unlearn a bad skill than it does to learn it.  That is why grailfever is so devastating.  If you flail trying to go fast, you will spend years trying to unlearn the flail.

To be a competitive gunslinger, you must have a "deliberate practice framework."  This framework must be such that you finalize your draw so that in competition you can shoot from the subconscious. Practicing missing, whether in the name of speed or just having fun, accomplishes little and may actually set you back.