Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [94]
Over the past few decades, psychologists have reached the remarkable conclusion that your level of achievement in fields ranging from sports to music to science depends less on natural talent than on the number of hours you spend doing “deliberate practice,” a term coined by Florida State University cognitive psychologist Anders Ericsson. In one of his seminal studies, Ericsson found that the virtuosos at major philharmonics had averaged 7,400 hours of deliberate practice by the age of 18; typical professionals had averaged 5,300 hours; and those who ended up teaching violin instead of performing had spent only 3,400 hours.
Not all practice is “deliberate” practice. Rather than simply repeating tasks over and over, it involves setting specific goals and monitoring how well you perform, constantly adjusting and improving your technique. This seems like the opposite of most training for endurance sports—heading out the door and running for an hour at a comfortable pace, say, with no specific goals, minimal feedback, and no thought about technique.
But top endurance athletes rely on a number of training techniques that do fit the definition of deliberate practice. In a study of the training practices of elite runners by University of Ottawa researchers Bradley Young and John Salmela, what separated the highest-performing group from their less accomplished peers was how much they incorporated elements like interval training, tempo runs, and time trials, all of which require ongoing attention to pace and other feedback. “High quality and high intensity, rather than long slow distance, is at the heart of deliberate practice,” Baker says.
Deliberate practice also involves monitoring your training and progress over the course of weeks and months and making appropriate adjustments, rather than just doing what you’ve always done. A study of Ironman triathletes by Baker and his colleagues found that the most experienced athletes planned their training year carefully, taking regular easy weeks to allow their bodies to recover so that they could steadily build their training to a peak. The novices, in contrast, simply trained as hard as they could until cumulative fatigue or injuries forced them to back off, resulting in less training overall.
Traditionally, researchers have divided the mental strategies used by endurance athletes into “associative” and “dissociative.” When you’re associating, you’re concentrating on the task at hand: your breathing, your pace, and so on. When you’re dissociating, you’re thinking about anything but the task at hand: the weather, or last night’s TV show. A series of studies over the past few decades has demonstrated that faster runners have more associative thoughts during competition than their slower rivals, who have more dissociative thoughts. “But there’s an important message,” Baker notes. “No one has suggested that top runners associate all the time.”
Similarly, psychologists don’t suggest that you try to make all your training deliberate. Even the virtuoso violinists, famed for spending 10 or more hours a day practicing, managed to average only a few hours a day of deliberate practice. For most people, the majority of exercise time should remain relaxed, a mental diversion. But adding a segment of deliberate practice a few times a week could make a big difference in your race performance. And there may be an added bonus. Young and Salmela’s study of elite runners produced one very unexpected result: they found that the types of training that took the most effort and concentration—the most deliberate, in other words—were rated as the most enjoyable sessions by the runners. So deliberate practice may be hard, but it’s satisfying—especially on game