You Don’t Need 10,000 Hours of Reps

Back in 2008 Malcolm Gladwell published Outliers: The Story of Success. More than anything else, this book popularized the idea that the path to the upper echelons of any human pursuit went through 10,000 hours of practice. Several other books came out around the same time with roughly the same take on the link between expertise and practice time.

Although the “10,000-hour rule” is certainly pointing at something that’s true and useful, it’s vastly oversimplified as understood by the general public. 10,000 hours of practice is not THE key to becoming a high-end performer in a discipline, although it does take a ton of practice to get good at something. Most importantly not all practice hours are created equal. Let’s break it down.

Reps or repetitions are practice of specific body movement sequences to learn proper technique and achieve results for sports, physical fitness, physical therapy, and many related areas. Here we focus on sports. Quality reps are what’s critically important and generally if you are not doing things correctly, you’re kind of wasting your time. With quality reps you can significantly expedite your learning timeline.

So what makes for quality reps? There are two components: the content and the intensity. Content refers to what’s guiding your practice whether it be a skills instructor, coach, instructional materials, or technology. Intensity means you are giving all you have both physically and mentally, staying focused, and having specific goals to achieve. You need both quality in content and intensity to have quality reps. If you have intensity, said otherwise you are a driven athlete or have an elite mindset, you will seek out quality content which might be through a talented skills instructor or technology such as offered by VISYN.

Poor content with minimal intensity means lots of low-effectiveness practice hours. But increasing the quality of your reps means the effectiveness of practice hours goes way up, even to the point of more than making up for doing far fewer practice hours.

What’s more, this all serves to explain and add color to one of sports’ greatest stories of efficiency of practice. There is a legend of a tennis player who spent 268 weeks as the world’s number one player over the 70s and 80s and was able to reach this level while practicing less than most peers. This player is Jimmy Connors.

How did he do it? It’s said that he practiced with an intensity that others could not match. His competitors tried to train with him and failed to keep up. And, when he was spent (mentally and/or physically), he would end the session and move on.

But intensity should be approached carefully. There are physical limits to how hard one can train and for how long. And, although it’s commendable to push into those limits and find a level you didn’t know you had, not all practices should be physically taxing. Sometimes you are working on things that don’t really get you sweating, but instead are difficult on the mental side. For example, when you need to get ever finer control over some part of your body in order to get a technique right, this demands mental effort. And burnout defeats the purpose entirely.

How can you get more out of your practice? How can you set your brain up to want to engage with the challenges and to be primed to get the most out of them? This challenge of getting the most out of practice through quality reps is exactly what VISYN was created to help athletes overcome. VISYN provides a shorter and easier path to elite-level skill in various disciplines of human movement; initially targeting the sports of golf and hockey.

VISYN NeuroStream Training allows you to practice in your head before you physically practice your sport biomechanics. It’s mental practice delivered through NeuroStreams, first of a kind neuroscience driven experiences that feature Visual Reps. By design Visual Reps provide a repetition training effect like physical practice, and there are no limitations so you can practice anywhere, anytime, any condition. Practice in your head with NeuroStream Training means watching neuroscience engineered videos along with guided and controlled advanced mental imagery. Our training content is the most unique and highest quality you will find anywhere!