Principles of Effective Practice

When planning my skill development programme, it was important to consider the principles of effective practice.

 Specificity

It was important that my programme was specific to my skill level and development needs.  If my development needs were to improve my overhead clear, then I must ensure the practices I include allow me to perform a high number of overhead clears during the session.  It is also important that the programme is specific to my current ability level and the stage of learning I am at.  If I was at the associative stage of learning, I would include lots of shadow and repetition drills which were appropriate for a performer at this level.  The drills all focused on the overhead clear to make it specific to my development needs.

Progression

It is important to gradually increase the demands of your programme by increasing the difficulty as the programme progresses and my performance improves.  This means that as I move through the stages of learning, I can keep the programme specific to my level of ability.  In weeks 1 & 2 of my programme my session had lots of repetition drills and shadow practices, but by weeks 7 & 8 I was mostly working on pressure drills and combination rallies.  These practices were more difficult and more game like and had more decision making aspects to them which meant I was practising under more pressure.

Goal Setting

Throughout your programme it is vital to set short and long term goals.  These goals act as a motivator and also helped provide feedback on your progression.  It was important these goals are challenging but achievable, relative to the ability of the performer.  An example of a long term goal long term goal was to increase my effective overhead clears in the game from 35% to 75%.  My short term goals could be targets I set within my training schedule. For example, in week 1 I aimed for 50% accuracy target practice drills.  During target practice drills I aimed to hit a predefined target % of my shots into the tramline area.  By the end of week 8, when I had reached the autonomous stage, I was aiming for 80% success rate.  This helped motivate me during the session as it gave me a realistic, challenging, but achievable goal to aim for.  Other elements of the session designed to motivate me were the conditioned and full court games where I was focused on trying to win the game against my training partner.  The desire to win helped me concentrate and gave me determination to train at a high intensity.

Work to rest ratio

One of the most important factors to consider was my work to rest ratio, both in terms of the weekly programme and in the structure of each individual session.  I had to practice with enough regularity that the programme would be beneficial and bring improvement to my technique but also ensure that I had rest days to give me a physical and mental break from the training session to avoid burnout.  I therefore trained 3 times per week, on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday to give me a rest day in between each session.  This helped ensure my body was physically recovered from the strains of the previous session, allowing me to maintain a high level of intensity during each session.  It also ensured I did not burn out mentally and meant I could maintain my concentration and motivation in every session.  During the sessions I tried to work to a 2:1 work to rest ratio and ensured there was variety in the practices I did.  I tried to keep the repetition drills fairly short (10-20 repetitions) which usually took between 1-2 minutes, therefore my rest was 30s-1min.  My conditioned games to 11 usually lasted about 7-10mins so I had a 4 minute rest after them.  Planning the duration of each session and each individual drill was important.  I practiced for long enough to get enough repetition that I learned the movements required for the overhead clear through muscle memory but kept the practices short enough with rest breaks to avoid fatigue or boredom becoming a factor.  It was important boredom and fatigue did not become a factor in my training as this would cause the quality of my training to drop.