Hi there I'm Tomas Michaud. Today is day 3 of my 30-day coaching challenge.
Now if you're new here, part of the challenge was for me to
shave off my beard and to not shave again for 30 days, just a bit of
fun. So today's question, I'm gonna answer is Should you practice guitar every day?
I'm not a performance psychologist but I have been playing guitar for quite
a while. I'll tell you from my experience what's worked for me
and what I've learned from teaching and observing students. But
first, I want to explain something called the Ebbinghaus
Forgetting Curve. In 1885, Herman Ebbinghaus
published his research that showed how quickly we
forget something once we've learned it especially if we don't make an effort to
retain it. As you can see from this graph, the pink
line indicates when you first learn something you're at
a 100% but quickly you begin to forget.
The solution for this is come back at the material at regular
intervals. Learning consultants believe that reviewing the material
in the first 24 hours after learning is optimal. The green lines on the graph
show the review being done a day apart 24 hours.
You'll also noticed that you tend to retain more and more of the information
each time you review. Because of this, it's best to practice a little each day
and not let more than 24 hours go without going back over
something that's new. Spending time each day will help you
remember what you've learned and you'll feel like you're continuing
to make progress much more easily. The way I think of it is when you're
learning something on the guitar you're cutting a new pathways in your brain
and it takes time for those pathways to become permanent. When you let too much
time go between practice sessions the pathway degrades and you end up
having to go over and over the same ground
wasting a lot of time. On the other hand, if you make another pass within 24 hours
you'll still have retained some of the information and it'll start to solidify
what you've learned. It ends up becoming permanent much more quickly.
So how long should you practice for? I've found over the years that
short practice sessions work best. I prefer to practice in 25
minute segments so that gives me enough time to warm up
really get into a subject or two and then play something for fun at the end.
I recommend beginners to start with 10 to 20 minute practice sessions.
The reason for that is that the amount of retention that you get
after that goes down tremendously. If you'd like to practice longer,
take a break and come back at it a little later that day with a fresh mind.
The most important tip I can give you is to aim for what I called deliberate
practice. What I mean by that is to really think
about what you're working on and come at it with a
conscious problem-solving attitude. In short,
really pay attention to all the details. This is different from what I call
mindless practice that's where you go over and over something without really
thinking about it too much. Going over and over something doesn't
automatically make it better.
It commits it to memory. So what happens
with mindless practice is you end up reinforcing bad habits
and it wastes a lot of time having to go back later and undo the habits.
I'll admit it's kind of a lot of work and that's probably why a lot of people
don't do it but the benefits are significant. You'll make
much more progress with less time and you'll feel better
about your practicing. You'll quickly gain confidence in your
ability to learn. It took me a while to learn this.
There was a whole period of time there where I would practice while watching TV
kind of go through my scales and exercises
and I justified it saying to myself I had a
long hard day and I needed some time to rest my brain.
Looking back on it, I realized that even though I spent hours doing this
that I pretty much wasted my time and I have very little progress to show for it.
Now I remind myself from time to time that how I practice is more important
than the amount of time I practice. Thanks for hanging out with me today. I
hope you'll be back tomorrow for my day 4 and stick with me as my beard grows
and hopefully you grow in guitar learning knowledge. Hey I'm
curious to hear what you think. Do you find it helpful to practice a
little every day? Or is there another schedule that works better for you?
Leave me a comment below and let me know.