Performing a skill well is more than just a skill, it's a habit. Habits don't change overnight. Developing a habit or a new skill takes about sixty days, or approximately twenty to twenty-four skill-practice repetitions. This is known as the habituation process, also known as the six-twenty-ninety rule, and it refers to the amount of time it takes to make a new behavior become automatic. What this means is that if you practice a behavior for twenty times a day, five days a week, and it still takes conscious effort each time you do it, the chances are that the behavior isn't yet ingrained. But if you practice it twenty-six times, for five days, you begin to enter the habituation process. At this point the behavior becomes automatic and doesn't need any conscious effort anymore to perform it. So if you practice something 26 times a day, you become a pro at that skill within a few weeks. For example, just think about how you would go about learning how to do a new task, like learning to ride a bike. What are the prerequisites of learning how to ride a bike? You need to know that you are going to fall. You need to know that it is possible that you might fall. You need to know that there are safety skills you need to practice like always being conscious of your feet and where you are looking to avoid a fall. You need to be willing to get on your bike and practice the skill twenty times in twenty different places. So if you do those things, it is pretty easy to learn how to ride a bike, and it will become automatic in time. The more you practice it, the more ingrained and less conscious will be your approach to learning. And you will start to fall back on that automatic approach as the first thing you do. So for example, if you have learned how to ride a bike and you are standing in front of a steep hill, instead of saying, "I need to think about how I am going to keep from falling," you would say, "Oh yeah, I learned that on Thursday. Now I just need to put it into action." * * * — The best way to remember the habituation process is to look at it as a set of concentric circles that represent levels of automaticity. You start at level zero where you are conscious of your actions and are performing a skill consciously and then as you continue practicing the skill, your level increases. When you reach the second circle, you are doing something almost unconsciously, and then when you reach the third circle, you are able to perform the action without any conscious thought. This is the zone of execution that athletes call muscle memory. And in order to perform at this level, you need to practice the skill enough times so that the skill becomes second nature and no conscious thought is needed to perform it. By the time you have reached the fourth circle, you are practicing the skill enough that it is automatic; it becomes automatic. You don't even need to think about it when you are performing the skill because you've practiced it enough that you have fully ingrained it into your skill set. * * * — There is a great example of how the habituation process works that you can apply to your own lives right now. It goes like this. Let's say you've already played ten thousand games of tennis or ten thousand rounds of golf or ten thousand games of basketball. You are so proficient at this skill that you can play it like breathing. You don't need to think about it, and there are no conscious decisions to be made when it comes to playing your sport. It has become automatic. It is so automatic that it is only second nature to you to perform. Then let's say you go to a sports psychologist and ask for his help. The first thing he would tell you is that if you had been playing ten thousand rounds of tennis or basketball, if you want to improve, you need to practice tennis or basketball for about six to eight thousand repetitions. Because that is how long it will take you to reach the habituation process, the point at which you are at before reaching the third circle. ## How to Improve Faster with Practice: Specific Practice In addition to performing a skill perfectly, another very important element of improving faster is making improvements that add something to your overall game. It's important to not forget that your mind can't process more than one new thing at a time, which means that if you want to improve your performance even more, you need to introduce new skills or strategies and do it within the framework of a specific practice. Let's say you've been practicing at a certain level and everything is going pretty well. You've been practicing and practicing with the same players, and you are playing at a certain level and getting the same results. Then you start to feel that you are playing better but that your results aren't as consistent as they were when you were first practicing, and you wonder, "Why am I only getting some good results now? Maybe I am playing so good that my opponents aren't good enough to compete with me anymore. Maybe I've got to start playing against better opponents in order for me to maintain my skill." It's easy to make these types of improvements in your skill when you are looking at the big picture. But it's very difficult to see how you can perform a certain movement better, because it has to do with how you train and practice and prepare yourself physically and mentally. So even though you might be thinking, "I can't run the marathon as fast now as I could last year," if you look at the big picture, you will realize that your technique might be a bit slower and your endurance might not be as good as it used to be. But if you practice specific skills at a specific time, you are always focused on making sure that your execution is faster and your results are better. So if you are doing a run at 5:30 p.m., instead of saying, "I need to practice my speed for ten thousand reps," you will just spend about twenty minutes doing specific reps. What do I mean by specific reps? Instead of walking out to your car and watching TV for twenty minutes, or going out for drinks with your friends after you've finished your run, you will dedicate that twenty minutes of your time to practicing a certain skill. Maybe you will do some strides, something like sprinting with an exaggerated arm swing, or hitting the ball into the air with spin. It could be anything you want. The more you practice it and the more specific you make it, the better your technique and results are. So if you practice specific skills, you can turn those small improvements into big improvements over a short period of time. ## How to Improve Faster with Practice: The Concept of Triage A concept that is also related to your specific practice is called triage, and it involves training at your peak and then being able to step back and practice at a different level. You do a bit better work if you do that, but if you stop doing all of the hard work that you are doing and decide to practice at a lower level, what will happen? You will start to lose a little bit of that edge you had at your peak. I call it a little bit, but it will be something like ten times what you would lose with just one session of not training at all. If you are in peak condition physically, mentally, and emotionally, your practice sessions should be shorter, maybe forty-five minutes, forty minutes at the most. If you are not in peak condition, your practice sessions should be longer, perhaps one hour. Or perhaps you do two-hour sessions. If you are at an event that is longer than two hours, then your training session should be longer, too, but you should still practice at a different level. For example, if you are doing a run at 9:00 a.m., you might do a forty-minute practice session, or maybe a thirty-minute session, or maybe even a twenty-minute session. So as you practice your specific skills, you try to find that edge of a very good performance and then back off and reduce the intensity of your workout as you start to feel tired. If you train at one level for an entire practice session, you might start to have a lot of distractions and might feel fatigued and mentally drained. So you need to understand that, when you are practicing, you are working out physically. You will work on your mindset with your mental skills because when you get to the competitive level, that's where the mental part of your training starts, but when you are starting out, you should work on both sides of your brain at once. When you get to the competitive level, you should work primarily on physical development, but at the beginning, you need to work on both sides of your brain and develop your skills at the same time. You will only improve fast if you are bringing your physical, mental, and emotional selves into play, working on all sides of your brain. ## How to Improve Faster with Practice: Learning from Other Skill Levels Another concept in improving fast is to learn from other players' levels. You should always try to understand what is going on when other players are playing or how they are playing, because it could give you a clue as to what you need to do to be better. What you do is simply observe their play and try to develop an understanding of how they are approaching their goals or objectives. For example, you might watch the same team that you are competing with and look at how they handle an opponent or watch their approach to a