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How high do you tee up your drive?
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"5 Minutes Daily" Practice Challenge 1 2 3 4 1012
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If that's what defines block practice, then no, I haven't either. But the point is there is limited or no variable repetition required to learn steering/car turn relationship. I certainly have seen people repeat a bar '100 times' in learning a piano piece until they hit the notes in the right sequence and the right timing/tempo, before they move to the next bar and so on and forth. I listened to Dr. R's podcast twice now, to make sure I'm not misunderstanding. It seems block practice is being equated to mindless hitting by some and deservedly gets a bad rap if so. I like what he said but think people can do 'random' just as mindlessly. I am preaching to the choir here but from my perspective this boils down to the being specific and mindful in your practice. Hitting 50 straight seven irons has it's value if it is done to specifically learn a hand position before delivery (random eg.), since the feel they are trying to internalize is universal regardless of the club. Eventually they need to vary the club to replicate the same feeling to add more variables. -
In driving a car you have all sorts of random or variable parts, though. Different speeds, corners, conditions, size of turns… even different cars and sizes, different traffic and laws (lights, signs, etc.). I don't think I've seen anyone doing "block practice" to practice the same exact turn 100 times, then trying it in the real world. -
IMHO, block practice is good. Any new motor pattern or a 'move' has to be committed to muscle memory and be reproducable at command without conscious thought as the final goal. I don't see how this is that much different than learning how to drive a car, or let's say how to handle the steering for example. One must do it enough times and then also do it in different situations to commit to all layers of brain - judgment of demand, decision making, judgment of response and finally execution. Unless each layer is familiar of each of their role in the specific motor move, it is not truly learned and you will simply fall back to the original pattern. I think the random practice is simply committing the learned pattern to different scenarios or intervals of time to replicate in the real world (actual rounds). It breeds further familiarity learned from block practice. Steer the car a hundred times to learn the move (block) and then drive the car all over town to make it real world (random) to a level of maturity. I don't see how block and random have to be in conflict with each other.
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Yea, I think the first thing is to define block, variable, and random practice with regards to golf. The easiest one might be in practicing distance control for putting. Block practice would be just hitting 50 putts from 5 feet, then 50 putts from 10 ft then 50 putts from 15 ft. While random practice would having a different distance putt for every putt. In terms of learning a new motor pattern, like let's say you want to make sure the clubhead goes outside the hands in the backswing. I am not sure how to structure random practice. Maybe block practice is just making the same 100 movements over and over again. I don't get how a random practice is structured for something like learning a new motor pattern for the golf swing. Like, if a NFL QB needs to work on their throw. They want to get the ball higher above the shoulder. How would random practice be structured? Would they just need someone there to say, yes or no for feedback? That way the QB can go through an assortment of passing drills and throws trying to get the wright throwing motion? For me, how do you structure the feedback and be time effective. Let's say you want to work on the club path in the backswing. You go out to the course to get some random practice. Do you need to set up the camera at each spot, check after each shot to make it random? I know that feedback is also a HUGE part of learning. I could say, I went to the golf course and worked on my swing. If I made 40 golf swings on the course, what if none of them were good reps because I couldn't get any feedback? What if I regressed? -
I found it odd that both Drs. (Raymond Prior and Greg Rose) in their separate videos gave the same exact math problem (23 x 12), and both made the point of comparing block practice to solving the same exact math problem (23 x 12) over and over again. But I've made the point that when you are learning your multiplication tables… you do a bunch of similar multiplications over and over again. You do 7 x 8, then 9 x 4, then 3 x 5, then 2 x 6, and so on. So, I think when golf instructors talk about block practice, they're really not understanding what it actually is, and they're assuming that someone trying to kinda do the same thing is block practice, but when Dr. Raymond Prior said on my podcast that what I was describing was variable practice… then… well, that changes things. It changes the results of everything you've heard about how "block" practice is bad (or ineffective).
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