Deliberate Recovery — Improve Your Skill Development by Taking a Rest

Sometimes a nap can be more productive than a run

Even Olympic athletes don’t practise nonstop. They carefully alternate between periods of intense exercise and intense relaxation. When they are not practising, they are resting deliberately, getting ready for the next session.

And the more intensely you practice, the better you need to be at relaxing. By taking care of your body and mind, you recover faster and can start the next quality practice session in less time.

Practise is most effective when the body and mind are rested

When you are rested, it is easier to stay fully focused and give your full effort. This means that you are more likely to practice close to your current limits of performance. Only when you are close to your current capabilities are you able to push your skills to a higher level.

The hours that you can stay entirely focused during a day are limited, due to the high energy demand of such activities. It is therefore essential to spend the hours when you can pay full attention and give full effort, intelligently.

Practise in the morning

The best time of the day to practice to maximise your skill improvement is when you have sufficient energy to pay full attention. Expert performers practice most frequently during the morning when their minds are fresh. This is the time of the day that individuals have the highest capacity for complex, demanding activities (Ericsson, 2008).

In contrast, if you practise a skill at the end of the day, you will often be tired and lack focus. This will lead to less than perfect technique and performance, and you may learn to do the movements in a sub-optimal way.

Many master teachers and coaches consider practise while fatigued and unfocused not only wasteful but even harmful to sustained improvements.

Ideally, you would practice only when rested. But life also consists of many other activities that compete for your attention. Work, studies, family and friends all want a share of your time. Top performers in any field have often sacrificed time in some other areas of life to focus on their practice and improvement.

I’m not suggesting that you should neglect these other areas to improve the skill you are working on. But it is crucial to consider the relationship skill learning has with the rest of your life. If you want to get the most out of your learning, it is essential to make it a priority and schedule it for a time when you are rested. And this could mean that you will have less energy for something else.

Learning a skill requires sufficient energy to pay attention

To pay attention requires energy. And as improving an ability demands that you try to do something that is currently just outside of your capabilities, it is especially energy demanding. Energy is not only used to learn skills, however. You use it in all parts of your life. How much energy you will have available to focus on practice, therefore, depends on every activity you do. You can spend energy on physical, emotional or mental activities.

At the physical level, too little sleep or poor fitness makes it challenging to concentrate. If you haven’t eaten enough or been drinking sufficient water, it becomes difficult to perform at your best.

At the emotional level, feelings such as anxiety, anger or frustration can interfere with focus. If you spend a lot of energy getting annoyed while stuck in traffic on the way to practice, you will arrive with less energy. And if you argue with someone important in your life, you may not be able to focus very well during practice.

Anything that happens during the day can affect your performance. It is therefore vital to think carefully about what times of the day you will be more rested and less likely to be distracted or tired from other activities.

Another tip is to take some time to calm your mind down between a demanding activity and practice. If you have done something tiring in the first half of the day, I recommend to take about a two-hour break before starting a new skill development session. This is an excellent time to eat, let your mind rest and take a siesta.

Focused attention is very tiring

Deliberate practice activities are mentally and physically effortful and need to be balanced with adequate recovery and rest periods.

The high level of energy that is required to learn well needs to be recovered, saved and used in the right moments.

What can you do to improve your skill development?

Sleep well — Sleeping well and for long enough is essential to be able to practice with full focus and effort.

Studies of great performers show that they sleep more than the rest of us. Top violinists slept an hour more a night than their less accomplished peers (Ericsson et al., 1993). The extra sleep was mainly in the form of an afternoon nap.

Expert musicians further emphasised the importance of sleep and rest in maintaining their high levels of daily practice.

The same can be seen in many athletes, with people like Cristiano Ronaldo, Tom Brady and LeBron James known for their long sleep hours.

‘During the periods when I train hardest, I spend sixteen hours a day in bed.’ -Former half-marathon world champion Lornah Kiplagat.

Getting enough sleep is perhaps even more critical when you are doing strenuous physical practice. The body needs more time to rebuild and sleep is a crucial part of this recovery.

An example of the effects of sleep was shown in a study with the Harvard basketball team. They found that after increasing their sleep to 10 hours per night for five to seven weeks, players clocked faster sprint times, increased their free-throw percentage by 9%, and boosted their 3 point shooting accuracy by 9.2% (Mah et al., 2011).

(Also check out Sleep, by Nick Littlehales, for a thorough discussion of the effects of sleep.)

Eat well — When you practice intensely, your body needs a lot of nutritious food. This may be obvious for physical skills. But you also spend a lot of energy while performing mental skills. When you practice a mental skill for a while, for example, learning a language or chess, you can feel equally exhausted as after a physical workout.

Take breaks — Even though your improvement in any skill is highly related to the number of hours you put in, each hour is not worth the same. Learning is much more efficient when you are rested. It can be worth taking a break or a rest to come back fully focused at a later time.

‘We’ve come to believe that world-class performance comes after 10 000 hours of deliberate practice. But that’s wrong. It comes after 10 000 hours of deliberate practice, 12 500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30 000 hours of sleep.’ -Dr. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of Rest.

‘The greatest geniuses, sometimes accomplish more when they work less.’ ‘It is a very good plan every now and then to go away and have a little relaxation… When you come back to the work, your judgment will be surer, since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose the power of judgment.’ -Leonardo Da Vinci

Taking breaks improves both your performance in a skill you already know well and in the development of a skill.

Drink water — Staying hydrated is crucial to perform at your maximum level. Not drinking enough water can lead to a severe drop in both physical and mental performance (Kenefick, 2012).

Plan the time of your practice — Try to practice at a time of the day when you have a lot of energy. This makes it easier to stay focused and put in the full effort.

Stay in shape — A fit body leads to a fit mind. By keeping your body in shape, you can handle both physical and mental challenges in a better way. You will be able to practice for longer and recovery between sessions will be shorter.

You don’t need to rest when you are rested

To get the benefits of a well-deserved rest, it is crucial first to push yourself to your current limits in a skill. You will not get better at anything if all you do is resting.

Only after you have pushed yourself to your current limits can you deservedly sit down, eat and relax with your favourite Netflix show. All this while your body is recovering for the next session.

Take home message

If your goal is to maximise your improvement in any skill, you should put in as many hours of quality practice as possible.

Your ability to practice with high quality depends on how well you recover between sessions.

To increase the hours of quality practice you can do per day, it is essential to organise your life in such a way that your body and mind recover between practice sessions.

Getting better is not only a question of working harder than others. It is also about proper balance. To deliberately invest time in recovery. You must not only train like a champ but also sleep like one.

To improve fast at a skill, prioritise practice and rest (so that you can recover quickly and practice even more).

Thanks for reading, following and sharing ! :)

My 100 Hour Challenges: