Could less practice be more effective?

Mark Morley-Fletcher is an educator who, according to his website, teaches the skills and mindsets musicians need for effective practice and performance. He notes that this kind of big-picture thinking is often overlooked among musicians, and I would have to agree.

Recently, Mark posted a video on Youtube which caught my attention because of its striking claim: that less practice could be more effective. Here’s his video:

Mark’s explanation is based on a research paper that compared two groups of people practising on a keyboard. One group practised continually for a set length of time, while the other group took frequent breaks during their practice over the same length of time. In fact, these break times were pretty extreme: the second group actually practised in continuous cycles of ten seconds playing and ten seconds off. Yet the surprising result was that those individuals who took these multiple micro-breaks actually learned faster than those who didn’t, despite only ‘physically’ practising for half the time.

Mark explains,

What was actually happening while [the second group] were trying to think of nothing was that the brain was playing back the sequence that they’d just been practising at 20 times the speed of what was going on when they were practising it for real. So if they were managing to practise the sequence five times within one ten second physical practice, that would mean their brain would be rehearsing it 100 times during the time that they were resting and supposedly doing nothing.

According to the research paper which Mark references, ‘the introduction of rest intervals interspersed with practice strengthens wakeful consolidation of skill’. The authors go on,

… it has been proposed that “much, if not all” skill learning occurs offline during rest rather than during actual practice. For example, performance improvements while acquiring a new skill accumulate almost exclusively during waking rest periods interleaved with practice. These micro-offline gains indicate a rapid form of skill memory consolidation that develops over a much shorter timescale than previously thought, and that is approximately 4-fold greater in magnitude than classically studied overnight consolidation requiring sleep.

‘Consolidation of human skill linked to waking hippocampo-neocortical replay’ (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109193). References within the text removed.

From the Alexander Technique perspective, this finding is very good news. Musicians are notorious for practising long hours without a break, often leading to discomfort, pain or injury. As Alexander Technique practitioners we emphasize the importance of pausing to prevent habitual muscle tension, thus allowing our minds and bodies as a whole to return to balance, poise and good working order. And so, if we can persuade our musician clients that pausing is not only good for their health but actually speeds up their learning as well, then there will be even greater incentive to apply the Alexander Technique principles while they practise.