The article makes recommendations on martial arts training based on amateur science. There are some decent training ideas in there, but I think the bad presentation of the underlying scientific principles really cause problems.
First off, the title is problematic. It suggests that mastery of a motor skill can be accomplished by working less. In the overall context of the article that statement is correct, but it is very misleading to lead off the article with the title. If you look at the status quo when it comes to learning a motor skill, yes, people are working too hard. Mastery of the skill will take a lot of work, but it will still require work. A more appropriate title might be about working smarter. Most of the work people do to learn a skill is not actually productive. He mentions this late in the article when he talks about the typical dojo practice of doing a serious cardiovascular workout and then working on the motor skill. We're going to get better at a motor skill by practicing the motor skill more, not less. It's a bad way to lead off an article about spending more time actually working on the skill and calling it working less.
My second beef is the use of the term "muscle memory". It is a very en vogue term that is misleading. I much prefer the term "motor program", but that might just be the exercise science classes talking. A motor program is what he describes in brushing teeth. It is some set of movements that we learn through practice. It is so well practiced that we don't think about it; we just do it. It would take most of us a lot of time to think about all the discrete muscle movements that are used to brush teeth without actually pantomiming or acting it out. An athlete might be able to recall some instance when they were performing poorly because they were thinking about the skill rather than just doing the skill. Muscle memory is a term that makes sense and alludes to what motor programs are, but it implies some sort of muscular intelligence that does not exist.
The next section is probably the one that bugs me the most. I don't know if I am just not understanding what he is saying, but I can't figure out a way to make it fit with sound principles of exercise science. Successful muscular fitness training is based on overload. There needs to be overload in some part of training, either volume, intensity, duration, or a combination. The training method described may or may not overload the muscles. The description is a little light on details so I'm not sure. It completely falls apart scientifically when it starts to carry that muscular intelligence torch past the last section. There might be a psychological phenomenon going on there where an athlete might think that the exercise sucks, but it isn't that their body thinks the exercise sucks. If anything the "push ups until your arms can’t move" approach will promote adaptations in the body that allows that maximum number of push ups to increase over time. If the athlete does 20 push ups each and every time he or she works out, the athlete's body will adapt to doing 20 push ups. The athlete's body will get really good at doing 20 push ups. Going past that is uncharted territory. Then we're really pushing the limits of physiology, and the athlete's psyche starts to take a bigger role. Some mythical muscle memory isn't going to play any role apart from knowing how to do the exercise, but we should already know that.
The rest is pretty good. We really should learn a motor skill when we are fresh. Fatigue is going to seriously hinder motor learning. In the context of a dojo that a student is presumably paying a fee to learn, the student should spend the majority of his or her time learning and practicing the skill. An hour lesson to learn how to do a skill should mostly be the skill in question. A half hour cardiovascular session is going to hinder learning, and really a serious student should be doing that away from the dojo. Similarly, an athletic team has a limited amount of time to work together on improving individual and team skills. Spending any significant amount of practice time on conditioning is robbing from the team's valuable time to improve on the things that matter for competition. I once heard a story of a volleyball team that did a half hour step aerobics program at the beginning of every practice. They were the best step aerobics team in the league. The actual on court volleyball skills suffered from losing two to two and a half hours of skill practice every week, and that isn't even going into if they were focusing on skills that would have significantly improved their performance.
"A common thought in martial arts is that it takes 10,000 repetitions to master a movement.
Wrong.
It takes 10,000 good repetitions to master a movement."
I don't know if it was just the bad science coloring my opinion, but I really didn't like this closing bit. I think that the "10,000 repetitions to master a movement" is a really solid statement. I think that it would have been much better to just amend the statement rather than declare it "wrong" and then insert one word to "make it right". "10,000 repetitions to master a movement" is a pretty accurate statement. The thing is that you are going to master the move you are practicing whether that is the movement you are trying to master or not. The old martial arts wisdom implies proper technique in both practice and goal. I think it would be better to amend, or qualify rather than proclaim that it is false and then amend. Maybe it was just to keep with a theme of "everything you learned is wrong" that seems to permeate the article, but I can't help but think that everything that was presented as a foundation for the recommendations is wrong.
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