Theory of Performance Excellence 1.0
Part 2a: Physical Preparation and Practice
Reading Time: 5 Minutes
What to Expect:
The foundations of great physical preparation
The 3 main factors to consider in practice design
Some issues to avoid
In the first part of my Theory of Performance Excellence, I laid out some of the basic assumptions guiding my work.
In this edition of the newsletter, I'll dive into my first pillar of peak performance: readiness.
Few things bolster our confidence, focus, and ability to execute like practice and preparation. The best performers put themselves in position by getting and staying ready to compete. “Proper preparation prevents poor performance,” as the saying goes (thanks James Baker).
When most people think of preparation, a few simple tactics often come to mind: mapping out a plan, identifying some contingencies, and a simple rehearsal or two. The best athletes I’ve been around have shown me that good preparation is what enables them to feel maximally ready to compete, and that readiness also has a strong psychological preparation component that most people simply don’t touch.
In my work, I view readiness as a combination of being physically prepared and mentally prepared. That means that you’ve taken the time to actually rehearse what it is you’re going to do and that you’ve spent time in your mind doing something like imagining the performance, thinking through contingencies, clarifying your intentions, or something of that sort. I don’t believe you can be fully ready without both parts of the equation.
Physical preparation is important in any performance domain - sport, speaking, selling, managing - you name it. Thinking about something can only get you so far.
If you want to get great at a pitch or a speech, you need to practice it repeatedly. If you want to enhance your skills as a leader, you need to practice communicating more effectively. If you want to throw a football more accurately, you need to do it - over and over and over again.
There's a science to good practice. Good physical preparation has a few principles that make it valuable. Without following these principles, it might be fair to assume you’re not as ready as you could be, which means you may not reach the full peak potential of your performance. Those principles are:
Variation
Representativeness
Repetition
We’ll take them one at a time.
Variation
Variation means you rehearse the skill in a variety of contexts and situations. Steven Kotler gives a great example of this in his book, The Art of Impossible. He says that if he can deliver a keynote while hiking up a mountain, he knows that he’s got it nailed.
It sounds a bit silly, but there’s some validity to this approach. He’s elevating his physiology, which is something that’s likely to be experienced when he gets on stage (it's a natural human reaction) and practicing responding to that challenging circumstance. Though he’s not likely to give a keynote on the mountain, he is enriching his mind’s model of how he might possibly feel when giving this talk. That means he’ll be better able to perform under a variety of conditions that might elevate his physiology when he gets to the big day.
Variation is about giving your brain enough ways to experience the performance so that the inherent variability on performance day itself is not so novel that it throws you off. In other words, it’s enriching the mental model of your performance.
This idea of a “mental model” ties back to the predictive brain (what’s called predictive processing theory). Underlying the predictive brain is the notion of the Bayesian brain - the idea that the brain uses past experience to guide future predictions. The more varied the past experience we have, the wider the range of new experiences we can more easily accommodate and issue accurate predictions for. We’ll dive into the Bayesian brain soon, too.
For now, what you need to know is that the richer the mental model, the more accurate your predictions are likely to be. The more time your brain spends confirming, rather than correcting, for the experience in the real world, the more “in the zone” you are likely to feel and the better your performance. That all starts with helping your mind account for varying possibilities.
Some simple ways you can introduce variation are:
Change the constraints in a drill
Introduce 1-2 new places to practice
Rehearse at different times throughout the day
Representativeness
What the data points to when it comes to “transfer” - the idea that we can take what we’ve practiced and translate it easily to a game - is that the single most important factor is representativeness. Representativeness means that the practice resembles the actual performance as closely as possible.
If variation is the recipe for managing the breadth of performance possibilities, representativeness is about depth and specificity.
Representativeness is about making the moment of performance more familiar. The more familiar it is, the more predictable it is. Variation allows us to prepare for anything. Representativeness allows us to prepare for what’s most likely.
Representativeness tends to be the hardest thing to replicate in practice. In sports, this is fairly obvious - how do you get 20,000 screaming fans into your practice arena? In business, we’ve gone the other way, and tend to think that everything we do is a performance, which means there’s almost no time for practice. That’s unfortunate because if we could find opportunities that weren’t exactly the most important moments but lent themselves to great, representative practice, we’d be more likely to deliver under pressure, when it matters most.
The key is to find the happy medium. This is a place where you can get creative. It’s not an all-or-nothing requirement to be fully representative. It’s about being directionally correct.
What can you do to improve representativeness?
Introduce loud music to prepare for rabid fans
Give your speech in a crowded room or restaurant to prepare for a big audience
Use conversations with colleagues as opportunities to practice coaching to prepare for managing other people
Once you start looking for opportunities to try a new skill in a context that’s similar to your performance context, you’ll find the possibilities are pretty limitless.
Repetition
The neural efficiency hypothesis is the idea that the more expert you get at something, the less activated your brain needs to be to reproduce that skill. It turns out that your brain isn’t actually less activated, though. It just appears less activated, because it requires less energy to reproduce the performance.
Repetition makes your brain maximally efficient, and this is the basis of why repetition works.
The more we repeat a particular act, the stronger the neural links or pathway to execute that action. Over time, we get more and more efficient in our execution. Our brains are using less and less energy to do the same physical skill. In fact, our brains even reorganize a bit structurally in the gray and white matter to accommodate this efficiency.
Repetition literally restructures your brain. Make sure the restructuring is for something worth repeating.
This has huge performance advantages. The most important advantage is that it frees up cognitive resources to deal with the inevitable novelty and complexity of performance day itself. Your brain is the most metabolically taxing organ in the body. The more efficient your brain is, the more energetic resources you have in the body to manage the evolving performance context.
No matter how much representativeness and variation we get into our training, we need some degree of neural efficiency to optimize our performance on game day. That’s why it’s valuable for Steph Curry to keep shooting hundreds of 3-pointers in practice, even if he’s already pretty good at making them in the game. Efficiency is energetically very valuable.
But not all repetition is created equal.
After a decade + in sports, I’ve seen repetition go wrong a few times. If you’re repeating a skill you’ll never use day after day - like practicing putts from a sand trap (true story) - you’re training up some efficiency that will not be quite as useful as it could be. It's a wasted brain reorganization. To be clear, this activity isn’t completely unworthy - it’s just not maximally worth it. And, since time is often our most precious resource, this is about as close to a waste of time as we can get.
For busy performers wanting to make the most of their time, then, the repetition needs to be representative of the skills you’ll use in the game. When repetition is done right, it combines with representativeness to maximize the use of practice time and to make the mental model as specific as possible.
Some recommendations for repetition:
Find the skill you use most regularly and do it again and again
Make sure your repetition mimics the performance as closely as possible
Seek feedback on your repetition to refine as you go
While there’s more that we could dive into for effective practice design, and maybe we will down the line, these 3 guideposts are enough to get started on good physical preparation for performance.
For non-sport contexts, the key is to start to differentiate between what needs to be a performance and what can be practice. With practice time identified, you can start to build the pillars of effective preparation and readiness into your day-to-day life.
Physical preparation alone is not enough to maximize your potential readiness, though. In Part 2b, we’ll dive into psychological preparation, and the skills you can use to max out this readiness state. What we’ll find is that there’s a synergistic relationship between the two, down to the neural level. When physical preparation combines with psychological preparation, our readiness is maximized which means the odds of our best performance possible are their highest.