Coaching Tip #70

“One practice is not important”

Practice is important.  Coaches know that.  Scientific research underpins that knowledge.  It naturally follows that you can’t improve if you aren’t practicing, and that every (extra) minute of practice time is important.  After all, getting to 10,000 hours takes a long time and all those minutes add up fast, especially the ones that are lost.

Coaches can easily get hung up on measuring practice opportunities.  They often want squeeze in an extra session between other activities.  Coaches can easily get hung up on counting every extra minute of practice.  They often want to squeeze in one extra rep here, or add one extra drill there.

But how much does it really matter?

If you have clear, integrated vision of the game, and how to teach it, and an understanding of how players and teams develop over time, and if you follow that vision every day, then the impact of any single training session is minimised.

If you have a clear understanding of how injuries and overtraining syndromes develop and you care for the health of individual players, then you know that in many cases missing a training session has measurable long term benefits.

Practice is important, but one practice is not important.

A collection of more Coaching Tips can be found here.

For more great coaching tips, check out the Vyacheslav Platonov coaching book here.