Ten Thousand Hours and Ten Years - BetterJudo.comBetterJudo.com
Author: Gerald Lafon
Description: The initial finding is over one hundred years old. That finding has been validated by several researchers in the last fifty years. Now, thanks to Outliers, The Talent Code, and Talent is Overrated, the general public is more aware that world-class … Continue reading →
Date: 2010-01-19T20:11:35+00:00

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# Ten Thousand Hours and Ten Years

Posted on January 19, 2010 by Gerald Lafon

The initial finding is over one hundred years old. That finding has been validated by several researchers in the last fifty years. Now, thanks to Outliers, The Talent Code, and Talent is Overrated, the general public is more aware that world-class mastery in any activity requires 10,000 hours of practice over a 10-year period.

While general knowledge is a good thing, a little knowledge of something is often dangerous. As more and more parents receive the “10,000 hours and 10 years” message, more of them will be approaching Judo coaches with pleas for more training hours and additional competitions so that their little Johnny and Jane can achieve mastery in Judo. It’s already happening to me!

Should the coach not heed parents’ supplications, parents may run interference and take it upon themselves to provide their child the additional hours of training. Since interference from parents who have little or no training in our sport is often disastrous for the child, education is a must.

Parents are usually well-meaning as long as they are not living vicariously through their child’s performance. They can do the math. Ten thousand hours of training divided by ten years equals one thousand hours per year or roughly twenty hours of training per week. But, hey, their child is only training four hours a week! What gives? What gives is that there is more to the “10,000 hours and 10 years” equation. It’s important that we all understand the other issues associated with mastery. Failing to do that will mean that many more participants will drop out of our sport.

It is a fact that six-year old beginning participants in a sport don’t train the way Olympians do. Beginners do sport two to three hours per week while Olympians do more than that per day. For the beginner, sport is fun, while for the Olympian sport has become a job which hopefully remains to some degree fun. Young participants are not ready physically or mentally to undertake training loads more fit for advanced athletes. When young participants train too often and too hard, they often fall victim to burnout and quit the sport well before the “10,000 hours and 10-years” mark.

Successfully navigating the transition from beginner to Olympian is not brain surgery. All it requires is an understanding of how training loads are increased little by little over years. Judo Canada has developed a with a stage called Active Start. This stage is followed by Fundamentals, Learning To Train, Training To Train, Training To Compete and Training To Win. Finally, it’s topped off with Active For Life!

Another good source for a long-term development plan for youth is Tudor Bompa’s From Childhood to Champion Athlete. His stages of athletic development are initiation, athletic formation, specialization and high performance. Unlike a lot of other East European based manuals, From Childhood to Champion Athlete is easy to read and void of technical jargon that gets in the way of the message. I highly recommend this book for coaches, parents and athletes as a primer into long-term athletic development.

The second factor to get your hands around in the “10,000 hours and 10 years” rule is that not all training hours count toward that total. Training that lacks a quality component to it- unstructured training done simply for the sake of getting to that 10,000th hour of practice- won’t help you achieve mastery. Only those hours devoted to the deep, deliberate, hard practice of performance-required skills count. All else is deemed irrelevant training and wasted training time. So what is deep, deliberate, hard practice? In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle puts it thusly:

> Deep practice feels a bit like exploring a dark and unfamiliar room. You start slowly, you bump into furniture, stop, think, and start again. Slowly, and a little painfully, you explore the space over and over, attending to errors, extending your reach into the room a bit farther each time, building a mental map until you can move through it quickly and intuitively… Growing skill, as we’ve seen, requires deep practice. But deep practice isn’t a piece of cake: it requires energy, passion, and commitment.

The last factor that many are sure to wrestle with and try to ignore is that it still takes ten years to develop skill mastery, even if you could cram 10,000 hours of training into seven or eight years. Developing the necessary neuromuscular pathways that are required for skill mastery apparently can’t be sped up.

Let’s remember that the “10,000 hours and 10 years” rule applies to all fields of endeavor, including coaching. To help you achieve mastery as a coach, if you haven’t already done so, do yourself a favor and read Outliers, The Talent Code and Talent is Overrated. Each one addresses the same concept from different angles thus tripling the effect on your understanding of the subject.

Happy reading!

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