In my last article, I shared the story of the girl who did a month’s worth of practice in 6 minutes! In it, Daniel Coyle explained (from his book The Talent Code) how that happened. In the Talent Code he explains how deep practice, ignition and master coaching cause accelerated learning, all of which we can apply to improve our technical riding skills as well as increase our feel and timing.

Deep practice means slowing down, making errors, correcting them and moving through the sequence again. To me it means we have to be willing to embrace mistakes and learn from them rather than beat ourselves up when we fail. Then have the patience to start again from the beginning.

Deep practice also utilizes the “chunking” method that Barb and I teach at our high-performance clinics. It’s a version of what the girl did who was learning to play the clarinet that helped her do a month’s practice in 6 minutes.

Chunking is dividing what you’re trying to learn into chunks or segments. Let’s say for instance a reined work pattern could be divided up into maneuvers, each one being a “chunk”. You develop the skills necessary to perform the circles first. Then as you execute a circle you work on making it round, hitting the middle etc. If you miss the middle, you’d stop working on the circle and work a bit more on steering your horse, being more accurate with your arena placement (ie correcting the mistake). Then start at the beginning with the circle and aim more carefully for the middle. If you were successful, you could start on your big fast, but if not, you’d work on your steering some more, then start at the beginning again. Then maybe you start to increase your speed for your big fast, your steering is good, you hit the middle, and all goes well until you try to slow down. You’d stop the pattern and work on slowing down from different speeds, collection etc. Then, you guessed it start back at the beginning again.

Each time you do this, you reinforce on a deeper level the skills that you’ve been building on. After you get the circles/figure 8 done, that’s one big chunk and it should be able to perform it very well.

Now you’re ready to work on the next chunk, say rundowns and stops. After you have all the chunks very solid and easily done, you put them together. Once again, if the wheels start to come off anywhere, you work on that skill and start at the beginning again.

This creates deep learning from deep practice and you and your horse will own these skills forever in a much shorter time than you think. In fact, he proved that it is the fastest way to gain mastery of any skill. In my next article, I’ll give you his take on ignition and then master coaching. If this intrigues you, you can read the Talent Code (available on Amazon).

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