Chapter 17: The Amount and Distribution of Practice
0.1 Overviews
1 Introduction: Is More Practice Always Better?
We’ve all heard the advice: if you want to master a skill, you just need to practice, practice, practice. Whether it’s a dancer perfecting a routine or a golfer on the driving range, the common wisdom is that more repetition is the secret to success. This idea of practicing a skill well past the point of initial mastery has a formal name in motor learning: overlearning.
The official definition of overlearning is the continuation of practice beyond the amount needed to achieve a certain performance criterion.
While this strategy can be incredibly powerful, the “more is better” philosophy has its limits. However, a surprising body of research reveals that beyond a certain point, more practice isn’t just inefficient—it can actually be counterproductive. This guide will explain what overlearning is, explore its powerful benefits for skill retention, and reveal the surprising reasons why it can sometimes lead to diminishing returns or even hinder your progress.
2 What Exactly Is Overlearning?
2.1 Defining the Concept
In a practical setting, an overlearning strategy is straightforward. A teacher or coach sets a specific performance goal for a learner—for example, throwing a ball at a target with a certain accuracy. Once the learner achieves that goal, the coach doesn’t stop the practice. Instead, they require the learner to perform a specific number of additional practice trials. This extra work is the “overlearning” phase.
2.2 Why It Works: A Look “Under the Hood”
From a theoretical perspective, there are two key reasons why this extra practice is believed to be so effective at locking in a skill.
- Motor Program Theory: Strengthening the “Muscle Memory” Blueprint Think of learning a skill as creating a detailed blueprint, or a “generalized motor program,” in your brain. Extra practice helps to strengthen and solidify this blueprint and its associated response schema. This means you’re not just reinforcing the movement plan itself; you’re also strengthening the rules for adapting that plan to different situations, making the skill more robust and versatile.
- Dynamical Systems Theory: Making the Movement More Stable This theory views skill acquisition as your body learning to coordinate itself in a stable and efficient way. From this perspective, extra practice helps increase the stability of that coordination. A more stable movement pattern is more robust and less likely to fall apart under pressure or after a break from practice.
Now that we know what overlearning is and why it’s supposed to work, let’s look at a real-world scenario where it proves incredibly effective.
3 The Major Benefit: Locking in Your Skills for the Long Haul
3.1 Fighting the “Forgetting Curve” with Procedural Skills
A procedural skill is a task that combines a series of mental steps with physical actions. Think of assembling furniture, tying a complex knot, or even typing from a written text. A common problem with these skills is that if you don’t perform them regularly, you tend to forget the necessary steps.
To combat this, the U.S. Army researched an “overtraining” strategy for soldiers learning to assemble and disassemble a machine gun. This was a perfect test case because it’s a skill soldiers learn but don’t use daily, making it easy to forget. The study’s findings were clear:
- The Problem: Without extra practice, soldiers showed a large drop-off in their performance on a skill test administered sometime after their initial training.
- The Solution: An “overtraining” group was required to perform 100% more practice trials than the amount needed to first master the skill.
- The Result: On a retention test held eight weeks later, the overtraining group performed significantly better. Specifically, they required far fewer retraining trials to once again correctly assemble and disassemble the weapon, proving they had forgotten much less.
3.2 Key Insight: The Power of “Immediate” Overlearning
The army study also compared doing the extra practice right away (“immediate” overlearning) with coming back for a “refresher” session several weeks later. They found that both methods worked equally well for skill retention. However, the researchers recommended the immediate overlearning procedure because it was more time- and cost-effective than bringing soldiers back for a separate refresher course.
Overlearning is clearly a powerful tool for preventing skill decay, but this doesn’t mean that an infinite amount of practice will yield infinite results.
4 The Catch: The Point of Diminishing Returns
4.1 When Extra Effort Stops Paying Off
Sometimes, you can reach a point of diminishing returns, where the benefits you gain from extra practice are no longer proportional to the time and effort you put in. After a certain point, simply doing more doesn’t necessarily make you better.
4.2 Case Study: Learning to Balance
A classic experiment by Melnick (1971) investigated this very question. Participants practiced a dynamic balance skill on a device called a stabilometer. Once they reached a performance criterion, they were divided into groups and assigned different amounts of extra practice: 0%, 50%, 100%, or 200% more trials. The results on retention tests held one week and one month later revealed a clear point of diminishing returns.
Practice vs. Payoff: The Stabilometer Study
Additional Practice Performance on Retention Test Key Takeaway 0% (Control Group) Baseline performance No extra practice means less retention. 50% extra trials High performance A moderate amount of extra practice provides a significant benefit. 100% extra trials High performance Doubling the extra practice did not result in better performance. 200% extra trials High performance Quadrupling the extra practice did not result in better performance.
4.3 The “So What?” for Learners
The takeaway is powerful: while some overlearning (the 50% group) was extremely helpful, practicing beyond that amount was not proportionally more beneficial, even a month later. This demonstrates that for some skills, there is a “sweet spot” for extra practice, and pushing far beyond it may simply be an inefficient use of your time.
While getting less benefit from extra work is one thing, it’s even more surprising to learn that too much practice can actually make you worse.
5 The Danger Zone: When Overlearning Backfires
5.1 Can Too Much Practice Hurt Performance?
It may seem counterintuitive, but research shows that for some skills, excessive practice can lead to poorer performance on later retention and transfer tests. This means that practicing too much can actually harm your ability to perform the skill when it counts.
5.2 Evidence of the Negative Effect
In a pivotal experiment by Shea & Kohl (1990), participants learned to push a handle with a specific amount of force (175N). The researchers created three different practice groups:
- A group that practiced the target force for 85 trials.
- A group that practiced the exact same target force for 289 trials (constant overlearning).
- A group that practiced for 289 trials total, but with the practice distributed across the target force and four other force variations (variable overlearning).
The results on a retention test one day later were startling. The constant overlearning group (289 trials of the same thing) performed the worst. The group with only 85 trials did better. But the group that performed the best of all was the variable overlearning group.
5.3 Why This Happens: Two Core Reasons
Researchers believe this negative effect occurs for two primary reasons, especially with simple skills:
- The Boredom Factor: When practicing a simple skill, learners may cease to engage in the amount of cognitive effort required to improve task performance. After a certain number of mindless repetitions, your brain essentially checks out, and the specific mental processes needed for further learning stop happening.
- The Repetition Trap: Practicing the exact same simple movement over and over can make you less adaptable. The Shea & Kohl study provides the perfect proof: the group that practiced slight variations of the force skill performed the best. This shows that your brain is better at remembering and transferring a skill when it’s challenged with variability, which prevents the movement pattern from becoming too rigid.
This crucial finding—that practicing variations of a skill is more powerful than sheer repetition—is the key to practicing smarter.
6 Conclusion: Practice Smarter, Not Just Harder
The key to effective learning isn’t just about the sheer volume of practice. It’s about finding the right dose for the right skill. By understanding the principles of overlearning, you can make your practice sessions more efficient and effective.
- Overlearning is a Tool, Not a Rule: It is the deliberate practice of a skill beyond the point of initial mastery. This strategy is highly effective for making skills, especially complex procedures like the army machine gun assembly, more permanent and resistant to forgetting.
- Beware of Diminishing Returns: More is not always proportionally better. As the balance study showed, there is often a “sweet spot” of extra practice, beyond which you gain very little benefit for your time.
- Avoid the Danger Zone: For simple skills, excessive repetition can lead to boredom and a lack of adaptability. As seen in the force-production task, this can actually harm your ability to perform the skill later on.
The amount of practice is not the only critical variable. The ultimate goal is to find the optimal learning environment, which means balancing the amount of practice with other key factors like practice variability. The evidence is clear: effective learning is about finding the right dose of practice for the right skill.
6.1 Frequently Asked Questions
Overlearning is the continuation of practice beyond the amount needed to achieve a certain performance criterion. It involves doing extra trials after reaching the initial goal to strengthen skill retention.
No, there is a point of diminishing returns where additional practice yields less proportional benefit. For some skills, excessive practice can even lead to poorer performance due to boredom and reduced cognitive effort.
It refers to the point where extra practice provides less benefit per trial. For example, in a balance study, 50% extra practice helped, but 100-200% showed little additional improvement.
Overlearning can lead to poorer performance for simple skills where boredom reduces cognitive engagement. Excessive repetition can make movements rigid and less adaptable.
Procedural skills combine cognitive and motor components, involving a series of mental steps with physical actions, like assembling a machine gun or tying complex knots.
It helps strengthen memory for sequences performed infrequently, preventing forgetting of steps in tasks not done daily.
Practice distribution refers to how practice time is spaced across sessions and trials, including intertrial intervals and session scheduling.
Massed practice involves long, concentrated sessions with little rest. Distributed practice uses shorter, more frequent sessions with rest periods between them.
Distributed practice is generally better as it allows memory consolidation and reduces fatigue, leading to superior long-term retention.
The benefits come from reduced fatigue, maintained cognitive effort, and memory consolidation processes that occur during rest periods.
The intertrial interval is the rest period between individual practice trials within a session.
Massed intertrial intervals (short rests) are better for discrete skills, while distributed intervals (longer rests) are better for continuous skills.
The fatigue hypothesis suggests that massed practice causes fatigue that hinders learning, while distributed practice allows recovery and better cognitive engagement.
Memory consolidation is the process of stabilizing memories over time without additional practice, requiring rest periods for long-term retention.
Use shorter, more frequent sessions rather than long, infrequent ones to maximize learning benefits.
The study on balance skills showed that 50% extra practice was beneficial, but 100-200% extra showed diminishing returns, demonstrating the point of diminishing returns.
Immediate overlearning involves giving extra practice right after reaching the performance criterion, rather than in separate refresher sessions later.
It enables memory consolidation during rest periods and reduces fatigue that accumulates in long sessions.
6.2 Test your Knowledge
Take the quiz to test your knowledge of the material in this chapter. At the end of the quiz, you will be given a personalized study plan to help you master the material.