I know it takes a lot of practice to become adept at tai chi. Just how much I was unable to gauge until I read about the research conducted by K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist who has studied expert performance. One of the outstanding differences between elite performers-- international violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians, athletes—is the cumulative amount of deliberate practice they’ve had.
For example, the critical difference between expert musicians differing in the level of attained solo performance concerned the amounts of time they had spent in solitary practice during their music development, which totaled around 10,000 hours by age 20 for the best experts, around 5,000 hours for the least accomplished expert musicians and only 2,000 hours for serious amateur pianists. More generally, the accumulated amount of deliberate practice is closely related to the attained level of performance of many types of experts, such as musicians (Ericsson et al., 1993; Sloboda, et al., 1996), chessplayers (Charness, Krampe & Mayr, 1996) and athletes (Starkes et al., 1996).
quote from K. Anders Ericsson
Practice hours accumulate slowly. The numbers are daunting. Practicing one hour a day for 360 days a year, it takes 2.7 years to accumulate 1000 hours and 13.5 years to reach 5000 hours.
I’ve been practicing tai chi for 12 years but the willingness to engage in sustained training did not take root until the 5th year. Without making any correlation with level of skill, and if I figure generously, I've clocked 3- 4000 hours of deliberate practice and that includes group practices and classes. Under ordinary circumstances, the practice hours feel about right for a serious life commitment that began in my fifties.
Although my willingness to practice remains high, MS throws a couple of curves. Balance and fatigue issues affect the way I think about the amount of time devoted to practice. Do I try to override the MS fatigue? How far do I push myself? Testing my limits produces anxiety over the consequences of overdoing. At the same time, MS is always available to fall back upon and rationalize doing less than I am able. When is doing less laziness and when is it coping with MS?
So like so much of life, I hear the friendly prod--"you're doing too much" "you need to be doing something aerobic" "what about upper body strength?" -- and I recalibrate the balance with an evershifting reference point.
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I ask the question often about how far to push, and how much to test the limits. It has been difficult to get my head around the idea that, unlike most people, pushing does not produce increased endurance, but in fact can be harmful. To have gone practically overnight from walking 2.5 miles every day to barely being able to walk a half mile I know is not because I suddenly lost muscle strength. And forcing myself to stumble an extra few yards is detrimental. I don't have the anxiety, I just get angry and sad over what has been lost, perhaps irretreivably.
I am looking forward to starting a tai chi class for MS people, hopefully this summer. I have high hopes.
Dear Joel,
I've been a professional cellist my whole life. The four major revamps that I had to do with my technique make sense in retrospect of a M.S. diagnosis. "Practice" (which, to me, always was in the sense that a doctor practices medicine) has morphed into something much less than I ever visualized, due to M.S.
In fact, I think the loss of abilities to learn and physically repeat creates EXISTENTIAL problems. This is not a joke. But it is an interesting situation for a person to get into...
I see that core problem in the Qi Gong that I attempt. (My heart is broken over my inability to perform on the cello--after habits of 3 to 8 hours per day for 27 years.) But here I am still! However my idea of self-dom has truly shifted. Know what I mean? It's not what we thought it was.
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