In part 2 we looked at the value of guidance in our movement skill learning processes.  Now we’ll look deeper into the value of repetitions.

Every adult understands and values repetitions for learning.  And they should.  Repetitions are the critical action that we undertake in any learning process.

When repeating a movement skill, those repetitions ingrain the motion in your brain.  They also ingrain the signals from our brains to our muscles which are needed in order to create the movement.  This makes the technique repeatable.  This means that with more and more reps, less and less concentration is required in order to perform the skill.  Reducing the concentration required to execute a skill is critical for performance because during a game you will have to concentrate on reading and reacting to the play.

This reduction in concentration load is also key for future practice as the overall progression for any sport always includes adding new skills (which demand intense concentration on them) while simultaneously executing old skills.  This forces our old skills to be somewhat “automatic” before we can efficiently learn new skills.

However, to bring it back to our understanding of the balance between guidance and repetitions, remember that this “repeatability” says nothing of "quality".

Putting it all together, if we want quality skill without depending on discovering a best strategy through luck, we need good guidance.  If we want repeatability, we need a lot of reps.  In order to build a high quality player we need both quality and repeatability so we cannot dedicate all of our time to one or the other.

Coaches must make time for both by dedicating practice time to both guidance and repetitions.

There are ways to take this one step further though.  We are not limited to only doing one or another at any one moment of practice.  Clearly, a skater can be corrected (and understand said correction) during a drill.  In this way, they would be getting repetitions and guidance at the same time.

To conclude and summarize all of this; the best Hockey practice execution will have clear, sufficient, and efficient explanations.  Assuming the explanations are doing their job well enough, then we should focus on saving as much of the remaining time as possible for reps.  And finally, to maximize efficiency with both reps and guidance, an ideal practice will emphasize providing guidance DURING reps where possible.

In part 4 we'll talk about some strategies for coaches to make all of this happen.