Variability, not repetition, is the key to mastery

I don't know if this is relevant but I found it fascinating.

I saw a documentary, long ago, about primary school students in China with abacuses. They used the abacuses for mathematics, and they were blindingly fast with them.

And then they stopped using the physical abacuses and just sort of mimed the actions with their hands. And then, later, they stopped using their hands.

So, as far as I could see, they were training themselves to do maths via their muscle memory, and it seemed terrifyingly effective.

Play around with it.

Years ago, I was in a tiny town trying to teach kids to ride horses. It was a volunteer deal with a poorly-organized group. I was a fairly solid rider who had learned horsemanship through a patchy mish-mash of getting handed horses that were easy on beginners, getting handed horses who were way out of my league, buying an animal that was way out of my league (We finally match very well now after owning her for 13 years), and a few dozen lessons spread out over 10 years. I didn't know anything about how to teach children to ride. I honestly still don't know much about kids in general. Thankfully, learning and how to learn is super interesting to me, so I spent many a long drive home trying to figure out what components go into learning horsemanship.

Obviously these kids aren't going to go through my same experiences. They probably won't have a family friend who invites them out to ride a reliable, but energetic, old horse. They won't blunder into a job where they're spending 30 hours a week on horseback like I did. They've got an hour or so once a week to build their skillset. Teaching a kid the cues and posture and how to ride correctly - there's a thousand books for that. Getting them comfortable and to the point where they can handle a weird situation and a horse acting out, there's not much for that. I finally realized that while riding correctly and being held to a high standard by your instructor is very important, jacking around on horseback is important for making it second nature. (On well-broken, very well-behaved horses) try to whack the other riders in the arena with a lead rope. Play pony tag. Make dares, try stupid crap unless I tell you you're going to get yourself dead.

When you're always focused on what you're doing, you miss out on getting that instinctual reaction. I've come to call it fluency. If this happens, then _ . You've got to be able to roll with the punches and the best thing I've worked out for learning that is play.

That's where I think specifically the Active exercises can help. We gave students in a CS2 optional typing practice throughout the semester [1]. These students performed better on exams, made higher learning gains and uploaded less buggy code to GitHub for projects. The results were also significant for students that performed below the median on the first midterm and only started doing the exercises AFTER the midterm. Granted, the students were still self-selecting to improve their status, but it does help establish methods for helping even students in higher level courses.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3373165.3373177

Playing it on different instruments as well, in different configurations using different accessories (plectrum, bow, etc.).

If you can rock it on a total garbage instrument, it is going to be beautiful on a fine instrument.

Being free and egoless like a kid accelerates learning like that so well. Learning to ride as an adult means un-learning the fear we acquired along the way, which is often a big transformation for them, and learning things as an adult is hampered by the need to reconcile the new thing with what we already believe. It's a huge lift. I think mastery is achievable at any age, but the price is almost always "everything," because mastery is not technique, it really is a becoming.

While I was never pro, I still ride more days than not, and what I've arrived at from it is posture is the effect other people observe, but to your excellent point, only after we have polished a free and fearless foundation that comes from that time in the saddle, where everything just becomes natural. If we try to affect the posture without that foundation, we get heavy german seats and hands and floppy dressage legs. That affected rigid looking seat is about submitting the horse to our aids, whereas a seat that is the effect of the free foundation you can learn more easily as a kid is about releasing the horse's willingness from our need. The posture that is the polished effect of that freedom has more grace, like a dancer or a matador instead of that of a performer or a soldier. The lightness that is the result of it is the effect of a rider's patient posture, which to an observer, looks straight, but they can't see the underlying suppleness of it unless they are at that level themseves. If you ever see any old videos of Nuno Oliviera (the last riding master of the 20th century), I would say that his posture is an expression of this patience, which comes from his first hand knowledge of what is possible, and the horse is responding willingly because it is being met with the confidence of his knowing, and so when it moves, it is following him, but following at his leg, and really, through his body it is reading the intent of his mind. In this sense, the key to mastery is learning patience, and knowing when to be impatient.

Anyway, way to trigger a dressage bro, not a lot of opportunities for that on this site. :)