3 Steps to Make Sure You Can Compete in Any Context
Have you ever had your dancers do really well in practice, everything looks fine in the studio, but then when you go to competition and change venues, all of a sudden, the routine is a mess? Some of that can come from getting too stuck in a repetitive rehearsal structure.
As coaches and teachers, we can all get in a rut sometimes. We have a similar warmup every day, we do similar drills for turns and jumps. We have a formula for working across-the-floor combos. The plan is always to work on choreography, run it a few times full out, and then rinse and repeat the next day.
There are definitely aspects of having a routine that is comforting. But if you get stuck in a rut, you can actually make it harder for your dancers to compete. There is a concept called practice variability in motor learning that focuses on how we can change up the way we practice a motor skill in order to improve how well we learn that skill and our ability to perform that skill at a competition. So while it is important to change things up sometimes so practice isn’t boring, it’s actually going to help your dancers better learn the skills they're working on and ensure they can perform them when it counts. In this episode, I’ll tell you all about practice variability and 3 ways to use this new knowledge to help your dancers compete in any context.
Here are some highlights:
- [2m 26s] Defining Practice variability
- [5m 56s] Step 1: Determine future physical situations
- [8m 08s] Step 2: Consider different dance skill situations
- [10m 56s] Step 3: Consider all other contexts
- [14m 35s] How to help transfer skills from practice to performance
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