This is something I've found true in my own personal experimentation over the past few years. Any time I've been training something, if I take a break from it, I come back and I have more skill than I had previously.
Recently this occurred with my handstand practice. It's something that I've been working on the past year or two on and off, but more heavily recently. I've made some great strides, but the past week or two I've had a number of things distract me from my normal practice.
Jumping back into it this past week, I've found my balance and strength is or order of magnitude better.
This is only a single anecdote - but I've felt it rings true every time.
What I noticed a few years ago when I decided to bring myself up to date again on machine learning after a ten years break (and what ten years that was for the domain!) I read a ton and watched several online classes.
I realized that the pace was very different from the classes I had been during my student years: classes were boring, so I had time to think about stuff.
The rhythm that I found worked really well for such information-dense subjects was 1:1 breaks. One hour of classes. One hour to think about it (usually I would go for a walk)
Internet taught us to drink from a firehose, but our brain needs some time to process the information. It can't accumulate information and digest it at the same time.
You just learned about drop-out layers or the drawbacks of softmax? Don't feel bad about switching off the computer and think about it. No one is judging that you are "doing nothing".
I remember that on my last corporate job, I used to go for a break/walk when stuck on a nasty bug and would often come back with the solution. My colleagues frowned a bit upon that but luckily my boss, a former researcher, totally approved of the method.
I assume he means that going for a walk provides alternating periods of unconscious processing and deliberate thinking in a similar cadence to that described in the study. I'm not always actively practicing when I'm out walking, there are times wh... Ooh, a squirrel!
My assumption is that there is a difference between actively pushing yourself to think about it by adding new stuff to your brain as opposed to simply digesting the already added.
I read somewhere that you are not thinking consciously about the problem, but the unconscious is. I do it quite a but, walk away, get lunch and come back and viola! you have the solution!
I'm a self taught jack of all trades. What you describe is ultra common in music. I used to obsess for hours on exercises and quickly got nowhere. Whereas not doing anything for a week and going back to the instrument, everything was in place without even trying. Super odd at first.
Recently I've been trying to learn electrochemistry and electromechanics, by copying youtube videos, which is different from doing it in real life (the consequences can be lethal at times). And I've noticed an amplified version of the music pause-improvement. When I'm stuck on a project, 6 monthes later I wake up one morning and feel 1) confident, 2) motivated, 3) sure about some ideas I didn't really see before
Again, nothing but time away from the task and again, very odd.
Got me thinking about progress and time. You can clearly see the steps taken by people or groups in lifting up their lives. You do a bit, live this way, wait, and one day you make a new step. There's a natural rhythm. Except for the illuminated that can skip gaps over the average person of course.
When I used to practice competitive sports I spent a lot of time doing positive visualisation. This involved (track & field sprinting) visualising the timing of my foot strike, visualising of the stride motion and power transfers, (mtbing) day dreaming about railing difficult lines on my favourite tracks including visualising the bike physics (especially in the wet). Though it's only anecdotal and there were no doubt other genetic factors at play I excelled at a rate much ahead of my peers. I have tried the same with more cerebral tasks and whilst it definitely works I find I need to spend more time immersing myself in the practice with these types of tasks.
My understanding is that "visualization" does work in the sense that it forces you to think about the subject, and it's "better than nothing" for knowledge/skill based tasks.
I find it to be mostly useless for things I don't really know though, since I find myself needing to look up details I don't remember. It can be great for knowing what you don't remember though. Kind of like trying to explain the topic to someone else.
Speaking of handstands, I've been wanting to get started with that too as an item on my skills-to-acquire list. Any tips for a fellow beginner? I could never seem to get past the point needed to balance. I kick my body back and it stop right before the balance point and my body slowly goes off center and comes crashing down. Have you found it easier to do with trying to keep your body straight and stiff or feet tucked in a bit? Is it easier to learn with using your head against the ground or going for it with your arms straight? Any supplemental exercises or methods that you've found have helped?
As someone who's spent more than the last year trying to learn handstands as an adult, they're seriously hard. I don't know how long you've been practising, but I totally underestimated how long it would take me to balance one. I was starting from being pretty out of shape and I'd never done anything like this before, and I'm also tall (6'4"/194cm) which makes it harder, but I see people talking about timeframes of 6 months to a year minimum of training them seriously (say 20-30 mins 4x a week or more) to have a chance at kicking up into a free balancing handstand for, say, 15-20 seconds. It has taken me way longer than that, but I'm now up to ~30 sec holds but still with pretty terrible consistency (i.e. I get a couple of good holds and a few more shorter ones a day out of ~20 attempts).
For where it sounds like you're at, I totally recommend Yuri Marmerstein's Vimeo series here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/handstandbalance/249766384. Not free but cheap and very good. The basic requirements are being comfortable bailing, and being able to hold a half-decent chest to wall handstand.
re: body tension, it depends what you're planning to achieve. For just handbalancing you actually don't need a lot of tension, just enough that you're not flopping around all over the place. Most of the information online that talks about buns & core of steel comes from gymnastics, where the tension is used to generate force when tumbling. Most people from a handbalancing background no longer recommend tons of ab work (i.e. dish/hollow body) since it's not really required. You will need tons of trapezius and forearm strength though, working those was really a game changer for me.
I've also been working on handstands a lot recently, and I've found this very hit and miss. Sometimes I will come back and be much better than previously, and sometimes I will totally suck after a break. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground there.
I've found handbalancing in general to be very frustrating in that sometimes it will go really well, and other times I will totally suck, and there's no obvious reason why. i.e. I slept ok, I ate breakfast, I'm not particularly stressed or unfocused, but it just won't work at all. And then the next day will be fine.
I have small kids and have noticed that they can consistently screw up a task when you’re teaching them something. A few days later, they can suddenly do the task without thinking. I suspect learning happens partly after the fact, analogous to physical exercise.
This has happend to me with video games.
Been really trying to get good at fortnite in februrary/march and I actually got quite good but hit some kind of a mindblock... Then due to busy life I couldn't play for a month. Got sick 3 days ago and been staying home and playing it and I am noticably better than I was a month ago. So maybe alternating in playing for a 14 days and then taking a break for few days could do some real good
This may be caused by other factors as well. Some multiplayer games tweak matchmaking algorithms to increase addictivness - after you stop playing for some time when you return they will put you in easier games for a while to make you win and hook you again. Same happens when you are on a long losing streak.
I've been to a few gamedev conferences and some of the monetization lectures sound like taken straight from a movie villain. They calculate the perfect intervals to invoke the skinner box response, and to milk it for the most microtransactions money.
Hmm maybe it could be matchmaking. But I was thinking more about in-game skills. Fortnite is quite intensive in button spamming, lots of different variations based on your position + 360 movment of your mouse. And I noticed great improvements in this area.
> Any time I've been training something, if I take a break from it, I come back and I have more skill than I had previously.
I’ve experienced this first hand, almost like a tangible thing, while learning a language.
Whenever I came back to it after a break, sometimes after months of no exposure to the language, I was sometimes surprised to find myself being able to understand some new dialogue without looking at subtitles etc.
Although I wonder if the break is really necessary. I have taken an intensive language course (10 weeks, full language immersion and homework from waking to sleeping every weekday), and the full brunt of the language skills I learned didn't hit me until ~2 months later, where I find myself understanding the learned language constructs intuitively without deliberate analysis. It may just be that it takes time for one's subconscious to fully integrate the newly learned material, especially for complicated and non-intuitive subjects such as language, as opposed to any special effect from taking a rest from it. Another aspect is that learned material have an expiration date or a half life, so that if I take too long of a break, it would disappear as opposed to being strengthened. This is where spaced repetition software comes in handy for me, especially for rarely used vocabulary (which are often the most important words in a sentence, and the lack of understanding of would change the meaning of the sentence entirely).
Anecdotally my experience would suggest that they are important.
As someone living in one European country where English is less frequently spoken and occasionally traveling for work to others where English is more prevalent, I always felt that I could notice a real improvement in my second language upon returning "home" after speaking English for three or four days.
Incidentally, those same breaks usually resulted in improvements in rock- climbing (which are a bit easier to measure objectively because of the grading system), but I tended to attribute that to a full recovery / perhaps I was over-training.
Thinking about it now, maybe it's odd that I always accepted that the stenuous physical activities naturally needed a recovery period while assuming that I could just keep hammering at the mentally taxing skills day after day.
I have observed similar things and so far the relationship continues to bewilder me. At times I return with a better ability for something I haven't touched in years, while when I was actively training it, improvement was slow. Perhaps some cross-pollination from another source, but still strange.
It's... not always encouraging, as at times it's very hard to say what has improved it and whether practice is all that useful.
I couln't access the article. Is it balance related ?
When I learned rope walking, I first practiced for about two months but could only take a few steps. Then I took two months off, and when I tried again I could magically walk the whole rope!
Me too. After a short break of a few weeks I definitely feel like a better player. I think part of it is a genuine missing of the activity and a renewed motivation and sense of enjoyment.
Recently this occurred with my handstand practice. It's something that I've been working on the past year or two on and off, but more heavily recently. I've made some great strides, but the past week or two I've had a number of things distract me from my normal practice.
Jumping back into it this past week, I've found my balance and strength is or order of magnitude better.
This is only a single anecdote - but I've felt it rings true every time.