Commitment, Dedication and Practice!

The author of Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell is coined with the phrase it takes 10,000 hours to become good at something. While I think it is really hard to put a singular number on acquiring a talent or skill, let’s think about it from a Pilates’ perspective.

10,000 divided by a realistic number of hours one could practice a week. Just for our purposes let’s say you’re an apprentice in a teacher training program and enthusiastic. You plan to commit 10 hours a week.

10 hours X 52 weeks in a year = 520 hours a year. 10,0000 ÷ 520 hours = 19. 23 years! So yes ladies and gentlemen close to 20 years if you’re working at that pace.

Or what about just an average student who commits to 2 sessions a week? The math is 2 X 52 = 104. 10,000 ÷ 104 = 96 years!

Seriously though, it’s good to keep things in perspective when trying to master a new skill. Think about how much practice is needed to play the guitar, learn a foreign language or even drive a car. Although out here in California one wonders if anyone even practiced driving before getting on the freeway! That’s a whole other conversation.

My point on the 10,000 hours is as a reminder that real knowledge is not a lesson in speed-reading but one in patience.

“Too often, we approach a new skill with the attitude that we should nail it right out of the gate,” says Halvorson. The reality is that it takes much longer. “It’s not going to happen overnight. It usually takes six months or more to develop a new skill,” says Weintraub.

Authors: Joseph Weintraub and Heidi Grant Halverson

It doesn’t matter whether you believe in the 10,000 rule or 6 months from the above business skill perspective. What does matter is that if you really what to take something on board time matters. I think also what should be included in the time factor is the ability to apply knowledge of the new skill in other areas of your life.

Expanding on that thinking from a Pilates’ perspective I use a client of mine as an example. She has been doing Pilates steadily for 10 years, twice a week. Thus by Mr. Gladwell’s prediction she still has a long way to go to hit 10,000 hours.

However, that individual uses her Pilates in a large portion of her daily life. Thus, she is accumulating hours of mastering Pilates by applying it to other components of her life. Be that when walking, cleaning her house, movement in and out of the car, the list is endless. This is what I call “application of the Pilates’ principles.”

That individual would not have such a strong application of Pilates if she were not practicing on a regular basis. Her dedication has infiltrated her physical and mental skill set and continued to provide her with growth in mastering the method.

Part of the problem in an instant gratification society is that everyone tries to compare their level of athleticism to another body. We each come into the Pilates’ method with varying levels of movement experience. This can aid our understanding but it can also negatively impact our willingness to invest time in learning. Simply said, we want to look like our neighbor today without the hours of practice.

I think it’s also a reflection of teachers who teach too many new exercises to a client before the client is ready. The desire to do a bunch of new exercises as a form of entertainment and not because this is what the body needs. There is a wonderful line in the Classical Pilates sector, “teach the body in front of you.”

It’s also important for apprentices as well as practitioners to understand that it’s different skill sets for practicing the method and teaching it. Often, individuals enter a program with minimal Pilates training under their belts; thereby they must learn to do and to teach at the same time.

My moral at the end of the story is think of knowledge acquisition as a life-long journey. You might learn the basics of an exercise but through ongoing practice your understanding of the essence of the exercise deepens.

You learn to see how it is reflected in other exercises, what Kathi Ross-Nash calls the red thread or you develop a better eye to seeing what individuals need in order to build up to that exercise. And also like my client example you see how an exercise applies to a daily life activity.

The beauty of Classical Pilates is there is so much to learn without changing the method that striving for 10,000 hours is a journey worthy of exploration. That of course takes commitment, dedication and practice.