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Cue Blending
Cues show the brain where to direct attention and improve motor control.
When new to a skill, start with simplicity. Take one Cue (A) at a time and use that for a few minutes or a few repetitions. Then switch to another (B), and then switch to another (C). You can repeat that cycle as many times as you like.
Use rest in between to refresh your attention.
Eventually, you will be able to hold attention on two cues at once (AB, AC, or BC), and over hundreds of successful repetitions the brain and body will adapt and then desire greater complexity. In this way your attention and control over the movements will improve. Then you will be able to hold 3 or more at one time (ABC).
Learning to use and gradually increase the complexity of cues is one of the hallmarks of our training approach. To create a ‘super-learning’ environment for yourself you want to set up just enough challenge on your brain, so that success follow more frequently than failure. You don’t want there to be too little complexity so that your brain grows bored and wanders, nor too much complexity that you lose control, confuse the brain, and fail more often than succeed.
You may have many features you are working on but you need to consider how effectively you will dividing your attention between them. So, you need to identify the highest priority (or most fundamental) focal points first.
There are many ways to distribute the concentration so you can work on multiple cues:
For example: cues A, B, and C
You can give attention to one thing for a small period of time…
Take 15 minutes, 5 minutes for each…
- 5 minutes – cue A
- 5 minutes – cue B
- 5 minutes – cue C
Or, you can give attention to one thing at a time, but cycle through those cue s frequently and repeat the cyle a few times…
Take 15 minutes to cycle through…
- 1 repeat cue A
- 1 repeat cue B
- 1 repeat cue C
The idea is that you are deliberately sending repetitious signals through a motor-control circuit so that your brain is triggered to strengthen that specific circuit. If you bounce around one your focus you lose the quality of stimulation your brain needs to strengthen a specific circuit.
How much is enough? That is one that may still be hard for science to answer for each activity. But you will develop your own feel for it. For now, our rule-of-thumb is to ‘do smaller practice pieces, and do them more frequently’. So, my informed guess is that if you can give between 5 and 15 minutes a day to each of your highest priority focal points you may be giving yourself high quality neuro-muscular programming.
And then you can increase the complexity by one incremental step. Check out Challenge Multipliers in the Knowledge Base.
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