That has to be misphrased. If we take "beyond the edge of one's capabilities" literally, that means you can't do it. You can't practice what you can't do. But even just hitting the edge of your capabilities is something athletes almost never do. Practice is certainly still deliberate. It's planned. Every workout has a purpose. But lifters don't hit a one-rep max every single day. Runners don't run a race every single day. The overwhelming majority of practice is intentionally submaximal because the stress of trying to max out every time you do something is too much to recover from and limits your ability to accumulate large volumes of practice over time. "Performance-improving adjustments on every single repetition" is almost incomprehensible in some realms of performance. I'm not some high level athlete or anything, but I ran 9 miles this morning with 5 of them slightly below lactate threshold and that took a bit fewer than 13,000 steps. Do we really expect each of those steps to involve feedback and improvement? Fatigue is a thing. Nobody gets better with every step. You get better very, very slowly, often after very long cycles of functional overreach and recovery in which you first get worse before you get better.
I agree with other posters that this is overly nitpicky.
Take as an example playing a musical instrument. Perhaps you play cello in a community orchestra, and you're presented with a piece that has a passage that you can't reliably or consistently play at performance tempo - maybe it has an awkward fingering or shift, or maybe requires a bow technique that you struggle with. But, maybe if you reduce the tempo to 80% of performance speed, you can hit it more-or-less consistently.
The recommendation that is ingrained with all classical musicians in this scenario is to practice the challenging passage at this comfortable tempo with utter dedication to precision and execution. And when you can reliably and consistently execute at this tempo, notch up the speed a tiny bit - as little as 4 beats per minute. Repeat until you hit the consistency milestone, ad nauseam until you get to performance tempo (and then a bit on top for good measure).
Per the article and per the top comment - there's a reason this is SOP for musicians. Deliberate practice right at the frontier of your capabilities expands that frontier, and lets you push further.
By the way, "consistency" here might be, "play 100 times in a row without a single mistake." I've absolutely had lessons where we do this exercise with a gnarly passage, and when I make a mistake at repetition 79, we start the counter back at 0. It's tedious, laborious, and exhausting - but it works.
I dunno, ask my wife and she'll tell you the songs I'm usually practicing are beyond the edge of my capabilities.
In seriousness, I don't think that statement is meant for lifting/running or anything that's bounded by your physical fitness. Because you're right, the human body doesn't work like that.
Music is probably a better example. I push myself by learning songs that are beyond what I can do now. I practice them and make a bunch of mistakes. And as I keep practicing, the mistakes go away. And at some point, the song I couldn't play becomes a song I can play. Then I find new even harder songs to focus my practice on.
There is a subtlety of language at play here. When a musician practices a song they "cannot play", usually what they mean is they cannot play it fluidly, at full speed.
There are many degrees of being able or not able to play any given song.
This is what I hear when someone says they are practicing a skill slightly beyond their current capacity.
I mean, do you know what the biggest record jump in 100m running was?
...Usain Bolt beating his own record.
I used to think that genetics must surely play a bigger and bigger role the more a skill is built around pure body function (management < speed typing < wrestling < running), but looking at stuff like this, it doesn't seem so simple.
>If we take "beyond the edge of one's capabilities" literally, that means you can't do it.
I think you're being a little nitpicky, people often say to practice at the 'edge of your ability' for this reason. You should push a little at the boundary and eventually you grow to be successful at that edge and then can push a little further.
"Beyond the edge of one's capabilities" means that you're working on things outside of your current repertoire. This could mean any of a number of things, e.g.:
1) Maybe you can do it with scaffolding, but you are unable to do it without scaffolding.
For instance, a musician might not be capable of playing a difficult section of a musical piece at full speed. So they might practice it while playing slowly (a type of scaffolding), and then gradually ramp up the speed while maintaining accuracy.
2) Maybe you can do it sometimes, but not consistently/accurately.
For instance, a gymnast might not be capable of landing a particular flip consistently with proper form. But maybe they can land it 50% of the time with shaky form. So they might practice improving their consistency and form on this skill.
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Working on things outside of one's repertoire, is a core aspect of deliberate practice. Non-experts are often misled to practice within their level of comfort. This tends to be more effortful and less enjoyable, which can mislead non-experts to practice within their level of comfort.
For instance, Coughlan et al. (2014) observed this as a factor differentiating intermediate and expert Gaeilic football players:
"Expert and intermediate level Gaelic football players executed two types of kicks during an acquisition phase and pre-, post-, and retention tests. During acquisition, participants self-selected how they practiced and rated the characteristics of deliberate practice for effort and enjoyment.
The expert group predominantly practiced the skill they were weaker at and improved its performance across pre-, post- and retention tests. Participants in the expert group also rated their practice as more effortful and less enjoyable compared to those in the intermediate group.
In contrast, participants in the intermediate group predominantly practiced the skill they were stronger at and improved their performance from pretest to posttest but not on the retention test."
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The idea of practicing outside of one's repertoire can be generalized to the idea of engaging in a cycle of strain and adaptation. This is done in, e.g., Ericsson (2006). Here's a snippet:
"When the human body is put under exceptional strain, a range of dormant genes in the DNA are expressed and extraordinary physiological processes are activated. Over time the cells of the body, including the brain (see Hill & Schneider, Chapter 37) will reorganize in response to the induced metabolic demands of the activity by, for example, increases in the number of capillaries supplying blood to muscles and changes in metabolism of the muscle fibers themselves.
These adaptations will eventually allow the individual to execute the given level of activity without greatly straining the physiological systems. To gain further beneficial increases in adaptation, the athletes need to increase or change their weekly training activities to induce new and perhaps different types of strain on the key physiological systems."
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In general, in the phrase "deliberate practice," the word "deliberate" is not just an adjective. "Deliberate practice" has a very specific meaning in the research literature.
The way you describe it -- "Practice is certainly still deliberate. It's planned. Every workout has a purpose." -- is not as strict as the meaning in the research literature.
For something closer to a proper definition, I'll quote (Ericsson, 2006):
"The core assumption of deliberate practice (Ericsson, 1996, 2002, 2004; Ericsson et al., 1993) is that expert performance is acquired gradually and that effective improvement of performance requires the opportunity to find suitable training tasks that the performer can master sequentially -- typically the design of training tasks and monitoring of the attained performance is done by a teacher or a coach.
Deliberate practice presents performers with tasks that are initially outside their current realm of reliable performance, yet can be mastered within hours of practice by concentrating on critical aspects and by gradually refining performance through repetitions after feedback.
Hence, the requirement for concentration sets deliberate practice apart from both mindless, routine performance and playful engagement, as the latter two types of activities would, if anything, merely strengthen the current mediating cognitive mechanisms rather than modify them to allow increases in the level of performance."
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I don't know much about serious running, but based on how things work in other domains: if "performance-improving adjustments on every single repetition" is incomprehensible at the level you're looking, then it's an indication you need to zoom out a bit.
The same confusion can happen in, e.g., deliberate practice in math, if you zoom in too much. When a student solves a math problem, do we really expect every single pen stroke to involve feedback and improvement? No. You have to zoom out to the level of the problem.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would expect that in running, the appropriate level to view these deliberate practice cycles is not the level of a single step, but rather, a cohesive group of a taxing "deliberate practice" runs and easier "recovery" runs. At this level, it looks more like that cycle of strain/adaptation that is characteristic of deliberate practice.
(And that level seems to align with what's discussed in the literature -- for instance, I was just skimming Casado et al, 2020, Deliberate Practice in Training Differentiates the Best Kenyan and Spanish Long-Distance Runners, which mentioned that "systematic training ... included high-intensity training sessions considered deliberate practice (DP) and easy runs.")
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References
Casado, A., Hanley, B., and Ruiz-Pérez, L.M. (2020). Deliberate Practice in Training Differentiates the Best Kenyan and Spanish Long-Distance Runners. European Journal of Sport Science, 20 (7). pp. 887-895.
Coughlan, E. K., Williams, A. M., McRobert, A. P., & Ford, P. R. (2014). How experts practice: A novel test of deliberate practice theory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(2), 449.
Ericsson, K. A. (2006). The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance. The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance, 38(685-705), 2-2.
There is a disconnect between academic researchers and practitioners. In this case, researchers observe and organize/categorize what already exists. High-level practitioners and coaches have been using “deliberate practice” forever.
There are plenty of examples, but let's take what the great sprint coach Charlie Francis used in the 1970s and 1980s.
He used the medicine ball to encourage proper form without the sprinter having to think about form, because otherwise they would stiffen up. He alternated between tempo and sprint sessions to balance the rest and activity needed for the best nervous system performance. He understood the balance between optimal sprint form and idiosyncrasies.
Twenty-five years ago, for a couple of years, I trained in gymnastics with the local team coach. Without calling it “deliberate practice,” it was what they did day after day, which was to work on increasingly difficult skills with the support of an experienced coach who had the mental model for skill acquisition and “demonstration.”
A certain kind of nerd would salivate when there is a “book” on something, or someone has done “research” and written a “paper” with references that are there to explain that yes, water is wet, but how would you know without this paper?
The contribution of Erickson's research to coaching practice is nonexistent.
Beyond the edge of your capability to do perfectly is what is meant, because there's little point to practicing something you can do perfectly (other than to warm up for other practice for example).
These are good points. The devil is in the details for how to implement stuff like this, and there are a host of other tradeoffs, e.g., seemingly optimal regimens that people despise and that are de-motivating are, in practice, far worse than theoretically less-good training that people will actually do.
If it was as straightforward as some of the "expertise" research suggests, the world would be teeming with super-beings. That it isn't should give one pause about the relative leverage of constructing the problem this way.
