I agree. Around the beginning of this year I began practicing piano every day. I had done this in college ~ 20 years ago but didn’t keep it up and lost pretty much everything. Like, I couldn’t do a major scale with two hands at a moderate tempo. Four months later and the Brahms B minor Rhapsody is coming back into my fingers. My sight reading is about as good as it was back then…maybe a little better.
For something like playing piano, it’s so easy to get good education online today. Most of the good teachers and performers don’t recommend hammering out repetitive practice for hours. I’d imagine this is true for many things.
One notable book I read on piano technique mentions the superstitious sounding Post Practice Improvement (PPI). This is literally a recommendation to relax and stop thinking about the patterns you have practiced and get some sleep. It’s shockingly effective. I would wake up and play a passage that was difficult the day prior and I could play most or all of the notes. So yeah, not practicing is sometimes as helpful as practicing.
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