Drills

During the Covid pandemic I lost around 25 lbs. Apparently not being allowed to go to the gym was the biggest motivator in me wanting to go to the gym. Go figure. Anyhoo, I didn't want to waste momentum once things opened up and I took to boxing. My end goal was being able to (at least) spar (which I achieved). Turns out learning boxing is all about drills. Footwork drills, agility drills, drills on the speed bag, drills to increase cardiovascular fitness and actual training drills. My coach was a man of few words. But one word that he seemed to have really taken to was "again". He'd keep shouting at me this magic word over and over and over till I'd collapse. He wasn't too pleasant about it either. I remember moments when my shoulders would be burning on the speed bag after 10 reps of shoulder raises but I'd have a Tabata drill going and after the customary 10 seconds I'd have to get into another round. "Again" . . That barked order would force me to somehow raise my shoulders one more time for a go on the speed bag. Drills and endless drills. 

I look for meaning in everything I do. And for the first 3 months I didn't really understand why I was doing what I was doing. I had learnt the speed bag which took me 3 weeks. I had learnt skipping which took me 3 to 4 weeks as well. But as time went on and I saw improvement in my reflexes, my stamina I started to understand the beauty of drills. The real mental  models underneath drills. 

To understand a drill in a physical context, one has to understand the concept of a kinetic chain. Every athletic movement has one. Consider the jab. While often viewed simply as extending the lead arm, an effective jab transfers energy from the ground up. The kinetic chain begins at the ankle of the rear foot, pushing into the canvas. That push extends the rear leg, rotates the hips, transfers momentum through the torso into the shoulder, and finally accelerates the arm through full extension. A proper jab requires every link in this chain; maximum force depends on sequencing them correctly. The same logic applies to the speed bag: the shoulder remains stable while the torso adjusts slightly in rhythm with the rotating forearm to maintain cyclic momentum. Try doing a speed bag for the first time and you will notice that the rhythm is hard to get. You can’t move your forearm fast enough to tap the speed bag at exactly the same time that it hits the top of the board and comes back down. You have to practice using small drills. Build up to the rhythm. Drills exist to isolate, repeat, and synchronize each micromovement of that chain until the full movement operates with maximum output and minimal wasted effort.

Once I got the concept of drills - rather, the mental model underlying drills - I could extrapolate it to any physical skill. Over the last 5 years, I've learnt unicycling, CrossFit, and swimming. Swimming took me the longest because apart from the drills, I also had to combat my fear of water. Be that as it may, the point here is that one can use drills to learn any physical skill. 

But what about cognitive  skills? Can drills be used here? Turns out yes! To understand how, one has to go beneath the concept of drills to a "first principle" that I find useful for learning anything - neural pathways. Drills use repetition to build a physical skill into what we call "muscle memory".  We use the term muscle memory as if muscles have some short-term memory cache like a RAM chip but that's not the case. Muscle memory is nothing but a neural pathway. What's happening is our brain associates the micromovements in a kinetic chain and builds a neural pathway to solidify it as a group of actions. There's a fundamental concept in neuroplasticity which says, "neurons that fire together, wire together". That's what is happening when we do a drill enough times. We build a neural pathway which fires together every time we activate the drill, or the set of movements. Pretty cool stuff when you think about it. 

The beauty is that our brain does this for physical as well as cognitive  skills. I tried to use drills to learn a language and the same concepts apply. The building blocks of language are rooted in drills. We first learn the alphabet by repetition, then we learn the pronunciation, basic words, conjugation - all rooted in drills. We learn to conjugate verbs by memorizing the 1st person, 2nd person and 3rd person forms of verbs in the singular and plural forms - over and over and over again till it becomes second nature. Or to put it more precisely, till we build the neural pathway and it “feels like second nature”. We immerse ourselves in the language to solidify these neural pathways through “second hand drills”. Drills to learn verbs, drills to learn forms of words, drills to learn sentence structure, drills to learn conjugation and drills to have unscripted conversations (like sparring). 

What works for languages works for all cognitive skills. Want to learn Python? Use drills. Want to learn statistics? Use drills. If you use drills effectively, you can learn any physical or cognitive skill, age no bar! Any complex cognitive skill can be broken down into more basic “fundamental” skills and then further broken down into “micro-movements” or “micro-skills”. Practice enough of these micro-skills enough times and you build the expertise in the fundamental skills. Practice enough of the fundamental skills enough times and you gain more and more expertise in the complex cognitive skill. 

Mastery is often romanticized as intuition, natural talent, or sudden inspiration. In reality, it is nothing more than accumulated, automated mechanics. The real enemy in learning anything difficult (be it a jab, a foreign language, a Python script, or a statistical model) is the sheer weight of the finished product. Look at everything you don’t know, and paralysis sets in. A drill destroys that paralysis. It contracts your entire horizon to the single rep directly in front of you. You don’t need to master the art of conversation today; you only need to conjugate this one irregular verb ten times. You don’t need to deploy a full-scale automation project right away, you just have to figure out how to automate ETL first. When your brain feels exhausted and the urge to quit surfaces, you don't need a breakthrough. You just need to hear that same voice from the gym cut through the noise:

"Again."