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Is there such a thing as too much practice? To be good at anything you must practice of course but can too much be just as bad as too little?

When I was a bodybuilder many moons ago I learnt of the concept of over training too much working out in too short amount of time this lead to fatigue and not many results. Being a bodybuilder is a actually a life style if you chose to take it up I wasn’t a “hardcore” type of bodybuilder the ones who was in the gym seven days a week training for Mr Olympia and taking the “juice” , but I would train up to 5 days a week watched what I eat and set my self strict (achievable ) targets. it’s a long hard road and takes discipline just like magic is what ever branch of magic you are in to.

We are told practice, practice and practice some more this is very true and I agree that you must practice to become an accomplished magician. But it is the way you practice that actually counts. When lifting weights you would never train the same muscle group twice so if you did arms on a Monday then a Tuesday would be leg day. Other wise the muscles and muscle memory never gets a chance to adapt to what its doing.

So I have come up with a plan. A lot of people on this forum say I have practiced my pass 100 times to day (or words to that effect) then another 100 times on the next day. I think you should rest the pass and move on to another slight you are learning the next day. There is nothing more frustrating then practicing something a million times and not getting it. Have you noticed though if you give it a rest and come back at a latter date after doing something else you “get it”? I believe using the body builders principle of training on different days for different things will actually be better in the long run.


Practice and the mind set. When you are laying down under a 150lbs of iron and you going to bench press that you must tell your self you can lift the weight don’t think its too heavy because your are setting your self up for failure. How many times doing a slight do you think “I hope I get this this time”? and don’t ? throw your cards on the floor and what not. Think that this time is the time the pass will be invisible the classic palm will be natural and then that’s half the battle.


Also with bodybuilding you wouldn’t do the same training schedule for more then about 6 weeks. :

A) To stop boredom,

B) To allow your body to change the way it was being trained so it didn’t go oh yeah Monday that barbell day.

You would maybe do a bench press set then throw in some curls where before you would do a kick back. So why not do a pass then palm a card of the top just to mix it up a bit?

Or even make a practice cards Mondays, coins on a Tuesday etc . then 6 week latter swap coins with cards add something else even.

Give it ago and see what happens.

If you love magic and don't get bored with it easyily then you can never pratice to much. But it may be a good idea to pratice one trick for a limited amount of time then practice another trick and then go back to the first one. Thus you will avoid geting bored.

I am not actually saying getting bored, i am saying that if you mix things up you will have a fresher idea on how to perform the slight the next time.

Never - you just can't practice too much. If it's starting to get repetative then pcik up something new or something that you have left alone for some time.

If some of the greats say that they never stop learning then there's no excuse for us mere mortals

Ah see thats my point Dat try something else and then come back.

Over practice is possible, but it is always a matter of perspective and interpretation....

Firstly, you are overpracticing if you find that you are not accomplishing anything productive........what one deems to be "anything productive" is a matter of personal opinion.

For example, if I have a deck of cards in my hand and am not actually working on a specific effect, that could be wasted time (or overpractice) for me, I like to grab cards and relax by shuffling, flourish, etc....so in this instance I may at times say it is unneeded practice, or very productive practice.

So basically (as with any sport/activity/hobby) overpractice/overtraining is possible, and is present....everyone has a different threshold for "TOO MUCH" and what it would take to be considered TOO MUCH!

Speaking of Perspective...

I have found that if and when we practice too much at a time that we start practicing bad habits vs. proper technique.

Something I learned long ago was that it is wise to go back over your moves and handling on effects, even if you've done them for years; but get in front of the mirror or video camera and study your handling. We all pick up bad habits and slop over time, by reviewing ourselves every six months or so, we are able to fine tune what we do and correct those little short-comings that can and will crop up.

I remember hearing about Richard Ross and his learning the Linking Rings, how he refused to do them infront of other people for nearly two years, because of his "need" to get them down to picture perfect handling. If you've never seen his award winning FISM act with the rings and watch manipulations you owe it to yourself to look it up... it is awesome! Then again, he was a student for the later Fred Kapps, you'd expect him to be awesome

The Russians have a saying:

We learn to swim in the winter
And learn to ski in the Summer

When you practise, you are giving information to your muscles. When you stop practising, that's when your muscles have time to assimilate what they've been learning.
And that's why constant practise is a bad idea.

However, bad practising is much more common than over-practising.
Often, after practising for a long while, our concentration lapses and the practising gets sloppy. That's not really over-practising, it's just lousy practising.

It's slightly different with weight-lifting, where muscle fatigue plays a big part of it. You never have the same kind of exhaustion with cards as you do with Supersquats!

Something I learned long ago was that it is wise to go back over your moves and handling on effects, even if you've done them for years; but get in front of the mirror or video camera and study your handling. We all pick up bad habits and slop over time, by reviewing ourselves every six months or so, we are able to fine tune what we do and correct those little short-comings that can and will crop up.

Craig, thanks for this advice!! Yes, just because an effect seems to work and the spectators in general produce the right responce, does not guarantee that the effect is performed correctly. I will record and examine some of my moves to see if they can be improved. I just watched David Copper Field perform "grand pa' aces" on You Tube! What a contrast between Copper Fields incredible performance and the many depressing performances where amatures on You Tube mistreat the great classics.

I think that the mirror or the video camera is only of limited use. If you are constantly failing to pull off an effect, perhaps it is something you're doing and a video/mirror image may reveal this. However, the viewer in both cases is the only person in the world who will never be in the audience for the effect.

A perfect move is not like a perfect circle. You can practice drawing freehand circles 1000 times a day, and one day when you draw that perfect circle around an advert in a newspaper, or in the sand on a beach, or as the beginning of a smiley face - will it be any more useful than all your previous circles? Of course not. In addition to this, it is highly unlikely that it is even possible to draw a perfect circle, and so the task you've set yourself is absurd.

A perfect move is one which which helps you achieve your aim, which is to create something magical for an audience. The basic mechanics of most moves can be learnt in a weekend, others take longer. This has as much to do with performing magic as conditioning and toning your body has to do with boxing. Yes it's a necessary part of being a good boxer but training alone will not make you a good boxer. Just as not everyone who trains is a boxer, not everyone who learns 'moves' is a magician. A boxer who never faces an opponent is the ring is not a boxer and a magician who never performs magic is not a magician. The essential difference between someone who trains and someone who trains to be a boxer is the sparring. The same is true with magic but instead of sparring you are performing.

When you practice, it should be performance based. Does your, for example, ambitious card routine, work as well with your boss as it does with the barista at Starbucks. A technically perfect handling of the cards that floors your boss but only bemuses the barista reveals your weakness.

Sitting at home playing with cards is not magic but a form of juggling. I like a bit of juggling, I enjoyed TJ's act at the International Magic Convention but nevertheless it wasn't magic.

If you want to be card juggler who only performs for themselves then there is no difference between practice and performance.

If you want to be a card juggler who performs for others, you need to spend probably as much time at home practicing as out performing.

If you want to be a magician who performs for others (there is no other kind) then you need to spend most of your time performing.

Craig wrote:

I have found that if and when we practice too much at a time that we start practicing bad habits vs. proper technique.

That's very true and something that I hadn't thought of. However, assuming that you're on the right track, I often start looking for different variations of performing something, once I've got the main moves down.

Experimentation pushes those boundaries forward and can make things a whole lot more interesting.

Actually, I had some thoughts recently about over-practising and wrong practice and so on and found a lot of similarities between learning a magic trick and learning a new piece on an instrument. I tend to play the piano a lot and found (and have been confirmed in it by expert opinion) that beyond a certain point the amount of practice doesn't make any difference anymore. So, while it is very useful to practise, say, a hard passage twenty times one after another, then there comes a point, when concentrating becomes hard because it's just too repetitive, so it gets sloppy and instead of training your muscles, you "untrain" them because the muscle memory will adopt those sloppy moves and they're really hard to get rid off again later. It's pretty much the same for magic, I find.

Another similarity is the way to practise. Say you're practising the classic pass - when you first start you do it very slowly in order to get the technique right, you watch yourself in the mirror to see what it looks like etc. Once it gets more familiar you start doing it faster and then there comes the point when you do it a hundred times in five minutes and you do that ten times a day. From my experience that doesn't really help that much. Of course, you'll soon be able to do it in your sleep, but the question is, how well will you be able to do it? When I practise the piano, even with pieces which I know well, I at least once a day practise the whole piece very slowly, maybe even hands separate, just to ensure I still keep the precision and technique and it doesn't get sloppy. I'm doing the same with magic tricks and sleights, where appropriate, and it helps.

So the bottom line is that I agree that too much practise can do more harm than good and that it's more how you practise than how much you practise. Now my magical experience is still relatively limited, so perhaps some of you out there may disagree, but that's what I found anyway.

I think this is a good point - isn't there a professional tennis player who will just stop practicing if he keeps doing it wrong? Unlike the common "practice until you get it right" idea, he points out that there's no point in practicing doing it wrong. He'll only practice something if he's already seems to be doing it naturally quite well, because then you can actually build on your technique.

Obviously this doesn't refer to moves that you have never done before and are just starting out on, but I think it's quite helpful when thinking about practicing old favourites.

Yeap see it is possible ot over do it. But yes you can under practice too you have to find the right balance.