[boredemployee]

I can relate a lot to what you said.

I practice piano (jazz improvisation), and I have mix of love and hate with practicing.

You basically spent lots of energy for little to no improvement at all lol, playing scales, arpeggios, etc.

And if you stay like 1 month without practicing you waste a lot of time trying to go back where you stopped.

It's like trying to go up an escalator that's going down, if you stop you come back to point 0.

[djtango]

> It's like trying to go up an escalator that's going down, if you stop you come back to point 0.

I think it's more nuanced than that, you don't go back to zero, the decay is exponential so the drop is most brutal at the front of the curve:

My experience with skill acquisition, you have to hit a checkpoint and bed it in while in a learning phase.

Eg Now that I grok cycling/skiing/wakeboarding, I can take years away from those and will be able to find my way around without starting from scratch.

Even after a decade of not speaking Mandarin, I decayed massively but didn't go back to zero even though I really had lost so much vocab and fluency.

My takeaway after really honing the skill of learning itself is that it's most efficient to learn in super intensive bursts, especially if you don't expect to be able to keep up frequent practice.

Skiing is probably the most relatable skill that many people learn but rarely practice. Living in a foreign country and learning the local language is another example.

Bringing it back to music, after taking almost 8 years out of the piano my scales didn't really drop below 150bpm for quavers but I was able to get to 250+ in a single focused practise session. Skill reacquisition is very fast, which is why weight lifters always report that getting back to PB is considerably faster second time around (weightlifting low-key being the skill of muscle recruitment)

[pclmulqdq]

Supporting your exponential hypothesis, I noticed after my 5 year break from piano that I could still play scales at pretty much exactly the same speed, and I still had a lot of the muscle memory. My teacher when I was in school had me doing them in 16th notes (semiquavers?) at 160-180 bpm before I stopped.

[djtango]

That's some serious scale speeds there...

[Gigachad]

I gave up piano, was spending all my practice time just keeping level but not progressing. Switched to drawing art (mostly nsfw). Takes far less work imo and I don’t seem to regress in skill after taking a break.

You get way more attention for low skill drawings than music too.

[boredemployee]

Yes. I noticed as well that, in my case, if I don't have a pushy teacher I make little to no progress studying alone.

[verst]

Your dexterity is lost without practice, but I find that the new licks, chord progressions and other ideas you add to your repertoire to be used in improvisation stick around. This to me is far more valuable than the dexterity which I can reacquire in no time. My jazz voicings today are far better than they were at a time when I practiced a lot more piano.

[sdwr]

Exercise is the same way, lots of effort to stay in the same place. I like to believe that maintenance work makes me better, even though the numbers don't really change. At least it gets easier to keep it up over time.

[ralgozino]

Having recently picked-up the guitar after a 10 years hiatus, that escalator analogy hit me right in the feels :'D

[darkerside]

You do go back down to 0, but you can run up that escalator pretty damn fast