The 8-Day Rule

Do you practice anything 8 times a week?

It took 13 months from the moment I first touched aerial silks until I performed my final piece and retired. Fortunately, by the end, I managed to place second in the highest amateur category (the top of 4 divisions) at an international competition.
I believe this was a fairly exceptional feat.

Not that I have innate talent—I don't. On my very first day of aerial, I thought my ankles would break just by doing a simple Clé (footlock). As my studio mates know well, I could barely do anything for the first 6 or 7 months.

However, during the final 3 months, I was practicing at least 8 times a week. At the time, I felt almost embarrassed to tell anyone just how much I was practicing. I simply wanted to be good at aerial; to reach that level within such a limited window, that frequency felt like the only natural path.

When you want to improve at something, there are various strategies: efficient practice methods, how to choose and interact with coaches, how to build your environment, selecting the right materials, and a myriad of other variables.
However, I believe the simplest and most highly correlated factor with progress is, pure, unadorned practice volume.

That said, simply telling someone to "just practice a lot!" isn't particularly helpful, so I'd like to offer a benchmark: "The 8-Day Rule."

Whatever you are tackling, the correlation between practice volume and speed of improvement is absolute. Whether it’s sports, music, research, work, or even romance and relationships. Looking back, hasn't that been the case for you as well?
When you have mastered something in a matter of months, you too must have been dedicating your very life to it 8 times a week.

By "8 times," I don’t mean it metaphorically; I mean it literally. In sports, this means practicing both morning and night on your days off (if you can even call them days off?), thereby maintaining an "every day as a baseline, then plus alpha" practice schedule.

To be precise, there are types of training that are better not done every day for the human body, and there are areas where the efficiency of improvement drops if the practice volume becomes too high. However, preventing overwork and adhering to The 8-Day Rule are entirely different matters; they can absolutely coexist. This holds true whether the subject is a high-cognitive-load learning item like mathematics or a high-intensity sport like aerial.

Beyond that, based on experience and observation, I believe that maintaining this 8-times rhythm is a kind of physical ritual: that stoically dedicating your time without skipping a single day is the simplest and most fundamental rule when you truly want to improve at something.

—

But just like romance, there is a sequence to the ignition of passion. Without the prior mental readiness to let that fire consume and rewrite your everyday life, an 8-times-a-week commitment is nothing more than a grueling penance that destroys your lifestyle. That is why forcing practice is meaningless.

I describe this state of mental readiness and resolve as being "under a curse." In my case, it took 10 months just to fall under the curse of aerial.
For the first few months, our relationship was like that of distant acquaintances; I would only go to a trial lesson once every 2 or 3 weeks. Naturally, I would forget the content of the previous lesson every time, and I made almost zero progress. Eventually, however, I started meeting the silks once a week, then twice, then three times. By the time 10 months had passed, I was finally under the curse and thought, "I have no choice but to do this every day."

I won't delve deeply into the period before the curse, as that is beyond the scope of this post, nor am I suggesting that one should impose the mechanical constraint of "8 times a week" on someone who isn't ready.

But if, upon hearing the phrase "8-times-a-week commitment," you find something within yourself that makes you feel "That’s only natural," I believe that is an exquisite and profound blessing. You will undoubtedly be able to forge bonds with comrades under the same curse—sharing moments where you naturally understand and elevate one another, bonds that will remain as treasures to cherish for the rest of your life.

If I am ever blessed with such luck again, I will make this extremely simple "8-Day Rule" my first promise to myself, based on the empirical lessons I confirmed through aerial as well.
And the "8-times-a-week life" one reaches in this manner is, in every sense, still barely even the starting line.

This is because, beyond the depths of the curse, there are people in every field who are under a curse as profound as Paul Erdős—practicing not 8 times a week, but what you might call an "8 times a day (?)" rule: from the moment they wake until they sleep, constantly, every moment, at all times, they are devoted to their craft.
In that light, the 3 months I spent devoted to aerial were nothing more than a fleeting, single step from the shadows of the wings—a momentary presence upon a vast, radiant stage, just as the curtain began to rise.

—

I suspect the folks running the studio where I mainly practiced were thinking, "This guy is here almost every day? Does he even have a job?" For the record, I was working a normal, full-time professional job. Meanwhile, my close colleagues at work were likely thinking, "This guy is doing aerial every day? Has his work been put on the back burner?"