The Performance Room

The Performance Room | Making Sense of Practice

Blocked. Random. Serial. Constant. Variable. Massed. Distributed.

We hear these terms regularly in golf coaching. But are we always talking about the same thing?

And more importantly, does knowing how practice is organised tell us whether it will transfer to competition?

In this episode, Terry Rowles and Stuart Morgan explore the terminology behind practice, where the research originated and how its findings have been interpreted and applied in golf.

We revisit foundational motor-learning experiments, including Shea and Morgan (1979) and Lee and Magill (1983), and discuss what more recent research tells us about retention and transfer.

We also explore why two practice sessions can share exactly the same labels yet provide very different learning experiences.

A golfer might practise different distances, change clubs or alternate between shots. But what information are they using? What decisions are they making? And how closely do their actions reflect what competition requires?

Drawing on representative learning design and the Transfer Taxonomy, we discuss why practice organisation is only part of the picture.

Perhaps we've become too focused on the recipe and not enough on the ingredients.

Research referenced

• Shea, J. B., & Morgan, R. L. (1979). Contextual interference effects on the acquisition, retention, and transfer of a motor skill. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 5(2), 179–187.

• Lee, T. D., & Magill, R. A. (1983). The locus of contextual interference in motor-skill acquisition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 9(4), 730–746.

• Guadagnoli, M. A., & Lee, T. D. (2004). Challenge point: A framework for conceptualizing the effects of various practice conditions in motor learning. Journal of Motor Behavior, 36(2), 212–224.

• Pinder, R. A., Davids, K., Renshaw, I., & Araújo, D. (2011). Representative learning design and functionality of research and practice in sport. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 33(1), 146–155.

• Czyż et al. (2024). Contextual interference and retention: A meta-analysis. Scientific Reports. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-65753-3.

• Czyż et al. (2024). Contextual interference and transfer: A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1377122.

For more on practice design, skill acquisition and transfer in elite golf:

Stuart Morgan | Develop–Train–Perform
https://substack.com/@stuartmorgancoach

Instagram: @stuartmorgangolf @Iceberggolf @terryrowles

Email: [email protected]

The Performance Room — The Beliefs Nobody Questions

We challenge technique. We challenge coaches. We challenge practice, data and performance.

But how often do we challenge the beliefs beneath our behaviour?

In this episode of The Performance Room, we explore the beliefs golfers develop about improvement — where they come from, how they influence what we do, and why some become so embedded that we stop recognising them as beliefs at all.

We look at beliefs that have changed as golf has evolved, alongside beliefs and behaviours that continue to shape how golfers practise and prepare today. We explore the influence of experience, coaching, education, culture and conventional wisdom — and ask how much of what we believe we have consciously chosen versus simply inherited. This reflects the central framing in the episode notes: practices can become so normal that the assumptions beneath them disappear. 

Drawing on research around beliefs, mindset, learning and systems thinking, we explore why changing behaviour may not always be enough. Sometimes the more important question is:

Rather than replacing one set of beliefs with another, the episode is about becoming more curious about the assumptions behind what we do — and being willing to update them when the evidence, experience or context changes.

Five questions to take away

1. What do I believe good practice looks like?
2. Where did that belief come from?
3. What evidence supports it — and what evidence challenges it?
4. How does that belief influence what I actually do?
5. What would have to happen for me to change my mind?

These are the five questions around which the episode notes are organised. 

Research & ideas mentioned

Albert Bandura — Social Cognitive Theory & Self-Efficacy
Bandura's work helps explain how beliefs about capability develop through sources including direct experience, observing others and social influence, and how self-efficacy can influence behaviour, effort and persistence. For our discussion, it provides a useful way of thinking about how golfers' beliefs can be shaped by their developmental and social environments.

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.

Bandura, A. (1986). Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Prentice-Hall.

Alia Crum — Stanford Mind & Body Lab
Crum's research examines how mindsets — the assumptions and beliefs people hold — can influence how people interpret and respond to their experiences. It provides a useful foundation for the idea in the episode that the goal isn't simply to tell someone their belief is wrong, but to make the assumption visible and create space to consider alternatives.
Stanford Mind & Body Lab

Crum, Salovey & Achor (2013) — Rethinking Stress: The Role of Mindsets in Determining the Stress Response.
Crum et al. research

Schmidt & Bjork (1992) — New Conceptualizations of Practice.
Important to the distinction between performing better during practice and learning that persists or transfers. It helps challenge the assumption that visible improvement during today's session necessarily demonstrates learning.

Shea & Morgan (1979); Battig (1966, 1972); Brady (2004) — contextual interference and the historical development of blocked/random practice research. These provide background to how beliefs around practice scheduling developed.

Czyż et al. (2024) — meta-analytic work examining contextual interference, retention and transfer. Particularly useful for understanding why simple rules about blocked and random practice need to be treated cautiously when moving between laboratory and applied sporting environments.

Ammar et al. — meta-analytic work examining contextual interference in sport and physical education. Relevant to our discussion of how nuanced research findings can become simplified into much stronger coaching beliefs about how practice “should” be organised.

John Kiely — Periodization Theory
Kiely's work provides another example of questioning inherited models and assumptions rather than treating established practice as self-evidently correct.

Donella Meadows — Leverage Points & Systems Thinking
Meadows' work provides the systems-thinking foundation for one of the central ideas in the episode: changing the visible behaviour may not always be the deepest intervention. Beliefs and paradigms can represent much deeper places to intervene in a system.

Meadows — Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

The question we leave you with

Instagram: @stuartmorgangolf @Iceberggolf @terryrowles

Email: [email protected]

“We’re talking about practice.”

But perhaps not in the way golf normally talks about it.

Practice is often discussed as though the central problem is simply choosing the correct drill, finding the right practice schedule or accumulating enough repetitions.

But every practice session contains a theory of learning—whether the player or coach recognises it or not.

When we repeatedly rehearse the same movement from the same place, under the same conditions, we are making assumptions about how skill develops and how it will eventually transfer to the golf course.

When we constantly correct errors, prescribe positions or try to make movement look more consistent, we are also communicating something to the player:

That variation is a problem.
That mistakes need to be removed.
That the coach knows the solution.
And that successful practice should look controlled, orderly and predictable.

The problem is that good practice performance is not necessarily evidence of learning.

Blocked repetition can make a session look fluent because the player knows what is coming next and can reuse the same solution. Random or interleaved practice may create greater difficulty, but the evidence does not support treating “random beats blocked” as a universal law—particularly when we move from controlled laboratory tasks into complex sporting environments. The effects depend on the learner, the task, the level of complexity and what is actually measured as transfer (Czyż et al., 2024).

This is why practice cannot be judged only by how well the player performs during the session.

A player can hit twenty excellent seven-irons from a perfect lie and become better at completing that particular exercise without necessarily becoming more capable of solving the problems they will face in competition.

The more important question is:

What information is the player learning to use?

Representative Learning Design argues that practice needs to preserve the important information–movement relationships found in competition. Practice does not need to reproduce every detail of the golf course, but it must allow the player to perceive relevant information, make decisions and regulate movement in relation to the task (Pinder et al., 2011).

Without that functionality, practice may contain physical similarity without containing meaningful action fidelity.

The movement might look like golf.

The environment might look like golf.

But the player may not be solving a golfing problem.

This becomes even more important when we stop viewing the golfer as a machine made up of separate components and begin viewing them as a complex adaptive system.

From this perspective, skilled movement is not produced by one part working independently. It emerges through the continuous interaction of the performer, the task and the environment. Coordination adapts as intentions, emotions, fatigue, confidence, equipment, lies, targets and environmental conditions change (Davids, 2015).

That means we cannot assume that changing one technical component will produce a simple, predictable change in performance.

The player adapts.

The rest of the system reorganises.

And sometimes the “correction” creates consequences that were never anticipated.

This does not mean technique is unimportant.

It means technique cannot be separated from the context in which it must function.

It also means movement variability is not automatically noise to be eliminated. Skilled performers do not reproduce an identical movement on every attempt. They stabilise the outcome while continually adapting how the movement is organised.

The aim of practice, therefore, may not be to build one perfect swing that survives only under controlled conditions.

It may be to develop a player capable of finding functional solutions across changing conditions.

In this episode of The Performance Room, Terry Rowles and Stuart Morgan explore:

Why practice that looks successful may not transfer.

Why blocked and random practice have become overly simplified coaching labels.

Why the information contained within a task may matter more than the drill itself.

Why movement variability can support adaptability rather than represent technical failure.

Why players should be understood as complex adaptive systems rather than machines to be engineered.

And why the beliefs beneath our practice methods may be more influential than the methods themselves.

Because beliefs do not merely describe practice.

They organise it.

They shape what coaches notice, what they correct, what they tolerate and what they interpret as progress. They influence whether difficulty is seen as productive exploration or evidence that the session is failing.

Mindsets can orient people toward particular expectations and responses, especially under challenge and uncertainty. They are therefore not passive opinions; they can influence how experiences are interpreted and acted upon (Crum et al., 2020).

So perhaps the most valuable question is not:

“What drill should I do?”

Perhaps it is:

“What does this drill teach the player to perceive, decide and adapt to?”

And beneath that:

“What belief about learning made us design practice this way?”

We’re talking about practice.

But we are also talking about transfer, adaptability, information, beliefs and the type of player our practice environment is quietly creating.

🎙️ The Performance Room — with Terry Rowles and Stuart Morgan

References

Crum, A. J., Akinola, M., Martin, A., & Fath, S. (2020). The role of stress mindset in shaping cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses to challenging and threatening stress. Anxiety, Stress, & Coping, 33(4), 379–395.

Czyż, S. H., Wójcik, A. M., & colleagues. (2024). The effect of contextual interference on transfer in motor learning: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Davids, K. (2015). Athletes and sports teams as complex adaptive systems: A review of implications for learning design. Revista Internacional de Ciencias del Deporte, 11(39), 48–61.

Pinder, R. A., Davids, K., Renshaw, I., & Araújo, D. (2011). Representative learning design and functionality of research and practice in sport. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 33(1), 146–155.

Instagram: @stuartmorgangolf @Iceberggolf @terryrowles

Email: [email protected]

Why do some changes in golf work brilliantly at first… only for the same problem to return later?

In this episode of The Performance Room, Terry Rowles and Stuart Morgan explore Fixes That Fail — a systems-thinking archetype that helps explain why well-intentioned interventions can produce short-term improvement while creating longer-term problems.

Golfers rarely operate in isolation. Technique, tendencies, perception, confidence, practice, decision-making and the environment all interact. Change one part of the system and you may unintentionally change something else.

Terry explores this from a technical and movement perspective: rather than continually layering fixes onto a player, can we better understand the golfer’s individual constraints and natural tendencies?

Stuart takes the idea into performance and systems thinking: when the same problems keep returning, are we repeatedly intervening at the symptom rather than addressing a deeper leverage point?

They discuss:

• Why short-term improvement doesn't necessarily mean you've solved the problem.
• How technical fixes can create unintended consequences elsewhere.
• Why understanding a player's tendencies matters more than chasing an ideal model.
• How ball position, grip, setup, timing and coordination interact rather than operate independently.
• The role of availability bias and halo bias in the changes players and coaches choose.
• Why experimentation can reveal more than continually adding technical information.
• How systems thinking can help players and coaches identify where change might have the greatest lasting impact.

Perhaps the most important question isn't:

“What do I need to fix?”

It might be:

“Why does this problem keep coming back?”

Because sometimes the solution isn't another fix.

It's understanding the system that keeps producing the problem.

Go deeper

Stuart explores the research, systems thinking and skill-acquisition ideas behind these conversations in The Develop Train Perform System on Substack.

Read more: https://substack.com/@stuartmorgancoach

Instagram: @stuartmorgangolf @Iceberggolf @terryrowles

Email: [email protected]

In our first episode, we answer a simple question: Why another golf podcast?

We discuss why we started The Performance Room, the conversations we think are missing in golf, and what listeners can expect. It's an informal chat about coaching, performance, practice, and the ideas that have shaped our thinking—setting the scene for the discussions to come.

For more information, please contact Stuart Morgan at [email protected] for Clinics, 1-1 coaching, seminars or any other coaching request for Stuart & Terry.

We look forward to connecting.

Instagram: @stuartmorgangolf @Iceberggolf @terryrowles

Email: [email protected]