Why ‘Perfect’ Practice Actually Makes You Worse

The most successful athletes don’t practice perfectly — they purposely practice imperfectly. It might sound counterintuitive, but according to motor learning expert Dr. Will Wu, the old adage “perfect practice makes perfect” could be holding back your performance.

The Problem with Perfection

“I can make practice people look really good in practice,” Dr. Wu explains. “Usually it’s because I put them in really repetitive situations. They hit 90 out of their 100 shots, but they missed the first ten shots. And by the way, they’re only probably going to get three shots in the game.”

This reveals a crucial insight: looking good in practice often comes at the cost of real performance.

The Science of Struggle

The research shows that some variability — even mistakes — in practice is essential for skill development. Here’s why:

1. The Learning-Performance Trap —  Real performance environments are variable and unpredictable. When we practice in perfectly controlled conditions, we develop skills that only work in those conditions.

2. The Necessity of Challenge —  “If I know a certain criterion level for that sport,” Dr. Wu notes, “then I’m kind of operating in that zone.” Elite golfers hit about 60% of fairways in competition — practicing at 90% accuracy might feel good, but it’s teaching your brain the wrong lessons. Most professional golfers hit the ball straighter on the range than on the course. This would mean making the fairway targets narrower during range practices sessions to match the level of difficulty for tournament conditions. 

3. The Power of Variability — “The bulk of their practice is not going to be doing the same thing over and over again,” Wu explains about top performers. Instead, they introduce purposeful variation to develop adaptable skills.

What This Means for Your Practice

Embrace Appropriate Difficulty

• Your success rate in practice should roughly match competitive norms for your sport 

• If you’re succeeding on every attempt, you’re probably not learning optimally

Introduce Strategic Variability

• Vary conditions, speeds, and challenges within practice

• Don’t just practice what you’re good at — challenge your weaknesses

Monitor Your Success Rate

• If you’re consistently performing better than your baseline by more than 10–20%, you might need more challenge

• If you’re consistently underperforming your sport’s baseline by more than 10–20%, reduce the difficulty

• This will change over time. You should be getting better at the things you practice, so the overall practice should get increasingly difficult over time. 

The Bottom Line

Perfect practice doesn’t make perfect — it makes you perfectly inflexible. Instead, seek out the right kind of imperfection in your training. As Dr. Wu puts it, “You should be committing errors at the proper level.”

The next time you practice, ask yourself: Am I training to look good, or am I training to get better?

Your Challenge for the Week

Your Challenge This Week: Look at your current practice routine and identify your success rate. Are you hitting 90% of your shots when competition averages are closer to 60%? Are you practicing in perfect, controlled conditions when your real performance environment is unpredictable? 

Think about the difference between practicing a presentation (where clean, polished delivery matters) versus hitting a corner three-pointer (where game conditions are always variable). While you might aim for near-perfect practice runs of your presentation, applying that same “perfect practice” mindset to basketball would actually hurt your game performance. 

Calculate your actual performance baseline in competition or real situations, then adjust your practice difficulty until your practice success rate matches it. Note how this more realistic practice approach impacts your mindset and performance.

Check this out!

If you got this far, I bet you will like the full podcast that I did with Dr. Will Wu. On it we talk about focus of attention, schema theory, and how to get the most out of practice (I promise we explain how these abstract sounding things help you improve your performance in the episode). Check it out here:

• YouTube

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

Book Recommendation 

The Pressure Principle — https://amzn.to/3EMLQiY

The book on how to handle pressure from the performance coach to Francesco Molinari and Jonny Wilkinson. I think this book is a great primer on how to train and think like an elite athlete.