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2026-08-09

Investigate how to speed up building muscle memory and hand-eye coordination

Disclaimer

• personal
• target audience - strictly myself

Main

• I was just staring at my hobby wishlist and realising there is no way in hell I am getting all of these done, assuming I allocate only one day a week for all of them combined.
• Hobbies I have non-zero interest in, that all depend on muscle memory and/or hand-eye coordination:
  • Dance, drums, massage, shooting, driving, swimming
• Whereas something like getting a ham radio license, I look at it and I know it will be dead easy to do over a weekend or two.
• I wonder if there are some general principles for how to speed up learning new skills into muscle memory.
• Like, with swimming and playing drums, I do think I have crossed certain thresholds, such that even if I practice zero for another five years, I will still remember certain basics even much later on. The challenge is how to reach this skill threshold in minimum amount of time.
• Some basic rules I am already aware of listed below. Writing them down explicitly as I think this will help me understand them and apply them more and so on:
  • Isolate sub movements, practice each individually, then combine.
    • For instance if you are playing drums, then only play a basic beat first, and add fills later. Or only practice rolls a lot so that those get into muscle memory with correct form and timing. Or only practice a particularly challenging part with bass pedal first but no hihat pedal, then hihat pedal but no bass pedal, then play both. Each muscle group
  • Practice core fundamentals with correct form.
    • It is important to not build muscle memory with an incorrect form, as that means you will have to unlearn it later on to learn the right form.
  • Tighter feedback helps I think?
    • Having a private coach (or nowadays, an AI app [1]) to correct your form on every iteration can therefore lead to faster learning, because you are not wasting iterations learning the wrong form or being uncertain about your form.
  • Once you have some basic fundamentals right, then maybe even pure visualisation helps improve muscle memory?
    • Interesting hypothesis, worth exploring more. There are some articles online that say this helps with sports.
    • Definitely with instruments or with dance, once you know certain basic moves, it is useful to plan ahead of time the next sequences of moves. Does this improve muscle memory though? Maybe?
  • Some articles online say practicing before night time especially helps?
    • I have no idea if this true. They say memory consolidation happens more during sleep.
  • There don't seem to be any real time limits besides physical exhaustion, and burnout.
    • In general for most motor skills, you can totally practice atleast 4 hours a day every single day (with some off days), assuming you are mentally motivated enough and you don't hit physical exhaustion limits (and you are using correct form ofcourse). There doesn't seem to be any other limit per se, as far as I can tell.
    • Is practising 4 hours every single day the optimal use of your time if you wanna learn a motor skill quickly? I don't know.
    • Anecdotal evidence online that frequency of practice seems to matter more than total hours though. So 1 hour a day beats 3 hours twice a week, for example.
  • Physical markers help to correct form.
    • For instance, with playing drums you can mark the specific spot on the drum pad you want to hit. With dance, I am guessing you can mark the spots on the floor. This improves hand-eye coordination while you are still building the correct form. Once it is in muscle memory you will probably ignore the markers and just execute muscle memory anyway.
• Most important bottleneck
  • The most important bottleneck is I don't actually enjoy learning any of these skills enough to actually want to practice them everyday. Frequency matters but it conflicts with staying motivated long-term for me. I care about the end goal but the process is meh.
  • Especially nowadays with the type of intense focussed work I do (honestly most software is like this, beyond a point), I don't want to afterwards practice some random muscle memory-based skill, I want to relax lol.

[1] Side Note

• important - If AI video-to-text is good enough at correcting your form, this basically eliminates the role of teachers for all these skills, right? Holy shit.
• I searched some of these apps, they do exist, but I am not yet sufficiently confident that the datasets + prompts they've been fed have been tested by actual teachers / skilled people, and there aren't edge cases in their code.
• Social-related motivation could still be a reason to attend a physical venue. But then you still don't need a teacher, you need a room with a large mirror and cameras and earphones that don't fall off your ears lmao.

Update

Potential solution to the most important bottleneck

• Honestly maybe it is fine to just not enjoy it much and do it anyway?
• Like, I don't want to become world's best swimmer or swim across an ocean because I intrinsically love swimming or something. I don't want to become world's best race car driver because I instrinsically love driving. I don't want to become the world's best sharpshooter because I instrinsically love shooting.
• I just do these things nowadays, primary motivation in socialising with women, and a minor secondary motivation is yes I do find these atleast a little bit fun, atleast once in a while.
• "atleast a little bit fun, atleast sometimes" is not enough to motivate you to become a master at any of these skills. You clearly don't want mastery.
• You want to reach a threshold where you have covered some fundamentals, and can hence do it with others. Reaching this threshold can be typically done in a few months itself even with very little practice (like once a week or whatever). Maybe just take the slow and steady route here.
• Once you have reached this threshold, then maybe even a little bit of practice every year is enough to refresh your memory by a lot, and ensure you don't unlearn it (unproven hypothesis).

Another radical solution

• A radical option might be to compress all the suffering into a short span of time. Like, do not work at all. For 3 months, just practice all the hobbies you want, every single day. For example, spend an hour dancing, then one hour break, then spend an hour driving, then one hour break, then spend an hour shooting, then one hour break, then one hour of either lifting weights or swimming, and end for the day. (Make sure to have teachers for all so you are not learning the wrong form, also you might stay more motivated this way.)
• At the end of 3 months you would have learned the fundamentals, and then maybe just practice a couple times a month or something to ensure you don't forget them. Eventually you can taper down to even couple times a year of practice or similar.
• Has someone tried this? This sounds like the HIIT version of learning new muscle memory-based hobbies lol.
• I don't know, I am personally not keen on this. Taking a complete break from work will cause me to lose momentum on that and I desperately do not want to lose momentum on that.
• Maybe I am okay with the suffering? Like, obviously implementing this is going to cause a bunch of suffering. But atleast the suffering will feel compressed into a short span of time and I will see fast progress, and there is a clear end goal. Fast progress will motivate me for sure, this I am quite sure about.
• Assuming 1000 INR per private class and 4 classes per day and 20 days per week (you will definitely need a bunch of rest days), this costs 2.4 lakh INR for 3 months. Also add some money for commute and living expenses. That is not bad, honestly.
• Also maybe one hour break is not reasonable between the hobbies, maybe you need a two hour break because you both need to travel across venues, and you need a rest break sitting still in one location. Hmm, the travel is going to be a big issue actually, because it will physically tire you further. It will help a lot if these classes all happen in the same place (such as your home lol).

Insert rant

• Man I really want to try the HIIT thing lol. It actually sounds exciting, the idea that if I just endure for a short time period I can actually see big gains across so many different skills.
• Worst case I will fail and I will learn from the failure too to be honest.
• This is tempting.
• (Side note - you are again procrastinating on work by thinking about this. Motherfucker)
• I think the time compression thing is tempting. Like, if I just suck it up and practice every day, I know I can probably pick up fundamentals of a skill within 3 months itself. Whereas if I practice only once a week, I know reaching equivalent skill level could take a year. Given how I currently operate, 3 months sounds like "sane reasonable amount of time I can visualise" and one year sounds like "infinite amount of time".
• Also, if I anyway accept that this isn't going to be a lot of fun, it is tempting to accept that this is just a full-time job and that you will suffer lol. As opposed to do it once a week and hope it will be fun, but get disappointed when it is not.

Update

• See also: There are only 4 skills - design, technical, management and physical, by Oliver Habryka
  • I am decent in technical skill. I want to double down and get even better at it, in specific niche of of writing / breaking secure software.
  • I spent the laast year on management aka social skills, and found it so incredibly painful that I decided I will not even try to get good at this.
  • I am not terrible in design skill but also I am unsure about my actual skill level here.
  • I am terrible at physical skill, I have no natural talent for it. But also physical skills are the type where you can reach a pretty high level just through brute-force (i.e. practising more than everyone else) even if you lack talent. I am increasingly realising a number of hobbies I want to learn are all in the physical skill bracket.

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