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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

Executing fast is important, but practice slowly. It is frustrating as heck to admit it, but forcing your body to do something slowly is very effective at learning to do it at speed.

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I think ideally you need to practice both slow AND fast. You need to practice slow so you can notice and work on small details that can be skipped over with speed, and you need to practice fast because some things are legitimately different at speed and you won't learn how to deal with them only going slow.

The metronome of music practice is the idea, here. You don't just do something slowly. You deliberately constrain yourself to a controlled speed and ratchet it up as you go.

As my guitar teacher used to say, “Slow is fast”. Mastering the techniques slowly and increasing speed until you’re “at speed” is the way to go.

Like riding a bike, you start slow with training wheels (or a helicopter parent) and work your way up to Yolo no-hander off that kicker ramp at 40 kph.

Shame you can't do this with something like juggling. :D

I suppose you can somewhat metaphorically replace speed with numbers there. In that juggling four balls is a lot like three, but faster. Getting the initial three going, though... Grrr.

You can practice with two balls, sound the same motions you would with three. And if you really want to focus you can practice making a consistent toss with one ball. Two is probably better bang for the buck.

Right, I was just pushing the idea that you can't always literally slow things down. That said, no reason you couldn't pantomime juggling really slowly. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if that is a legit path to getting going?

Funny. I can do 3 balls. I can do 3 clubs. I can do 3.

4? My brain revolts.

Even dumber, for me, is that I can easily juggle two in either hand. Try to do the same in both hands at the same time? Brain basically recoils in horror.

You can also use light handkerchiefs that fall slower to the ground than balls, pins, or flaming chainsaws.

I forgot about the handkerchief trick to slow things down.

> Shame you can't do this with something like juggling

You need not limit yourself to a single gravitational constant.

I look forward to video clips of Elon juggling on Mars!

Ironically, training wheels are actually a bad way to teach a kid how to ride a bike. They teach kids bad habits (like turning the handlebars to steer rather than leaning).

Balance bikes are a better first step and are actually really fun compared to training wheels.

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

As the Romans said, festina lente.

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