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The principles of effective practice also help you create and implement a development plan.

These principles are guidelines geared towards skilled development. They follow the acronym VPSMARTER:

Variety

You should include a range of different approaches in your training programme.

This will ensure that you remain motivated, which can lead to you giving 100% in every session and improving.

Progression

It is important that sessions are progressed as the programme goes on.

This will ensure you are suitably challenged in each session, meaning your skill development will continue to improve and you will avoid hitting a plateau.

Sessions can be progressed by:

• introducing opposition
• increasing the level of opposition
• performing the skill over a longer period of time
• increasing the accuracy demands of the skill

Specific

Approaches selected must complement the stage of learning a performer is at.

It would be unwise for a novice performer to try and develop their performance of the overhead clear whilst under pressure from opponents in a pressure drill or conditioned game.

Measurable

Each session should have a goal.

These goals should contain figures so it is easy to identify whether they have been achieved. They should be progressed in the following session to ensure progression continues.

Achievable

Each of these short-term goals should be achievable.

Once these are achieved, you can gain confidence, gradually increasing the challenge of your goals in future sessions, attacking them with a positive mentality.

Realistic

The approaches selected should make skill development as game-like as possible.

This can be done by increasing the pressure or by combining a range of skills within a session. This means you will develop your weakness as well as your whole performance, which will ensure you are competitive in matches.

Time

Sessions should be set at the appropriate time to allow you to develop your identified weakness.

By having enough time to practice, it will give you opportunities to hone the skill, making it automatic. This will help your performance within the pressures of a game.

However, if sessions are too long they can lead to boredom.

Exciting

Sessions should be exciting and you should enjoy them and want to continue training.

This can be made exciting by having a training partner who you get along with or who is at a similar level to you to provide challenge in the end of a session game.

Recorded

All session details should be recorded in a training diary.

This allows you to see how you are progressing, session on session, and means you have a note of how you felt each session went.

Doing this will enable you to monitor your progress, as you can make changes when something is not working.