I’m always amazed at how hard it is to obtain something, but then how quickly we are able to lose it. I guess it’s a part of how the human body wants to be as efficient as possible, which means it will be hard to take on things until it can be determined worthwhile to take on, and of course the faster we can shed it the better.

Of course, the opposite seems to be the case for the fat around our middles. 😉

But I noticed it while I was very active in empty-hand martial arts. I’d work really hard to gain some skill or some level of endurance, then something caused me to drop off (e.g. injury) and how quickly I’d lose what I gained. I stopped formal empty-hand practice a little while ago and have only loosely been keeping up at home (many reasons), and I can feel it in my body. I’m itching to get back to regular formal classes and have recently started to assess how to rearrange my life to make time for that (still thinking about investigating aikido).

In the July 2010 Rangemaster newsletter, Tom Givens touches upon this in a brief article about skill atrophy:

Many times, I travel somewhere to conduct a 2-3 day handgun course, and have to spend the first half of the first day going over skills the shooters are supposed to already have. Since they have not practiced since their last class, they have lost a great deal of the skill they acquired in the last class. Motor skills involving eye/hand coordination, like shooting, require maintenance (practice). Fortunately, some of the primary skills, such as presenting the pistol from the holster, can be maintained through dry practice at home.

I forget the exact wording Mr. Givens used, but he made a clear point that it wasn’t so much the duration of your practice that mattered as it was the time relation of your practice to the time you need to put those skills into use. That is, an hour-long practice session is well and good, but if you only do it once a month is it really giving you what you need? What’s more important is the relation of your practice session to when you deploy the skills, so if you had to draw your weapon in a self-defense situation a day after that hour-long-once-a-month session, you’d likely perform well. But if it’s been 3 months since your last practice, that won’t bode well for you. Thus Tom recommended something to the effect of practicing at least 2-3 days a week thus you were never more than 2-3 days from your last practice thus things would be fairly fresh in your mind. Even if that session is just 5-10 minutes of draw and present, it was still something fresher in your mind and body than a few hours of draw and present a couple of months ago.

Of course, this is just steps to keep your level of skill from degrading. Increasing your level of skill takes even more work.