My experience is that using the given definition for practice is misleading: “Practice is the repetition of an action with the goal of improvement”
The best advice for learning I’ve ever found comes from Regelski: Principles and problems of musical education.
Basically, he plainly states that repetition is practice. No qualifiers, no intention and no goals are required for something to meet the definition of practice.
Coming to grips with the fact that you can basically practice being bad as easily as you can practice getting good is far more useful than understanding what happens in the brain when practicing, and just as fascinating.
I don’t dispute that defining practice as being goal driven can be useful, but it is also misleading in that once you learn that ineffective practice time is not the same as no practice time, it is in fact worse than no practice at all, you are now reducing the amount of effective practice you actually need to get good at something.
