Why NOT practicing every day makes you a better musician

I’m a guitar player, and I also train for long-distance running. The distances aren’t important here, what mattered was a lesson I picked up from running: every serious training plan builds in rest days and de-load weeks. Not as a reward, but because adaptation happens during recovery. Your muscles and motor patterns don’t get stronger while you’re grinding through reps; they get stronger afterward, when you rest.

I didn't think about music practice this way for a long time. I figured more was better. Practice every day, no exceptions. That's what serious musicians do, right?

Junk miles

Runners have a term called "junk miles." It's those medium-effort runs that aren't easy enough to be recovery and aren't hard enough to build fitness. You're just sort of running. It feels like work, but the training effect is close to zero.

I realized I had my own version of this. I'd sit down with my guitar, play through the same songs at the same tempo, make the same mistakes I always make, and put it down 45 minutes later feeling like I'd done the work. But nothing changed. I wasn't pushing into anything new, and I wasn't resting either. I was just logging time.

Rest is where the work takes hold

This is the part that was hard to accept. The improvement doesn't happen during practice. It happens after, during rest, especially during sleep. There's actual research on this. Motor skill performance improves after a night of sleep with no additional practice. Your brain consolidates the pathways while you're not doing anything.

So when I practiced the same hard passage every day without a break, I wasn't giving those pathways time to settle. I was just stacking today's effort on top of yesterday's incomplete work.

I eventually started comparing my practice takes side by side in RunThrough, and one of the first things I noticed was that my best recordings rarely came after long daily streaks. They came after I'd taken a day off. That pattern showed up over and over.

The rut that isn't a rut

There was a stretch where I was practicing regularly and everything felt like it was getting worse. I called it "being in a rut." I didn't have another name for it.

Runners would call it overtraining. Same symptoms: persistent fatigue, declining performance, dreading the thing you usually love. The fix in running is almost always the same. Take some days off. Sometimes take a whole week.

I tried it with practice. Three days, no instrument. When I came back and recorded a passage I'd been struggling with, it was noticeably cleaner. Not dramatic, but real. The rest let the work actually stick.

What I do now

I don’t practice the same thing every day. I split the week up into different focus areas, and I make sure that I’m giving myself plenty of time to just have fun. Some practice days are hard, where I'm recording takes and really working on specific things. Some are easy, where I just play stuff I know and enjoy the instrument. Rest days I don't touch it.

The idea that practicing every single day is what serious musicians do sounds right, but it wasn't working for me. Consistency doesn't have to mean every day. It just means showing up regularly with a plan that doesn't burn you out.

The tape doesn't lie about any of this. When I compare takes over weeks, the pattern is clear. My best sessions follow rest. That's been true enough times that I stopped fighting it.