The question of how many hours do you need to spend on a task to be a true master of it surely crawled into your mind at some point in your life. It's an important thing to consider when you try to manage your time and plan your life accordingly. Ten thousand hours rule, that says that you need to spend at least 10,000 hours on something to be a true master is fixed in mind of numerous people especially professional athletes, musicians, and scientists. The term was coined by Anders Ericsson in 1993 based on his paper "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance". What a lot of people miss in his work is that during this 10,000 hours you need to perform deliberate practice which means that you need to consciously and intentionally practice your weakest aspect of the thing you want to get good in. Before we dig into what deliberate practice means and how we can apply it to League of Legends to get better at the game lets see how practice whether deliberate or not affects your brain.

"Practice is the repetition of an action with the goal of improvement, and it helps us perform with more ease, speed, and confidence.”

~Ted Ed

Whenever you issue a command to your body it begins in a grey matter where information is processed and electrical signal starts, for it to be effective it needs to travel all the way to your muscles through your spinal cord and axons (Axons are nothing else but nerve fibers). To preserve the quality of the information contained in electrical signals from your brain axons are covered with myelin that acts in a similar fashion to the isolation of electrical cables.

Whenever you practice myelin layer thickens and isolates better.

“… The repetition of a physical motion increases the layers of myelin sheath that insulates the axons. And the more layers, the greater the insulation around the axon chains, forming a sort of superhighway for information connecting your brain to your muscles.”
~Ted Ed

This process creates so-called muscle memory and increases your reaction time substantially.

Effective practice is consistent and targets your weakest aspects that are at the edge of your current abilities. While you practice you should aim to focus entirely on the task at hand, this means that you should turn off all possible distractions like Facebook, cellphone and anything else that might be disturbing.

Start slowly

Before you go right into a ranked game you should warm up your brain and muscles. Follow this routine for maximal performance in LoL:

Start with this warm-up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiRC80FJbHU

After you are done follow this in game warm-up:

Click this link and set the timer for 10 seconds.

Enter practice tool with tank runes and don't buy any items. Go to any lane that you usually play on.

Start the timer and look at your mini-map whenever timer rings while trying to CS as many minions as you can and record your performance for future comparison.

Enter ranked game about 2-3 divisions below your peak elo and play at least 1-2 games but no more than 3. If you are practicing your map awareness at this session you can keep timer turned on.

The greatest thing about it is that you will see better results in your serious ranked games right away!

Every part of your body gets tired after frequent and intensive usage including your brain. Your organism stores glucose reserves for your brain to use but after a while, they will get depleted and your focus won't be clear enough for the practice to be effective. To prevent that elite violinists studied by Mr. Erikson were engaging in the deliberate practice for about 90 minutes (around 2-3 games), followed by short 10-15 minutes breaks and naps sometime in afternoon.

You can also try Pomodoro technique of 25 minutes of practice (around 1 game) followed by 5-7 minute breaks.

Whichever practice you choose to keep in mind that the amount and duration of breaks are as important as their quality. Mindlessly browsing memes or texting your SO doesn't count as one. Examples of quality break would be:

Take a walk, they boost your

creativity and reduce stress

Eat something!

Meditate

Take a nap of appropriate length, click the link for more info

Clean your room and make your mom happy! :)

Recent studies suggest that Yogis and Buddhists were right for thousands of years and breathing focused practices strengthen our focus and give us other cognitive benefits:
~ Trinity College in Dublin article
That's why I highly recommend you to dig into it and include meditation practice before your games. From my experience, it doesn't only allow you to get good but also has more meaningful life and a bit more introspection into who you are hence decreasing potential tilt which might cloud your judgment.

Click the video below if you want to learn more about positive effects of meditation condensed into 3 minutes video from asapscience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw71zanwMnY

There are numerous ways to start meditation and breathing practices. The only secular recommendation I can make at this time is the headspace app. It has some basic content available for free and more sessions cost quite a while, but it's still a very good start in my opinion. I will talk more about it in a different article if you are interested in that topic let me know :)

You can also read about mindfulness breathing here.

This text was about half of guide written by Chivalrous Boosting. You can read the rest and more here: Chivalrous Boosting | Cheap Coaching!