I’m a consultant. I think in frameworks and models. Give me a spreadsheet and I’ll find a pattern. Give me data and I’ll find a story.
But adaptation — the core principle behind everything I’d learned about practice — resisted my analytical thinking. I understood the concept intellectually. I’d experienced it working in my own practice. I could explain it to someone else. But there was a gap between understanding it and feeling it — between knowing the principle and having it shape my intuitions in real time.
The rubber band analogy closed that gap.
The Analogy
“If we imagine a rubber band that is pulling us towards progress,” the “Art of Practice” author wrote, “the adaptation need is the rubber band. Whenever you start to practice a new move that is difficult for you, it’s as if the difficulty is the rubber band that creates progress and pulls you.”
Picture it. You’re standing still, and a rubber band is attached between you and a point in the distance — your potential. When you begin learning something new and difficult, the rubber band is stretched taut. The tension is high. The pull toward progress is strong. You’re being pulled forward by the gap between what you can do and what you’re attempting.
“That pulling power represents the need for adaptation that makes us progress.”
As you improve — as you close the gap between your current ability and the challenge — the rubber band relaxes. “As you get closer to your goal and closer to the other end of the rubber band, without you trying to heighten the difficulty, the rubber band is pulling you less and less.”
The pull weakens. The tension drops. And at the very end — the last ten percent of mastery — the rubber band is barely stretched at all. “Up until you reach the last ten percent where it doesn’t pull you at all.”
No tension. No pull. No progress. That’s why the last ten percent is so stubborn. The rubber band has gone slack.
Why This Image Changed Everything
I’d read about adaptation dozens of times. I’d experienced the plateau at ninety percent. I’d understood, rationally, why moving to harder material was necessary. But the rubber band image gave me something that rational understanding couldn’t: an intuitive sense of why progress feels the way it does.
When I started a new technique and felt the rapid early improvement, I could now feel the rubber band pulling me. The tension was real — a sense of being stretched beyond my current capacity, of being pulled toward a destination I couldn’t quite reach.
When I hit the ninety percent plateau and felt the grinding stagnation, I could now feel the rubber band going slack. The technique was no longer stretching me. The pull was gone. The sense of momentum had evaporated because the mechanism creating momentum had lost its tension.
And when I moved to harder material, I could feel the rubber band re-stretch. The new difficulty created new tension, new pull, new momentum. The metaphor aligned perfectly with the subjective experience of practice.
The Visual Diagnostic
The rubber band analogy also gave me a diagnostic tool. At any point during practice, I could ask myself: how stretched is the rubber band right now?
If the technique I’m practicing feels challenging, uncomfortable, and failure-prone, the rubber band is stretched. Good. Adaptation is occurring. Keep going.
If the technique feels comfortable, familiar, and mostly successful, the rubber band is relaxed. Warning sign. Adaptation has slowed or stopped. Time to increase difficulty.
If the technique feels impossible, overwhelming, and produces nothing but failure, the rubber band is overstretched — beyond the productive range. Back off slightly to the ten to fifteen percent sweet spot.
This real-time calibration was something I’d struggled with before the analogy. How do you know, in the moment, whether your practice is productive? The rubber band provides an experiential answer: feel the tension. Too little tension means too little adaptation. Too much means the challenge is overwhelming. The sweet spot is the range where you feel meaningfully stretched but not broken.
The Re-Stretch
The most powerful application of the rubber band analogy is the re-stretch — what happens when you move to harder material.
Imagine the rubber band has gone slack at ninety percent proficiency. You’re no longer being pulled forward. Progress has stalled. The conventional response is to pull harder on the slack band — to grind, to repeat, to try harder within the same level of difficulty.
But a slack rubber band can’t pull you, no matter how hard you try. There’s no tension to harness.
The solution is to move the anchor point. Instead of trying to extract tension from a slack band, you attach the band to a new, more distant point — a harder technique. Suddenly the band is stretched again. The tension returns. The pull resumes.
And here’s the key: the new tension operates on all your skills, not just the new one. The rubber band doesn’t just pull you toward the harder technique. It pulls your entire skill set forward. When you return to the original technique, you find that the new tension has dragged it from ninety percent to ninety-five, because the overall pull affected everything beneath the new anchor point.
This is the two-steps-forward, one-step-back method visualized. Move the anchor forward (harder technique), experience the new tension (challenging practice), return to the old level (step back), and find that everything has been pulled up (automatic improvement).
The Multiple Rubber Bands Model
As my practice matured, I realized that the analogy works even better when you think of multiple rubber bands, each attached to different skills at different levels.
At any given time, I have several techniques at different stages. Some are at ninety percent and slack. Some are at sixty percent and taut. Some are brand new and extremely stretched.
The key insight: the taut rubber bands create adaptation that strengthens the slack ones. As long as some bands are stretched — as long as some of my practice is in the challenging zone — the overall system is progressing. The slack bands get pulled forward by the taut ones.
This means I don’t need every technique to be at the cutting edge of difficulty. I need a distribution: some techniques in the maintenance zone, some in the challenging zone, and one or two at the absolute frontier. The frontier techniques create the adaptation pressure that improves everything below them.
This distribution matches exactly how naturals practice. They don’t attempt impossible material for the entire session. They spend their peak energy at the frontier, then work backward through progressively easier material. The frontier stretches the rubber bands; the maintenance zone keeps the highways paved.
When I Forgot the Analogy
About three months after internalizing the rubber band concept, I went through a period where I fell back into old habits. Travel was heavy, I was tired, and during my practice sessions I defaulted to comfortable, routine material. The rubber band went slack without me noticing.
After two weeks of this, I felt the stagnation. The familiar, demoralizing sense that nothing was improving despite daily practice. I was grinding without growing.
Then I remembered the rubber band. I asked myself the diagnostic question: how stretched is the band right now? The answer was obvious — it wasn’t stretched at all. Everything I was practicing was within my comfort zone. There was no tension, no pull, no adaptation.
The fix was immediate. That evening, I set aside the routine and went straight to a technique that was significantly beyond my current level. The first attempts were terrible. The failure rate was high. And I could feel the rubber band stretch.
Within a week, the sense of forward momentum returned. Not because I’d dramatically improved at the new technique — I hadn’t. But because the tension was back. The adaptation mechanism was engaged. The pull had resumed.
The Analogy as Antidote
The rubber band analogy serves as an antidote to the most common practice mistake: confusing familiarity with productivity.
When practice feels comfortable and smooth, the instinct is to feel productive. Things are working. Cards are moving correctly. The technique looks good. But comfortable practice is slack rubber band practice. The absence of tension feels pleasant, but it signifies the absence of growth.
When practice feels uncomfortable and frustrating, the instinct is to feel unproductive. Things aren’t working. Cards are fumbling. The technique looks bad. But uncomfortable practice is stretched rubber band practice. The tension feels unpleasant, but it signifies active adaptation.
The rubber band reframes discomfort as a positive signal. Not masochistically — nobody should practice in pain or frustration. But the productive discomfort of working just beyond your current ability is the feeling of the rubber band doing its job. The feeling of being pulled toward something better.
When I sit down to practice now, the first thing I notice is the tension. If there’s no tension, I’m in the wrong territory. The band needs stretching. I need to move the anchor point forward.
And when the tension is there — when the technique is hard, when failure is frequent, when the rubber band is taut — I know I’m exactly where I need to be. The pull is real. The progress is happening. Even when it doesn’t feel like it.