In the last post, I talked about the myth — the fear that pushing to harder material will erode existing skills. The somersault analogy showed why that fear is unfounded. But knowing the fear is irrational is one thing. Understanding the mechanism that makes it irrational is another. And the mechanism, once you see it clearly, doesn’t just eliminate the fear. It transforms your entire approach to practice allocation.
“Practice Like a Pro” laid out the mechanism with a clarity that made me reorganize my practice sessions the same week I encountered it. The core principle: when you practice something harder than your current level, you’re using all of your existing skills at maximum capacity, plus attempting to go beyond them. The existing skills aren’t neglected by harder work. They’re exercised more intensively than they would be by comfortable repetition at their own level.
This is what I think of as the umbrella effect. Everything underneath the harder skill is covered, protected, and actively strengthened.
The Mechanism in Detail
Let me break this down with as much precision as I can, because the mechanism is where the real insight lives.
When you practice at your current level — running through material you can already execute at ninety percent or better — your existing skills are engaged, but they’re engaged at a fraction of their capacity. They’re coasting. The movements are familiar enough that they don’t require full neural activation. Your brain allocates just enough resources to get the job done, and the rest of its processing capacity goes elsewhere. You’re maintaining, not growing.
When you practice something harder — something ten to fifteen percent beyond your current ability, as I discussed in earlier posts — the dynamic changes completely. Now your brain needs every ounce of capacity it has. The familiar, lower-level skills that form the foundation of the harder technique are recruited at full power because the harder technique demands absolute precision in the foundation before it can even begin to address the new, harder component.
Think of it this way. If you’re building a tower and you add a floor on top, every floor below that new one has to bear additional weight. The foundation is stressed more by the taller tower than it was by the shorter one. Adding difficulty on top loads the entire structure beneath it.
When I work on advanced card handling, my basic card handling isn’t resting. It’s working harder than it would be if I were just practicing basic card handling in isolation. The advanced technique requires the basic technique to be executed with more precision, more consistency, and less conscious attention than the basic technique demands on its own. The foundation is being exercised at a higher intensity by virtue of supporting something more complex above it.
This is why the gymnast who trains the double somersault finds the single easier afterward. During double somersault training, the single-somersault skills — takeoff, rotation, spatial awareness, landing — were being demanded at a level the single never requires. They were being pushed to their limits and beyond, which triggered adaptation, which strengthened them. The single somersault was getting a more intense workout during double somersault training than it ever got during its own dedicated practice.
The Umbrella Effect
I started thinking of this as the umbrella effect because the visual works perfectly.
Imagine your skill level as the handle of an umbrella. Everything you’ve mastered — all the skills at or below your current level — sits under the canopy. When you open a bigger umbrella by pushing to a harder skill, the canopy extends. Everything that was already under the smaller umbrella is still covered, plus more.
But it’s not just coverage. It’s active protection. The harder skill doesn’t just passively include the easier skills. It actively exercises them at higher intensity. The canopy isn’t just sitting there — it’s pressing down on everything underneath, strengthening the entire structure.
Every time you practice the harder move, you’re simultaneously giving every sub-skill within it a workout that is more demanding than what those sub-skills would receive if you practiced them in isolation at their own difficulty level.
This has a profound implication for how you allocate practice time. If harder work automatically exercises and strengthens the easier skills beneath it, then explicitly practicing easy material is, in most cases, redundant. Not harmful, necessarily, but redundant. The maintenance is being handled by the harder work.
My Experience With the Umbrella
Let me make this concrete with what I actually experienced.
There was a period in early 2018 when I made a deliberate decision to stop practicing basic techniques in isolation. I’d been spending roughly a third of every session running through fundamentals — partly as a warm-up, partly out of the maintenance fear I discussed in the last post. That was fifteen to twenty minutes of every session spent on material I could already execute at a high level.
I reallocated that time entirely to advanced work. The entire session, from the first minute, was spent at or near the edge of my ability.
The prediction, based on the umbrella effect, was clear: the basic skills should not only survive this reallocation but actually improve, because they’d be exercised at higher intensity during the advanced work than they had been during their dedicated practice time.
The prediction was correct.
After three weeks of not explicitly practicing basic techniques, I ran through them as a test. They were noticeably better. Not just maintained — improved. Smoother. More natural. More automatic. The things I’d been spending fifteen minutes a day “maintaining” had gotten better without any dedicated maintenance at all.
The explanation fits the mechanism perfectly. When I practiced basic techniques in isolation, they were being executed well within my capacity. My brain wasn’t fully engaged because the challenge was below the threshold for adaptation. I was paving roads that were already paved. But when those same basic techniques were demanded as components of harder sequences, my brain had to execute them with maximum precision while simultaneously managing the new, harder elements. The basics were being stressed at a level they’d never reached during their own dedicated practice.
This was the moment the umbrella effect stopped being a concept I’d read about and became a principle I’d verified through experience.
The Comfortable Repetition Trap
This principle reveals something uncomfortable about how most people allocate their practice time.
The standard approach — and the one I followed for my first year or so — is to divide practice into sections. Warm up with basics. Spend time on current-level material. Push into harder material toward the end. This sounds sensible. It sounds structured. And it means you’re spending a significant percentage of your practice time on material that provides essentially no adaptation signal.
The warm-up section? Your brain isn’t engaged enough for meaningful development. The current-level section? You’re in the comfort zone, where execution is solid but adaptation has stopped. Only the harder-material section is driving real growth, and by the time you reach it, you’ve already burned through a chunk of your focus and energy on work that wasn’t producing anything.
The umbrella effect suggests a different allocation. Start with the hardest material your focus and technique can support. Stay there for as long as your concentration holds. The basics are being exercised within the harder work. The current-level skills are being exercised within the harder work. You don’t need separate sections for them.
I’m not saying you should never touch easier material. There are legitimate reasons to occasionally work on fundamentals in isolation — diagnosing a specific issue, rebuilding after injury, or working on the artistry and presentation of a polished piece. But the default allocation of spending thirty to fifty percent of your practice time below your challenge level is inefficient, and the umbrella effect explains why.
Coming Back Down the Mountain
One of the most satisfying experiences in practice is what I call the descent effect.
You spend a week or two working on something that’s genuinely at the edge of your ability. It’s frustrating. Your success rate is low. Your hands feel clumsy. The material doesn’t flow. You’re in the adaptation zone, which means you’re uncomfortable, making errors, and having to think about every single movement.
Then you come back to the material you were comfortable with before. And it feels like a different world.
Movements that required conscious attention now happen automatically. Sequences that felt fast now feel leisurely. Timing that was tight now has room to breathe. It’s the sensation of coming down from altitude — everything at the lower elevation feels effortless because your system has adapted to the demands of the higher one.
This isn’t an illusion. It’s the direct, measurable result of the umbrella effect in action. Your existing skills haven’t just been maintained during the harder work. They’ve been strengthened by it. They’ve been exercised at a higher level of demand than they would have experienced during their own dedicated practice, and the adaptation mechanism has responded accordingly.
I remember the first time I experienced this clearly enough to recognize what was happening. I’d been working on a particularly challenging sequence for about ten days. Every session was a struggle. My success rate never climbed above sixty percent. I felt like I was making minimal progress on the new material and worried I was stagnating on everything else.
Then I performed a routine that I’d been doing for months — a routine I’d considered polished and complete. It felt completely different. Not just easy, but effortless. There was a looseness and naturalness in my hands that hadn’t been there before. The routine was better than it had ever been, and I hadn’t practiced it once during those ten days.
The harder work had done the maintenance for me. Better maintenance than I could have done explicitly.
Reallocating Your Practice Budget
Once you internalize the umbrella effect, it changes how you think about your practice time as a budget.
Before, my budget looked something like this: thirty percent fundamentals maintenance, forty percent current-level refinement, thirty percent new/harder material. The adaptation zone — where genuine improvement happens — received less than a third of my total practice time.
After understanding the umbrella effect, my budget shifted dramatically: maybe five percent warm-up and diagnostics, ninety-five percent at or near the edge of my current ability. Everything below the edge is being exercised by the edge-level work. The fundamentals are being maintained — and strengthened — by the advanced practice. The current-level skills are being maintained — and strengthened — by the harder-than-current practice.
The result was that my total practice time decreased while my rate of improvement increased. Not because I’d found a shortcut, but because I’d stopped spending time on work that the harder practice was already doing for me.
The Practical Takeaway
If you’re spending significant time maintaining skills you’ve already developed, the umbrella effect suggests you can probably reallocate most of that time to harder material without any degradation of the existing skills.
The key qualifier, which I mentioned in the previous post and which bears repeating: the harder skill needs to be similar in nature. It needs to draw on the same fundamental movements, the same skill family, the same neural pathways. A harder card technique protects basic card technique. A harder card technique does not protect stage presentation skills. The umbrella only covers what’s directly beneath it.
Within that constraint, though, the implication is liberating. You don’t need to spend time treading water at your current level. The harder work will keep you afloat. It will do it more effectively than treading water ever could, because it’s demanding more from your existing skills than comfortable repetition ever asks.
Push up. Everything below follows.
The umbrella covers more than you think.