“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” —Bruce Lee

Where amateurs or beginners are often drawn to the flashiest or most cutting-edge parts of their work, elite professionals consistently work on training their basic skills.

In the kickboxing arena, it’s the competitor who has spent hours upon hours honing her foundational moves that typically holds the advantage over her opponent. It’s the reason master crafters focus on keeping their tools sharp and oiled, why elite performers from music to swimming focus on their warmup, and why programmers make sure the core of their code works before adding bells and whistles.

The problem is, training these basic skills can be boring.

We don’t want boring, we want exceptional. We want the glory of the applause, the thrill of executing a complex guitar solo surrounded by pyrotechnics, the quadruple backflip that no one else can land. Practicing scales or working basic positioning on the mat can seem dull in comparison, even if there’s no way to get to solos or backflips without passing through scales or positioning. During training, it’s too easy to justify skipping these in favor of more advanced techniques.

In the world of emergency medicine, high quality basic skills save lives. They work even when advanced equipment is broken or unavailable, and they work in unexpected and unplanned situations to buy time for a more complete solution to be developed. We need these skills to work well, so we have invested heavily in overcoming friction and learning to train the basics.

So, here are four strategies we use in the ER to successfully train our most basic skill sets that you can put to work, whatever your domain.

1. Train In Situ

One of the core skills we practice routinely in emergency medicine is assembling suction devices. Suction helps us to open up a blocked airway to place a breathing tube in a sick child, or clear blood from a field and find the source of bleeding in a trauma patient. It’s not flashy, but it’s a workhorse and it saves lives.

Almost every time I work with new interns, I ask them if they know how to set up suction devices. When they say yes, we move into an empty trauma room and work together to actually step through the process. A huge majority of those who thought they could put the device together struggle mightily when actually doing so.

Why? Because the details matter. Knowing how something works in theory is not at all the same as being able to actually find where the components are stored and physically connect them.

Working problems in your real environment exposes holes in your understanding of a basic skill and is substantially more engaging than just working a problem on paper.

2. Simulate and Visualize

If you can’t train your basic skills in the exact location you’ll be using them, no problem. Use simulation to mimic the setup as best as possible.

Practice tuning up your instrument in a different concert hall, work through your tennis serves on a local court, or follow our lead from the ER and go to a sim lab designed to help you practice in near-real-life situations. The simple act of physically changing your space often adds challenge and learning to training the basics.

No access to a sim lab or other reasonable model for where you’re going to perform? Still no problem, you’re carrying an amazing sim lab around on your shoulders.

Mental visualization gives you access to unlimited simulation resources. To start, simply close your eyes and imagine yourself performing that basic skill. Pay attention to parts that seem “fuzzy” or out of focus compared to the rest of the visualization, as these often represent areas you need to train more.

Once you’ve mentally worked a basic skill several times over, work on visualizing the process step by step, leaving absolutely nothing out. If you find a step that you can’t expertly visualize—like how, exactly, should you trim a sail if the wind changes a certain way—stop your visualization and go study that piece of the puzzle.

3. Practice Stumble and Recovery Drills

Stumble and recovery drills supply you a chance to practice successfully finishing a basic skill despite an initial setback. Personally, I love these drills, since the more chaos going on around us in an emergency, the more crucial it is we get these skills right.

Stumble and recovery drills work best with a partner who plays the “opposing team.” For example, imagine you’re training to place the pair of cardiac defibrillator (defib) pads correctly—a key basic skill during cardiac arrests that is surprisingly easy to get wrong.

Have your teammate set up a situation where the pads are placed incorrectly, then practice fixing them. Start simply with an easy fix like single pad out of place, then challenge each other with increasingly difficult or complicated situations. Push each other to figure out where those basic skills can improve.

4. Teach and Field Questions

The physicist and educator Dr. Richard Feynman advocated what is now known as “The Feynman Method” of teaching something: Once you feel you have some command of a basic skill, teach it to someone who doesn’t. [1]

When they ask questions, and they will, use these questions they ask to push your understanding. Pay special attention to anywhere you say, “because we just do it that way,” and focus your own training there until you understand it better.

In the ER, we routinely run a variant of this where the highest-level learner (not the teacher) explains a concept to a more junior learner. This setup provides a buffer of experience around both sets of learners and seems to generate even better questions.

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Basic skills done well can mark the difference between success and failure—even life and death in some cases. If you want to achieve exceptional heights in your chosen field, you need to find a way to love training them. Your future self will thank you.

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