Is there a place for massed practice in a modern day physical education and sporting context?

What does it look like practically:

In the majority of cases discrete practice is a better option for learning outcomes and performance, but massed practice still has a place. Massed practice is best utilised in activities that are discrete and not very fatiguing in nature, such as darts. A practical example of massed practice being utilised correctly would be doing two separate 3 hour session a week of game practice of darts.

Theoretical basis:

There is a general consensus that distributed practice is superior to massed practice in regards to performance but there is still debated in regards to learning. A meta-analysis by Lee & Genvese (1988) came to the conclusion that generally distributed has better learning and performance outcomes, but is more pronounced in regards to performance. They also found that the vast majority of studies on the topic where testing continuous skills. Lee & Genvese also devised distributed practice lead to increased performance and learning then massed practice, but that massed practice for discrete skills causes similar or even elevated levels of learning. This can be accounted for when considering one of factors that causes distributed practice to generally be preferable to massed practice, fatigue. As a single repetition of a discrete skill is not very physically tacking, especially when compared to a continuous, more repetitions can be performed in the same time period without as much fatigue accumulating. Essentially the debate of distributed vs massed practice, it is fairly one sided in favour of distributed. The only possible exception being is the training is for a discrete movement that does not accumulate fatigue at a great rate. Training generally should be brief, high intensity, to the point of the learning objective and frequent for optimal learning and performance.

For additional reading check out;

Our full depth piece)

- https://joshgosch.wixsite.com/practiceschedules/single-post/2017/03/14/The-Base-Theoretical-basis-for-practice-schedules

Or our references from the articles)

-'Distributed practice in motor skill acquisition: Learning and performance effects reconsidered' in Research Quarterely for Exercise and sport, 59, pp.277-87 by Lee, M, & Genovese, E.