“We’re sitting here, I’m supposed to be the franchise player, and we’re in here talking about practice.” Remember that famous line? The year was 2002, so maybe not. If you don’t, here’s some background: Allen Iverson’s Philadelphia 76ers had just been beat by the Boston Celtics in the NBA playoffs. Larry Brown, the 76ers coach, had just criticized Iverson, one of the most feared scorers of his generation, for missing team practices. Iverson took issue with the comments, and launched into his infamous rant about how practice was, well, just practice and not, after all, as important as the actual games themselves.

Turns out that not only was he wrong (shocking), but if he had practiced more than he thought he needed to, he could have been more efficient and expended less energy with each driving basket and jump shot. Maybe then he would have actually won a ring.

According to a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder, led by Assistant Professor Alaa Ahmed, while practice does indeed make perfect, continuing to practice past perfection leads to more efficient behavior, a finding that college athletes and music majors should pay especially close attention to. While some, if not most, athletes and musicians practice hard to learn something, like a tennis backhand or a new piano solo, almost all move on to something new once they’ve perfected it.

However, continued practice of a perfected task leads to greater motor efficiency. And that means a perfected backhand takes less energy to complete and a perfected piano solo leaves fingers and arms less tired. As a result, a tennis player might have an edge in energy in a grueling fifth-set tiebreaker and a pianist might have more energy left to nail that climaxing crescendo after a night full of hammering the ivory.

In the study, Ahmed looked at how subjects learned arm-reaching movements with a robotic arm. After the subjects perfected the task, and a corresponding decrease in muscle activity had reached a stable state, the overall energy costs to the subjects continued to decrease with further practice. In fact, by the end of the study, practicing past perfection led to a net metabolic decrease (measured by oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide exhalation) of 20 percent.

“The message from this study is that in order to perform with less effort, keep on practicing, even after it seems as if the task has been learned,” said Ahmed. “We have shown there is an advantage to continued practice beyond any visible changes in performance.”