Speed trainers vs success-gating
Nearly every metronome app ships a "speed trainer": set a start tempo, an end tempo, and an increment, and the click climbs — +5 BPM every four bars, or every thirty seconds — until it reaches the target. The design has one problem: the clock doesn't know how you played.
What the timer-based ramp gets wrong
- It advances through failure. Flam the doubles at 120 and the trainer serves you 125 anyway. You spend the back half of every session practicing at tempos you can't play — which mostly trains tension and approximation.
- It moves the target mid-learning. Research on rhythmic skill finds that keeping tempo stable within a practice block transfers better than continuously sliding it. The run is the unit of practice; tempo should change between runs, not during them.
- It mistakes today's peak for progress. Hitting 160 once at the end of a ramp feels like an achievement, but performance during practice is a famously poor proxy for learning. What you can do tomorrow, cold is the real number.
What the evidence supports instead
Learning is fastest near the edge of ability but not past it — the "challenge point," quantified in one well-known study as roughly an 85% success rate. A progression that targets it looks like this: run at a fixed tempo, judge the run, and let the judgment move the tempo. Clean → up ~3%. Shaky → same tempo again. Lost it → down 6%, and a second failure ends the climbing for the day, because gains consolidate overnight and tomorrow starts fresh slightly below today's best.
The catch — and the honest answer
A web page can't hear your practice pad, so the success signal has to come from you: one tap after each run — clean, shaky, or lost it. That self-judgment isn't a workaround; deliberate self-assessment is itself associated with the most effective practicers. StickTempo's tempo ladder implements exactly this loop on every exercise, with your anchor tempo remembered per exercise. Details on the numbers live in the tempo guide.