Most people practise by taking the same one-minute test over and over. It is pleasant, it fills a streak, and it is close to the least efficient way to improve.
Taking test after test measures you repeatedly. It does not teach you anything, because the thing you are bad at appears for a fraction of a second every few runs and then disappears back into text you already handle well.
Deliberate practice works the other way round: find the specific motion that is failing, isolate it, drill it until it stops failing, then put it back into ordinary text and confirm the improvement survived. That loop is what the coach here is for — it identifies the weakest key or letter pair from your own keystroke history and generates a drill made mostly of that pair.
Fifteen to twenty minutes, structured, beats an hour of undirected testing. The shape most people converge on:
Stop when accuracy starts to decay rather than when the clock says so. Practising through fatigue rehearses the errors, which is worse than not practising at all — you are still building a habit, just the wrong one.
Typing is motor learning, and motor learning consolidates between sessions rather than during them. Twenty minutes on six days will beat two hours on one day by a wide margin, and the gap widens the longer you keep it up.
This is the entire justification for the streak counter, and it is worth being clear that a streak is a scheduling device rather than an achievement. Missing a day costs almost nothing; missing three weeks costs real ground, because the gains that had not yet consolidated go first.
If you have no data yet, the order below is a reasonable default. Once you have a dozen sessions logged, ignore it and drill whatever the weak-key list actually says — a generic curriculum cannot know that your left ring finger is the problem.
Fifteen to twenty minutes of structured practice is enough for steady improvement, and more than most people sustain. Frequency matters more than length — six short sessions a week beat one long one.
Reaching usable touch typing — no looking down, around 30 WPM — typically takes three to six weeks of daily practice. Reaching 60 WPM at high accuracy usually takes a few months beyond that.
Accuracy, until your first-try accuracy sits above about 97%. Below that, speed gains do not survive unfamiliar text, and the errors are quietly costing you more time than the extra speed is winning.
It is the single biggest limit on your speed, because it makes every keystroke wait on a visual search. It feels much slower to stop, and that period lasts a week or two before the improvement arrives.
Short, repetitive exercises targeting one specific motion — a key, a letter pair, a reach — rather than general text. Typepace generates them from your own error data, so the drill is made of the pair you are actually failing.