Then I saw a blog post saying:

This strikes me as so bogus, I can’t even begin to describe it.

A little poking around turned up plenty more people echoing the sentiment: that the exercises were unrealistic, needlessly restrictive, unproductive, etc. They’re right for the wrong reasons: these are all reasons that this is exercise. You’re cross-training, learning to swim with one hand behind your back. I’m going to stop belaboring the value of practice because Steve Yegge already belabored it quite well, but you’ll stagnate if you don’t struggle to improve.

(And hopefully we’ll all start practicing often enough to start figuring out what does and doesn’t work.)