I feel "mileage" is useful in any activity that you're trying to improve at. However, I don't think its the most efficient way to improve, at least on it's own. Your golf swing experience is actually a perfect example . Learning, practicing, and refining helped you so much more than just hitting thousands of balls would have. Learning and understanding the fundamentals will greatly help reduce the "luck factor" of success or failure when putting in that mileage. When you succeed, you'll know and understand why and try to reinforce those habits. When you fail, you'll be able to understand what you did incorrectly and can make adjustments and focus on improving. If the fundamentals are never learned or practiced then performing that task is going to be much more inconsistent. Success is going to feel a bit more reliant on luck and more difficult to replicate without the knowledge and understanding of how you achieved those results. Failures are going to feel worse without knowing what was done improperly or how to get improved results. Like you mentioned, you also risk reinforcing these bad habits through repetition. I'm learning that either way, success or failure, the answer seems to always circle back to "did I correctly perform the fundamentals?" For the gesture drawings, I'd advise don't go so fast to where you lose control but try to just get the gesture down using simple lines (CSI). Then, once you have an understanding of the process, you can challenge yourself by trying to do it quicker.

I think Proko talked about it in one of his classes (I think it's the gesture class in figure drawing) or the draftsmen podcast. Practice makes permanent. So if you draw lousily over and over again with wrong proportion, you'll just get really good at drawing lousily. Gesture is a slightly different thing though. It's difficult to nail the proportion in one minute, especially for beginners, and the point of gesture is not to have a precise drawing, but to get the spirit of the pose. I completely agree with your approach, and that's how I did mine too. Slow the time down, focus on expressing the figure with fewer strokes, rather than drawing really fast without thinking. And when the timer is up, use a different color pen/pencil to correct the proportion.

This is a great question. Yes, I agree with you that how you practice is how you perform, but the caveat to that is I feel that principle starts to apply at higher levels in drawing and art. I think you have to get a lot of drawings that reflect your current level under your belt in order to get good, which is where the mileage advice comes in. Many beginner and intermediate artists have a difficult time putting pencil to paper, maybe because of the fear of making a bad drawing or discouragement from not being at the level that they want to be at. But realistically a beginner artist doesn't have the understanding and practice to make complex and sophisticated drawings, so they must do what they can, evaluate it, learn from it, and try to apply what they've learned moving forward. The quality of instruction and optimization of routine can greatly increase the speed at which the student learns, but I think overall, yes, I think your drawing will improve just with more drawing. Just like how you draw, simple to complex, you can refine your approach as you go. That being said, I don't recommend continuing to draw past the point of things making sense. That does seem counterproductive 😁