How Many Teeth To Prep In A Day

Are you ready to practice for the bench test and want to know exactly how many teeth a day you should practice? If so, watch the full video below.

I have a course called Bench Test Mastery which has a recorded course component and an interactive component where I create video reviews of our member’s preps. And I get this question often, so I wanted to make a video addressing it.

You may be wondering how you should structure your bench test practice, and I get it. Do you want me to tell you to practice 1 cavity and 1 crown a day, or 3 cavities and 5 crowns a day? Something prescriptive like that?

Well, I have a different focus and theory about this. My thought is that the quality of your practice matters a lot more than quantity does.

2 people can practice the same number of teeth and have very different results. One person may prep twice as fast as the other, and one may improve twice as fast as the other too.

I see no point in trying to strive for a certain number of teeth. Who cares how many you do? The only thing that matters is how good you can get, and consistently so. So try to focus on the quality of your practice, practice with intention.

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If you’ve already practiced a bit, you may notice that your preps look similar to one another. You keep making the same mistakes. The preps look like brothers and sisters. You don’t know why, you try to improve, but it just keeps happening. It’s like the Handpiece has a mind of its own. At least that’s how I felt back when I was practicing blindly.

It takes less than a second to ruin a whole prep you were paying so much effort in doing well. And it’s hard to up your skill levels to the level it needs to be when there’s no intention and focus behind the practice you’re doing.

What do I mean by intention and focus? I mean, just prepping an FGC on #19 over and over again won’t necessarily mean you’ll improve on this particular preparation. Instead of blind repetition, take the time to dissect what’s happening each step of the way. If you find that your chamfer margin is always wobbly and not uniform, just doing the prep over and over won’t help you make smooth uniform chamfers, you’ll probably keep making wobbly chamfers, just more of them. Instead, you have to look at why this is happening. You want to treat the source, not the symptom, so to speak. In this case, you’d revisit your technique and approach to working on margins and the stability of your hands.

This is one of my strengths because I’ve been in your shoes not that long ago and went through the long arduous process of complete hand skills makeover. I can help you get to the bottom of things and improve things at the source. If you want to see the video about that journey, it’s here.

Anyhow, I wanted to record this video with the intention of redirecting your focus from quantity of practice to quality of practice. Have a focus and intention when you practice and don’t worry about how many teeth you’re going through each day. It’s a false metric.

If you want to work with me on improving your hand skills and becoming bench test-ready, I’m here. You can find out more about Bench Test Mastery through the button below.

Join Bench Test Mastery

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