Practiced system design out loud to my dog every morning for three weeks before my first real round

Felt genuinely ridiculous walking my dog while narrating "let's talk about how we'd shard this user table" to nobody but him. Did it anyway because reading write-ups wasn't sticking, and something about saying it out loud forced me to notice where my explanation got hand-wavy. The actual round wasn't perfect, but I never once froze mid-sentence, which is more than I can say for my last two attempts. Not sure I'd recommend the dog specifically, but the out-loud part mattered more than I expected.