In the book, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, he stated that a person needed to practice 10,000 hours in order to be proficient at a certain skillset.
One of the techniques in Training the Tiger by Earl Woods, was to distract Tiger from hitting the ball, in order to force Tiger Woods to focus more intensely at the task at hand, which Homer used on Bart.
The title is a reference to Bart's catchphrase "eat my shorts".