on the 1st play through of any music sheet, just highlight each Bar or Phrase that you played out of time with a metronome.

Then just practice all the highlighted Bars or highlighted Phrases.

After that, start playing through the whole sheet.

Then and only then, start practicing with the backing track, don’t waste time practicing with a backing track, until you can play the music sheet in time with a metronome. (takes a lot of stress off you😁)

Starting backwards mainly works for practicing difficult phrases, and is a commonly used by a lot of pro’s.

If you imagine a phrase consisting of say 12 notes, when you play the whole phrase it tends to have a natural feeling of ending on the last note.

If you start by working from the begging of the phrase and practice getting say the first 4 notes in time etc, it sort of hangs in the air when you get to playing the 4th note and the start of the phrase doesn’t feel complete.

compared to starting by practicing notes 9,10,11,12 those 4 notes make that part come to a natural sounding end, then practice doing notes 5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12. When you can do that, then practice notes 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12.

When you start by just practicing notes 1,2,3,4 your mind can get frustrated because it wants to hear the complete phrase – it’s similar to some one talking to you and they stop mid sentence, and you sit there saying “well go on, don’t leave us in suspense”