my partner says i've gotten a lot better at drums since i started teaching music classes for babies and they are SO right. my only experience with percussion used to be, like, clapping along on 1 and 3, and the cup song. and during our main activities in music class i still stick to very even patterns!
but, every class ends with a freestyle play-along using percussion instruments, and during those i get a little more funky with it. so i'm just sitting there doing percussion for 3-4 minutes with a drum or tambourine or clatterpillar or some shit. and turns out when you do something several times a week for half a year you get better at it!!
even though my funkier beats in class are still pretty small patterns using just one instrument and without much consistency across the entire song, i am apparently able to apply the same intuition to the larger patterns of a whole song. it's really cool!!