Forgetting to Remember

How to Accelerate Your Learning (or decelerate your forgetting)

Do you ever look at all of the terms and techniques in BJJ and think to yourself: ‘I’m never going to learn all this!’

Or do you practise a technique furiously only to forget key steps a couple of days later when you try it in a roll or try to show it to one of your training partners?

We’ve all been there. But that doesn’t make it any easier when all you want is to hit that slick move in a roll.

So in this edition I’d like to look at two concepts associated with accelerated learning which may remove some roadblocks in your retention. They are: Spaced Repetition and Overlearning.

Do you forget your jiu jitsu techniques soon after learning them?

Spaced Repetition

While we think of accelerated learning as a 21st century necessity, it was a topic of fascination as far back as ancient Greece. I guess for as long as people have thought something was worth studying they got equally frustrated when it didn’t stick in their heads. However, big breakthroughs were made in 1885 when German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered that the majority of our forgetting of information occurs within the first two to three days after we’ve learned it.

What does this mean for BJJ?

In practical terms, if I teach you a sweep and have you demonstrate it to me, you have learned it, but the subtle details will start to disappear from the moment you take off your gi. The next day you might struggle a little with one or more aspects of it. By our next class three days later, if I move onto a different, unconnected technique, there is little chance you’ll be able to replicate it. For you data heads out there, this is called the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve and it looks like this:

The red line is without revising whereas the green lines are the days at which revision takes place. So you can see that if you don’t revise what you’ve learned, after six days, most of it is gone.

So if we forget it so quickly, how is anyone any good at BJJ? Well here’s the good news: Once you learn something and forget it, the next time you learn it, your retention is much higher. The information disappears much later than in the first few days and if you start to use it in your practice, it will become part of your regular game. Like a procedure you have to use at work intermittently, or a tricky website you’ve navigated before.

Do I have to forget something in order to re-learn it and remember it?

Well, here is where Spaced Repetition comes in. You review something that you want to learn as soon as you can afterwards, then in slightly longer intervals each time you review it. So, I teach you a spider guard sweep (which can be a little counter-intuitive if you haven’t seen it before). After class, within twelve hours or so, you list everything about it you can remember. This could be just saying the steps to yourself on the drive home, writing it in a BJJ journal (yes, we all know we should keep them) or, if you’re super lucky, practising it on a loved one. Now you may not get it all right. You may miss a bunch of steps, but that’s ok. This is about improving retention, not perfection.

Then, two to three days later, you revise it again. List the steps, write the steps, track down some steps on youtube, ask your coach to demonstrate it quickly before the next class. Then finally, within two weeks, do the step one more time. Does this sound laborious? Absolutely. And at the end of it, you still might not have it perfect because you missed some key steps in the first forgetting interval, but your retention is way higher than if you did none of these things.

What’s my tip for Spaced Repetition?

I use Spaced Repetition for techniques that I think I can bolt onto my existing game or a story that I’ve already established. (For more information about using a story to conceptualise your game, read my previous post about the BJJ Story here.) That way, I have the beginning and the end of the technique already established and I’m working on fine details.

So with Spaced Repetition you can improve your chances of remembering techniques for years to come. By spacing out your learning over time, you are still forgetting, but forgetting more slowly.

If you’re keen to read more on Spaced Repetition, The Guardian broke it down very succinctly in an article that you can read here.

However, if you think I’ve made it sound like you’re going to learn something and forget it a bunch of times, re-learn it and then probably still get it wrong, I have another hack for you and one that I think makes all the difference.

Overlearning

All of the above information assumes that I teach you the spider guard sweep, you practise it until you understand it and can replicate it and then you stop practising with your partner because, hey, you understand it, right?

Which I see… every… damn… class.

Two guys will work through a technique and by the time I get around to them to check on them, they’ve already stopped practising it, they’re chatting about something else and they say, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve got it.’

Are your conversations with your partner focused on the technique you’re drilling?

Hey, I’ve done it as well. But if you partner up with me and one of my professors shows a technique, we will go three repetitions each, then two each, then one each. I won’t stop practising the technique until we get called back to learn something else or it’s time for rounds. I don’t care if it’s a technique I learned in the first week. Drilling repetition time is for drilling.

Because I’m not just drilling.

I’m overlearning.

I’m taking something I can already replicate and I’m adding repetitions to reinforce it to my brain that it is important to remember. This is exponentially reducing the amount I will forget in the first spaced interval and slowing down the forgetting process.

If you’ve never taken a critical approach to your own learning before or you’re getting frustrated with your progress in acquiring techniques, Spaced Repetition and Overlearning are a couple of handy things to address.

Ask yourself: How am I revising what I’ve learned? Am I thinking about attaching what I’m learning to what I already know? And (most importantly) am I making the most of the drilling time to consolidate what I’ve learned?

Let me know how you go. What are you going to overlearn this week?

If you have any thoughts on these drills or the content you’d like to see more/less of, leave a comment or get in touch. It’s great to hear from you! And feel free to re-post on social media if I say something you agree with!