Having been a coach for over 20 years, I’m incredibly passionate about empowering athletes to do their best and reach their full potential.

 

This passion is what drove me to create CoachNow. Every feature in the platform exists to keep you on track to achieve your athletic goals and master your sport. 

 

Specifically, I created CoachNow to help athletes conquer what’s known as the “Forgetting Curve”. It’s a scientific model that greatly informed the creation of CoachNow and provides insights that you need to take with you in order to reach your goals.

 

Trust me - this framing will greatly help you understand how practice should work, and how you can conquer the age-old challenge of always moving “two steps forward, one step back”. 

 

Let’s get to it.

Check out this basic model of the "forgetting curve":

 

Forgetting Curve (1)

 

I’m sure this resonates with you to some degree. We all know the feeling of memory fading over time. 

 

But I think most people don’t realize just how fast this happens. 

 

We lose TONS of information about a memory IMMEDIATELY, and then it CONTINUES to taper off even further as time goes on. 

 

Now let’s think about this in the context of your athletic development.. 

 

If you’re forgetting your coach's feedback after every session, you are more likely to make the same mistakes over and over again. 

 

This is especially true if you only see your coach a few times a month - practicing is supposed to help you get better over time. But when you reinforce bad habits, you run the risk of getting worse the more you practice.

 

So… How can you counteract this? 

 

Interestingly, researchers found that if you interrupt the forgetting shortly after learning the information, you’ll forget more slowly than before. 

 

The science behind this centers on a basic concept - any learning strategy that forces you to recall information from your memory strengthens the neural pathways in your brain. Additionally, this embeds the information into your long-term memory.

 

In other words, if you want to retain information you need to repeat the information. And the sooner you do this, the better. 

 

By retaining information better, you’re setting yourself up for so much more success. Say goodbye to wasted hours trying to remember what your coach taught you and dedicate that time instead to learning new skills and getting ahead.

 

When it comes to training, you can implement this theory to support your development in a few simple steps:

 

  1. Repeated, intentional, spaced review - This is KEY to disrupting the forgetting curve to your advantage. Take time after each practice session to analyze your performance and identify areas of improvement.

  2. Review the information 24 hours after learning it

  3. Review again multiple times every 2-4 days

 

The more frequently you’re able to do this, the better you’ll retain the information and the faster you’ll be able to progress.

What I’m about to tell you next may just be the most important part of this whole blog..

 

When you review material, don’t just be aware of what you know, pay extra attention to what you don’t know.

 

Use mistakes you keep making in your practice to identify gaps in your knowledge and spend more time focusing on fixing those than on anything else.



By focusing on those tough-to-conquer skills, your practice is becoming way more efficient and you’re also building tons of mental resilience. Nobody enjoys reflecting on their mistakes, but it’s essential in order to be your best. Even the Pros do it.

 

Let’s face it, there’s nothing more frustrating than feeling like you’re stagnant, working on the same things every time you practice with no end in sight. That’s exactly why you can use CoachNow as a training journal to accurately monitor your progress and identify those mistakes you keep getting stuck on.

 

I also talk more about the importance of intentional practice (and the CoachNow features that’ll help you get there) here, here, and here.

 

By regularly using a wide variety of methods to review your practice (like CoachNow's Cloud Library and Video Analysis tools) and identify areas of improvement, you'll interrupt the forgetting process and improve your retention and overall performance way faster than your peers.