Alex Here.
After speaking with thousands of coaches, the #1 problem they always want to solve is how to help their athletes conquer the age-old challenge of always moving “two steps forward, one step back”.
Have you heard of 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 to help your athlete’s reach their goals.
Trust me - this framing will greatly help you understand how practice should work.
Let’s get to it.
Check out this basic model of the "forgetting curve":
When we talk about “retention”, we’re referring to your athlete’s ability to remember what you said.
As you can see from the chart, athletes remember what you said really well immediately afterwards. As time goes on and the number of days from when you last saw them increases, there’s a sharp drop off in their memory, which only gets worse by the day.
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 athlete’s development..
If they’re forgetting your feedback after every session, they’re more likely to make the same mistakes over and over again.
This is especially true if they only see you a few times a month - practicing is supposed to help them get better over time. But when they reinforce bad habits, they run the risk of getting worse the more they practice.
This is where the power of asynchronous communication comes in.
When implemented correctly, we’ve seen coaches save 6-8 hours per week (aka a full workday) by simply reworking their coaching offer to include online written and video communication.
Asynchronous communication, at its core, is about shortening the feedback loop in the coach-athlete relationship.
Simply put, it just involves you making a couple posts per week in CoachNow and monitoring the comments section for questions.
Easy, peasy.
You see, in the old-school “lessons” model, your athlete does most of their improving when they’re on the playing field with you supervising.
Typically, this involves meeting once a week or so, giving your athlete “homework” before your next session, then moving forward when you see each other again.
In the ConnectedCoaching model, you still reap the benefits of the occasional live interaction, while also integrating periodic “micro touch points” between coaching sessions.
Micro touch points focus on iterative improvement in real-time, helping to reinforce success and minimize the development of bad habits before they take root.
In other words, in this model, your athlete doesn’t have to wait until your schedules align to keep moving forward.
The goal is simple and powerful: don’t rely just on the face-to-face coaching feedback loop.
Give your athletes the resources they need to achieve their goals on their own time effectively (See our previous post on Video Recaps for a token example).
While this results in more frequent communication, overall it saves everyone time and accelerates results.
In practice, this looks like the majority of the posts in a Space will be made by the athlete, not you. In an ideal scenario, they’ll share their progress in their space, and you will monitor these updates.
Micro-touch points are so powerful because they require such little time and effort from you, yet has incredibly high value for the athlete.
Additionally, you can counteract “two steps forward, one step back” in a few simple ways.
Interestingly, researchers found that if the forgetting is interrupted shortly after learning the information, your athletes will forget more slowly than before.
The science behind this centers on a basic concept - any learning strategy that forces someone to recall information from their memory strengthens the neural pathways in their brain. Additionally, this embeds the information into their long-term memory.
In other words, if they want to retain information, they need to repeat the information. And the sooner they do this, the better.
By helping them retain information better, you’re setting your athletes up for so much more success. They’ll say goodbye to wasted hours trying to remember what you taught them 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 athlete’s development in a few simple steps:
- Repeated, intentional, spaced review - This is KEY to disrupting the forgetting curve to your advantage. Take time after each practice session to analyze their performance and identify areas of improvement.
- Review the information 24 hours after learning it
- Review again multiple times every 2-4 days
The more frequently they’re able to do this, the better they’ll retain the information and the faster they’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 your athletes review material, have them pay extra attention to what they don’t know.
Use mistakes they keep making in their practice to identify gaps in their knowledge and spend more time focusing on fixing those than on anything else.
By focusing on those tough-to-conquer skills, their practice is becoming way more efficient and they’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 they’re stagnant, working on the same things every time they practice with no end in sight. That’s exactly why they can use CoachNow as a training journal to accurately monitor their progress and identify those mistakes they keep getting stuck on.
By regularly using a wide variety of methods to review their practice (like CoachNow's Cloud Library and Video Analysis tools) and identify areas of improvement, they’ll interrupt the forgetting process and improve their retention and overall performance way faster than their peers.