Mini Ep. 45: Spaced Repetition

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access, and if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free, go to BJJmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And in this week's mini episode, I want to continue our discussion of different concepts and mental models that you can use to learn faster in Jiu-Jitsu. Now, in the past few, we've talked about important concepts like interleaving, which tells us that rather than blocking off a big chunk of time to study one thing, we may be better served by cycling through different topics and then coming back to revisit the original one later. We also talked about effortful retrieval, which teaches us that if we want to strengthen the neural pathways in our brain and make it easier to recall information, we need to set up a learning practice where we force our brains to work to recall that information, and that should influence the study methods that we choose. All of this raises the question though, if we're going to set up some sort of study schedule to review what we've covered before in Jiu-Jitsu, what should be the cadence of that schedule? How frequently do we have to go back and actually study things? And the good news is, there is an approach here that has been shared and used quite often, which we can just pattern after and use in Jiu-Jitsu. It's called spaced repetition. And the idea is that when we are recalling information, so remember again that effortful retrieval chat that we had last week, when we are working and making our brains expend effort to recall information so that we can strengthen those neural connections and recall it even faster next time, there's a schedule that we can do that on. At the beginning, we want to revisit information relatively quickly. So, after a training session, you may want to sit down and try to recall that information by writing down notes, and I shared some tips on how to do that in the last episode. You might want to do that a few hours after class, maybe a day after class. But from there, depending on how successful the recall process goes, you can either space out your next session of recall for that topic, or start reviewing it again sooner. So let me give you an example. Let's say that my instructor shows me five tips for completing the arm bar. And let's say that three hours after class, I sit down and I try to write down the notes for what those five things were. Not because I need the notes for study purposes later necessarily, but more because the practice of writing notes itself is an effortful retrieval practice. It helps strengthen those neural connections in our brain so we can recall things later. If that process of recalling those notes goes well, so let's say I remember all of the five steps that I was supposed to remember, cool. I can then space out the next time that I consult this information. Maybe I will check in on these topics again tomorrow. And if again, I'm able to recall those five items, maybe I'll wait a few days before the next time I review. And then a week or two, and then a month or two, and then it gets to the point where you might only be checking things once a year or so. However, if I fail to recall something, so let's say I sit down and I try to remember, what are those five steps for doing that arm bar perfectly? But I can only remember three of them. Then that's a sign that I might need to revisit this topic more often, because the connections aren't really where I need them to be in my mind. So, instead of delaying the next review session, which could be a week from now, I might say, well, you know what, I'm going to do this one again tomorrow because clearly I'm struggling to recall this stuff. So spaced repetition basically tells us that in this practice of effortful retrieval, if we succeed at retrieving, we don't have to review this item again for a bit longer. But if we fail at retrieving, then we should start reviewing it again sooner. Now, this can be a very dynamic process, as you can imagine. It's easy to say that you want to do this when you've only got one or two things to study. But what I've found training Jiu-Jitsu is, you know, if you're training multiple times a week, if you're doing this process and you're taking notes and building up this like rollerdex of things to remember, this can become a massive job. It can get to the point where you've got hundreds of things on the go, and it can be very hard to remember them all. It can also sound overwhelming. Spaced repetition helps with that, because the better we get at remembering things, the more we can push out the next recall session into the future. So if, for example, let's again take this example of an arm bar. Let's say that I've got these five details for an arm bar that I want to recall. If I try to recall them tomorrow, and that works great, awesome. Then maybe I'll do the next recall session two days after. And if that works great, then a week after, and then maybe two weeks after, then a month after, then maybe a year after. So if you start recalling things more successfully, then you don't have to go through this effortful retrieval practice for that topic as frequently in the future. So this isn't as bad as it sounds in terms of how much stuff you have to study, because if this is going well, then you're going to be recalling and reviewing each topic less and less frequently. The main challenge when you're setting up a spaced repetition practice like this is how do you keep track of all of the things that you have to study, and how do you keep track of when the next recall session should be? The good news is, there's a lot of apps that will do this, where they will help you create flash cards and then they will automatically figure out when you need to review them next based on how well you're doing at recalling them. If you're an iOS user, there's an awesome app called Smart Cards Plus that does this job. Um, I definitely recommend it. But it is not the only app that covers this topic. There are many spaced repetition tools that you can easily load onto your phone, um, that will help you determine what you need to recall every day. So if you are struggling with recalling information on the fly, and you liked our prior chats about effortful retrieval and interleaving, and you just need a way to keep track of all of your study work, spaced repetition is a great model for that, and it's easier now than it's ever been to set up a spaced repetition practice because there are apps out there that will help you schedule your review sessions. It makes it quite easy to do. So I definitely recommend checking those out. I will say though that from my experience as a black belt, this is a practice that I find very helpful when I'm struggling to retain new information, but after I've been doing some of these things for a while, it gets to the point where I feel like I've outgrown this and I don't need to consult flash cards about these topics anymore. So like with anything that you take on as a habit, at some point you might want to consider reviewing that habit to prune out the stuff you're doing that's eating time but not really delivering value. So you may hit a point in the future where this spaced repetition practice just becomes overwhelming and you're not getting the value out of it anymore. But especially for people who are really struggling with information recall, this concept combined with the effortful retrieval one from the last episode, these two are a powerhouse combination for getting really good at remembering things and being able to ultimately make better decisions quickly when you roll. So again, just to recap, spaced repetition tells us that we should set up a practice where we try to recall important things that we've studied. At the beginning, we want to do this practice frequently for each topic. As we get better at recalling a topic, we can push out and make the review sessions less frequent. On the other hand, if we struggle to recall something, we should start doing it more frequently, and there's a lot of great apps that you can load onto your phone that will manage this process for you. So all of this is to say that, look, note taking in Jiu-Jitsu is a hot topic. People always love to ask about whether there's value in taking notes, and yes, there is. But I always encourage people to remember, the value is not the notes themselves. There is, I mean, there's so much information in Jiu-Jitsu. If you need to learn how to do an arm bar, you don't need your notes to tell you how to do that. The notes themselves probably are not the best way to find old information that you studied long ago. Where the notes are helpful is in the process of writing the notes. That's what strengthens the connections in your brain. It helps you recall information. It's the process of writing the notes and specifically doing so in a way that forces your brain to work to recall that information. That's how we get better at remembering things, and that's how we get better at recalling that information fast during a roll when we need that information fast. So there's another great learning concept. I'll probably do a few more learning concepts here before we cycle off onto something else. I mean, as you probably know, if you're a long-time fan of BJJ Mental Models, we've got well over a hundred concepts like this documented on our online database of Jiu-Jitsu mental models, plus our amazing BJJ Mental Models podcast, both the full-length episodes and the mini episodes like this. And of course, if you want more like this, if you really want to level up your Jiu-Jitsu with us, I can't recommend BJJ Mental Models Premium enough. It is, as far as I know, the single best value you can get online for a Jiu-Jitsu subscription service. The first week is free, so I definitely recommend trying it out to see if you agree with my assessment. It is the world's biggest library of Jiu-Jitsu audio courses, and believe me, these are way more valuable than you would think. Technique videos are great, but sometimes we need to talk about ideas, and I really love audio as an approach for that. So if you love Audible or Masterclass, please do consider checking out BJJ Mental Models Premium. You can get all of this, both the free stuff and BJJ Mental Models Premium at our website, BJJmentalmodels.com. I'll put a link in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I really do appreciate everyone hanging out here with me, and I'll talk to you in the next one.