Mini Ep. 43: Interleaving

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 1: 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 talk about a concept that's really helpful for learning, not just doing Jiu-Jitsu, but also how do we learn how to learn, to be better learners. It's a very important skill for us to learn in all walks of life, and one of the things I've always loved about Jiu-Jitsu is how it's such a great laboratory for becoming a better learner, because we get feedback so quickly. So in this mini episode and in the next few, I want to take some time to unpack some concepts that can be very helpful for figuring out the best ways to learn faster. And today I want to talk about something called interleaving. Interleaving basically tells us that when we're trying to learn a new skill, it can be helpful to switch it up. Instead of just focusing on one thing all the time, changing our focus and cycling through different options can actually be a better way to learn than just devoting a large chunk of study time to a single concept. There's an article in Scientific American about this called The Interleaving Effect: Mixing It Up Boosts Learning by Stephen C. Pan. And I'm going to just read off a quote here from that article. Enter interleaving, a largely unheard of technique that is capturing the attention of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. Whereas blocking involves practicing one skill at a time before the next, for example, skill A before skill B and so on, forming the pattern A A A, B B B, C C C. In interleaving, one mixes or interleaves practice on several related skills together, forming, for example, the pattern A B C, A B C, A B C. For instance, a pianist alternates practice between scales, chords, and arpeggios, while a tennis player alternates practice between forehands, backhands, and volleys. Now, there's a lot to unpack there in this quote, but basically the idea is that interleaving, which is where you cycle through different topics and revisit old topics on a more regular basis, could be beneficial to learning things more quickly and retaining information as opposed to what we would typically call blocked practice, which is where you focus on one thing for an extended period of time. Let's take Jiu-Jitsu for example. If you're at a gym where you're practicing the same thing for a month, maybe two months, such as this is armbar month, where all we're focusing on is an armbar, that would be called blocked practice, where you're focusing on a single concept. And a lot of Jiu-Jitsu coaches structure their curriculum like that, where you'll maybe do a month of one technique or position, and then a month of another technique or position. So you're taking a big block of time and devoting it to a single topic. Interleaving tells us that we can attack this differently, and rather than trying to get everything done related to one technique or position at a time, we should cycle through them. So instead of spending a month on armbars, and then a month on triangles, and then a month on omoplatas, you might do a little bit of practice with armbars, then a little bit with triangles, then a little bit with omoplatas, and then cycle back to armbars and go through that loop again. So that's where that quote from Stephen C. Pan comes up. So that's what he's saying when he's talking about instead of training A A A, B B B, C C C, we want to train A B C, A B C, A B C. Basically, shorter training windows for each topic, but then we cycle back and revisit the prior topic. Now, why does this actually help our learning? I'm not an expert by any stretch, but one of the explanations I've heard as to why interleaving can be so helpful is because it helps you see the differences between the different types of skill sets that you're working on. If you're only working on one thing for a month, like an armbar, then you're living in that world. But if you alternate between different topics, then you can start to see how all of these things are different and also how they're similar. So going back to the topic of armbar, triangle, omoplata, that triple threat attack sequence is so common from positions like the guard. And interleaving proposes that we will better understand, learn, and retain those techniques if instead of focusing on each one for a long period of time, we cycle through them. One of the other potential reasons why interleaving could be beneficial is because it forces you to revisit old topics and to retrieve that information from your brain. We'll talk about the concept of effortful retrieval at some point in the future in another mini episode, but the idea is the more work you have to do to recall information that you've learned before, the more you have to make your memory work for it, the stronger your neural pathways become and the easier it will be for you to call on that information again in the future. So it's very important in Jiu-Jitsu to not just look at information once and then move on, but to come back and revisit it, and to revisit it in such a way that it really makes you think. That's where interleaving can be very helpful. If you go to class and you train armbars for a week, and then you move on to something else, you're probably going to forget the details of what was taught. But if you move on to something else and then come back to armbars again, it forces you to do that recall. So this is something to think about both for students who are looking to most effectively organize their training and their study time, but also for coaches who are most effectively looking to build a curriculum. Rather than focusing on blocked practice where you have a topic of the month, it may be more beneficial to cycle through topics, but to make sure, and this is very important, that you go back and you revisit the topics that you talked about in the past. Now again, this is kind of the gateway into a lot of other learning concepts that we will talk about in future episodes. I can't wait to explore some of those. In the meantime, if you want to learn more of this, we've got a full database of all of those concepts, plus many, many podcast episodes that are all completely free on our website. You can get that all at BJJmentalmodels.com. That's also how you can check out our premium service. So if you want to get access to our massive library of Jiu-Jitsu audio courses, plus direct coaching from the world's best online coaching team, you get that at BJJmentalmodels.com. I'll put a link in the show notes, but I hope you found this episode useful. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you in the next one.