It took more than a few years of being a personal trainer for me, Coach Will, to realize that the basics of human learning applied as much in the gym as they do in the classroom.
But making this connection, and following through with what it implies, has both transformed my approach and vastly improved the outcomes and experience of training for the people I work with.
So while I do go into some depth here, I'm hoping you come away with one main lesson: optimal learning not only helps you get better, faster, but also feels really, really good.
First--the idea that learning should even be a part of an exercise experience is often somewhat new for the adults I work with. I draw this up to the fact that adults, in our society, are often not expected to be great learners; we're supposed to already have it figured out.
This means that while many people start training with me because they notice that there are gaps in their understanding--of themselves, their bodies, their health--that they want to fill in, they often don't grasp what that learning will feel like. Really, what it must feel like, if we are going to actually believe the decades of research around how humans learn.
Before we can even start any learning process we must want to learn. I'm not talking about having a positive, engaged attitude (although that helps), but rather I mean having an intention, or a goal.
Think back to when you learned to ride a bicycle, or learned to swim: you wanted to learn. That's a critical component to any learning process, which is why we try to get to the bottom of each person's why around training on their first, initial call with us.
From there, a key part of what optimal learning feels like is that it has feedback built right in.
Here, I don't mean the feedback you get after the fact, that you'd process with your think-y brain; I mean feedback that immediately impacts your experience, like when you start to lose balance on a bicycle. That loss of balance serves as an immediate feedback mechanism that allows you to immediately respond, correct, and with repetition, make automatic. That process, over and over, is learning in a nutshell.
Without that feedback, we don't know when we are failing, and so we can't correct. In the game of learning, feedback is critical.
Which is why unlocking these immediate feedback mechanisms is where we start with our training: are you, the mover, feeling all that the world (and your body) is offering as feedback? And since we learn from established anatomical science that much of what you feel when it comes to movement is coming through your joint capsules, we focus on making sure your capsules are working well and feeling good. Healthier capsules equals better feedback.
But being engaged in activities that we want to learn or improve at is not nearly as straight-forward as it might seem. After all, the feedback you feel from gravity while you ride a bike quickly becomes completely automatic, at which point learning to ride a bike is, well, not that interesting.
At that point, when some learning has happened, we need to keep engaging with tasks that are appropriately challenging if we are to keep learning and progressing.
So that makes appropriate and sufficient challenge the third component of optimal learning. This is a moving target as we learn and improve, but it can be a critical missing component. Perhaps an activity is simply too easy, or becomes too easy as in the biking example above, at which point learning can stop.
Just as often, an activity is just too hard or complex, and success is not even possible. In this case, the learning task either needs to be simplified or the learner has to increase their skills. The 'dialing-in' of challenge, of figuring the right amount of challenge for a particular learner on a particular day, is an essential part of coaching/teaching well.
The last component to optimal learning is to do so with attention and focus. While it might seem that if someone is motivated by a goal, they're getting good instantaneous feedback, and they're working at the right level of challenge for them, learning should be a snap, that discounts the experience of the learner, which can doom the learning task.
While learning, if we are focused on something unrelated to what we're learning, we will not have the kind of brain bandwidth needed to synthesize a new experience with the feedback we're getting simply because we're distracted.
This gets especially tricky for the "over-thinkers" among us (Dingdingding, that'd be me ), as we think we're helping ourselves with our attentional focus while actually just getting in the way of receiving and responding to feedback.
But there's another layer here, too...having attention/focus on what you're doing relies on the learner not being distracted by life circumstances. If you, the learner, is stressed by work, family, or anything else, you simply will not be able to bring the focus to bear that contributes to optimal learning.
And if coaches or teachers are ignorant of these circumstances, generally or specifically, they risk undermining the entire learning process, and, in the worst cases, blaming the learner for their difficulty. (This particular aspect is dense AF and deserves it's own newsletter!)
These four components that factor into optimal learning also define a physiological state you may have heard of: flow state, or more colloquially, 'being in the zone'. That's right...learning in an optimal way is flow state, and flow state is optimal learning.
There's a lot to unpack here, but the part that makes me giddy is that if each of us can crack the code of how to learn optimally, we have the opportunity to hit two birds with one stone. We get better at whatever we want, and we access one of the most powerful, positive ways of being a human that science has discovered.
Of course, this also means that learning is the way that our brains feel best. It's almost as if we are wired to learn. The hard part is removing any obstacles to that learning.
So as you go forth, to care for yourself, enjoy yourself, and take in the world, I hope that keeping these four components in mind help you do so more effectively.
Happy learning! Here's to finding your gold,
Coach Will