A better way to improve and practise
Those of you who know me may well know that I enjoy playing golf, a lot. Golf, like Taekwondo, requires a high level of technical ability and to be good in either – that technique must be kept consistent to be able to produce successful results.
In my email inbox, today, I usually skip through and delete many of my golf emails – but this one definitely caught my eye. I am grateful I stopped to read it.
It concerns the theory of "Primacy and Recency" in the way we remember things – and how it applies to the way we may use this to learn new habits.
The idea is that we can easily remember the first time and the last time we do something. But it is difficult to remember one in between – say the 3rd, 5th or the 28th time – unless it was a memorable result of some kind.
For example: most adults will remember (quite vividly) their first kiss, even though it happened years ago. Going to the other end – most adults will also remember their last kiss – their most recent one. But try to remember one in between and it may be a bit more challenging.
If you find this interesting so far, then I recommend you click this link to get to the original article that I read myself. Although it goes through an example for golf, just rearrange things to apply it to Taekwondo – or any other technique or habits you want to re-learn.
Roy Khoh says:
January 19th, 2010 at 5:19 pm
This will explain why it is sometimes difficult to get students to change certain techniques.
Roy Khoh says:
March 13th, 2010 at 7:42 pm
According to this Primacy and Recency – you'll always remember your first time. Sometimes, when you're learning something – a technique – you might just have to forget that first time.
Although each technique is quite simple – it isn't necessarily easy. It's like watching a movie or reading a book. When you go through it the first time – you get a good general idea of what's going on and what happened and how it started and ended. Though, to get finer details, you may need to watch it again, and again.
Each time you watch/read that story, you'll pick up more details you didn't really notice before.
It's pretty much the same principle here, with your Taekwondo technique. You may think you know it, and maybe there's a new aspect to it you just weren't aware of before. When your instructor goes through it again, you may hear something from a different point-of-view. You may understand it more clearly from a physics angle, etc. and so on.
Eventually, (depending on how you were first taught and how YOU understood that first lesson) your more recent effort will be vastly different from your first effort; and sometimes it might pay to just forget that ‘first time’.