How to remember the techniques you learn in class

The short version: you will forget most of what you are taught in your first few months, and it is not a memory problem. Write three lines within a few hours of class, what you drilled, the one detail that made it work, and what went wrong when you tried it live. Then read that note for two minutes before your next session rather than studying after it. That is the whole system and it beats every more elaborate one because you will actually keep doing it.

Everyone knows the specific moment. You are driving home, or on the bus, twenty minutes after a class that made sense at the time, and you realise you can recall two of the four details the coach gave and you are not certain about the second one. By Thursday you have the rough shape and nothing else. By the time it comes round again you are learning it for the first time, slightly annoyed that you appear to have learned nothing.

Forgetting is not the problem you think it is

Adults arrive at this convinced their memory has gone. It has not. The issue is that you have nowhere to put the information.

When an experienced practitioner learns a technique, they file it against fifty things they already know: it is that grip with a different entry, it is the same principle from the other side. Everything attaches to something. For a beginner every technique is a free-floating sequence of unfamiliar positions with unfamiliar names, and there is nothing for it to attach to, so it goes. That is not a deficiency, it is just what the first months are, and it resolves as the base builds whether you do anything about it or not.

What you can do is stop losing the one part that is genuinely hard to recover.

It is the detail, not the technique, that vanishes

Here is the thing worth understanding, because it changes what you write down.

A week later you will remember roughly what you drilled. The shape of a movement is fairly sticky. What you will have completely lost is the small correction the coach gave that made the difference between it working and not working: the elbow stays in, the step goes there first, you are pulling when you should be pushing. Coaches typically give three or four of those per technique, and they are the entire value of the class. They are also the first thing to go, usually within hours.

So do not write "we did the technique". Write the detail. One specific correction you understood is worth more than a full description of something you did not.

Three lines, within a few hours

The best note-taking system is the one you are still using in March, which means it has to be almost effortlessly short.

Three lines does it. What we drilled. The one detail that made it work. What went wrong when I tried it live. That is it, and it takes about ninety seconds. People who set out to write a page per session write four pages total and then stop, and they end up with less than the person writing three lines a hundred times.

Timing matters more than length. Write it on the way home, or before you sleep, not the following morning. A note written the next day records what you still remember, which is exactly the part you did not need to write down. Whatever you use for this is fine, and it can be the notes app on your phone. Ours happens to be a training log with a free app attached to it, but the medium is not the point. The ninety seconds is the point.

Name things too, and do not worry about getting the names right. Your own label for a position, even a silly one, makes it retrievable in a way that an unnamed shape is not. You will pick up the real vocabulary as you go.

Read the note before, not after

This is the part almost everyone gets backwards.

The instinct is to study after training, while it is fresh. In practice the two minutes that pay are the ones just before you step on the mat: read your last note, pick one thing from it, and go looking for that one thing in the session. Recall immediately before you use something is worth far more than revision immediately after learning it, and it converts a note from a diary into an instruction.

It also gives the session a point. Rather than absorbing whatever happens, you arrive with one intention, which is the difference between a hundred vague sessions and a hundred slightly directed ones.

Ask one question, get one answer

Change what you are trying to get out of a class and the remembering gets much easier.

The beginner instinct is to try to absorb everything, which produces four half-seen techniques and nothing usable. Aim instead to leave with the answer to one question you actually asked. Ask the coach, or the experienced person you drilled with, about the bit that did not work for you. One answer you understand will still be with you next week. Four things you watched will not.

Coaches almost universally prefer this. A beginner who asks a specific question about the thing they could not do is much easier to help than one who nods along, and you will find people go out of their way for it.

On watching video

Video is genuinely useful in one direction and unhelpful in the other.

Useful: you drilled something, you half remember it, you watch a clip and the missing detail comes loose. Unhelpful: you did not really learn it in class, so you go looking for it online, and you find a version that differs from your coach's. Now you are choosing between two things you do not understand, which is worse than having one. That is a real cost in the grappling arts particularly, where there are several legitimate ways to do most things and the differences only make sense later.

If you have the choice between twenty minutes of video and one question to your coach after class, ask the coach.

What actually makes it stick

None of the above beats the obvious thing, which is turning up.

You remember what you have done under resistance, repeatedly, more than anything you have written or watched. Notes are a way of not wasting the sessions you do attend; they are not a substitute for attending. Two sessions a week for six months will leave you with more than one session a week and a beautiful notebook, which is the same conclusion we reached about training around a full-time job, and it is close to the reason most people who quit do so around month four rather than at the start.

If you have not started yet and you are wondering what a first session involves, we have written up what actually happens in a first jiu-jitsu class.

Frequently asked questions

Why can I not remember anything after a martial arts class?

Because you have no structure to attach it to yet. In the first months every technique is a sequence of unfamiliar shapes rather than a variation on something you already know, so there is nothing for it to stick to. It improves on its own as you build a base, and writing things down accelerates it considerably.

What should I write down after training?

Three lines. What you drilled, the single detail the coach gave that made it work, and what went wrong when you tried it against resistance. The detail is the important one, because the shape of a technique is easy to recall a week later and the small correction that makes it function is not.

When is the best time to write training notes?

Within a few hours, and ideally before you sleep. The specific corrections start dropping out almost immediately while the general shape lingers, so a note made the next morning tends to record what you already remember and miss the part you needed. Two minutes on the way home is worth more than twenty the next day.

Should I watch videos of the techniques I learned?

Yes, but to revisit something you have already drilled rather than to learn it fresh. Video is useful for jogging a detail loose. It is unhelpful when it shows a different version from your coach's, because then you are choosing between two things you do not understand yet. Ask your coach instead.