The best training of the week happens while you sleep

Your students repeat, search and fumble their way through the session, and the work that turns all of that into a stable skill happens a few hours later, while they sleep.

The word of the day: motor consolidation

During the session, the nervous system explores solutions and builds traces that are still fragile. It is afterward, particularly during sleep, that these traces stabilize: the brain replays part of the day's movements, strengthens the useful connections and lets the rest fade.

This is what we call motor consolidation. Without it, the day's repetition stays a repetition, and it does not become learning that lasts (a hundred perfect repetitions, and nothing that sticks).

Same session, different learning

The consequence is direct and often overlooked: two people who do the same session but do not recover the same way do not learn the same thing. The one who sleeps badly keeps less of what she worked on, and sleep becomes a part of the training instead of a side issue of progress.

This is also why what you see in the session says little about what will remain: today's performance measures exploration, while retention is measured later (correcting too fast switches learning off).

What this changes in your practice

Count sleep and recovery as training variables, on the same footing as volume and intensity. A fine block of work on an exhausted system leaves few traces, and retesting a movement a few days after the session will tell you far more than the best attempt of the day (the duration of a stimulation's effect).

Reading the state of a nervous system, knowing whether it is available to learn or barely keeping its head above water, is where RNP, Neuro-Postural Reprogramming, begins (the window of tolerance).

What is repeated by day is engraved by night.

To understand how a movement is learned and then stabilized, the course "How we learn to move" is free, as is the introduction to RNP.

You are a movement professional: here is the training. You want to take stock for yourself: request an assessment.