Three Things You Believe About Learning

1979, two groups, three movements to learn, and a result that still troubles: the group that trained best is the one that retained the least.

This experiment by Shea and Morgan opens the free LabO RNP course, "How We Learn to Move": nearly two hours of content for movement professionals, with the names of the researchers, the studies and the level of evidence for each idea. We offer it because motor learning, the way a person learns and then stabilizes a movement, is the foundation of all support work, and it is still too rarely connected to field practice.

The first module tackles three beliefs that almost everyone shares:

• repeat the same movement, over and over

• "focus on your movement"

• trust what you see in the session

Belief 1: repeating the same movement

In the 1979 experiment, the first group worked in blocks: all the repetitions of one movement, then all those of the next. It was better during training. The second group mixed the movements in random order: worse in the moment, it retained more a few days later (a hundred perfect repetitions, and nothing that sticks).

Recent research has qualified this result: in the field, with real athletes, the effect is much less clear-cut than in the laboratory, and the course explains why.

Belief 2: focusing on the effect of the movement

This is probably the most widespread instruction in coaching: focus on the effect of the movement rather than on your body, what is called external attentional focus. A large meta-analysis established it in 2021, then a reanalysis published in 2024 took up the same studies, with a conclusion that changes how this instruction should be used.

Belief 3: trusting what you see in the session

This is the most unsettling one. The more frequent and precise feedback you give while a person performs a movement, the better their immediate performance, and the worse their retention, that is, what they keep when you are no longer there. This is the guidance hypothesis, put forward in 1984 by Salmoni, Schmidt and Walter, and replicated since in many forms (correcting too fast switches off learning).

In other words, what you see while you are present measures your presence as much as their skill. You may know the pattern: a person who succeeds at everything in front of you, and almost nothing is left the following week. We think we lacked insistence, when we are often measuring the wrong thing.

What the course contains

After this first module, the course moves forward step by step, from the perception-action loop to the ecology of learning, from affordances and constraints to your Monday session (the perception-action loop). It ends with the LabO RNP reading grid, to fill in on a person you work with (the neuro-postural reading grid), and each module concludes with applications for three audiences: athletes, people returning to movement, and children.

What a person succeeds at in front of you does not tell you what they have learned.

The course "How We Learn to Move" is free, with no credit card and at your own pace. For the full RNP grid, Neuro-Postural Reprogramming, the introduction is free too.

You are not a movement professional and you are rather looking for support: request an assessment.