Memory Discounting and Skill Decay: The Science Behind Our Longer-Term Coaching Programs and Global Expeditions

Ever stood at the top of a trail or feature and wondered why something you once did with ease now feels hard and scary, again!?

Perhaps you’d just about mastered the manual or the wheelie last season, and now you feel like you’re back to square one. I’ve been there. Frustrated. Trying to muster up some confidence while also trying to block the negative self-talk - you know it isn’t helpful - but it is still there, nevertheless. 

Knowing what I know now, and understanding the real scientific reasons behind this, has helped me have fewer and fewer of these lacklustre rides. It's also helped us to craft our coaching programs and expeditions in a way that sets our riders up for long-term success, not just small wins in the moment.

Before we get into it, it’s worth noting that although these experiences don’t always make sense to our rational mind, our brain is still our friend, it’s on our side, and it’s doing the best it can to help us. In this article, we’ll take a look at how we can help it, help us, to reach our riding goals.

So why does this happen?

• Exponential Discounting: The brain favours recent events over older experiences, giving greater importance to the most recent information when making decisions. This causes older memories to be less influential, acting as a form of ‘forgetting’ that helps the brain adapt to new environments quickly.

• While some studies show long-term skill retention of basic skills (riding a bike 😉), newly learned, complex skills are often unstable and require consistent reinforcement - eg, riding a MOUNTAIN bike down a technical trail that requires complex movements and maneuvers in precise amounts and timings. 

• Research on procedural skill retention indicates that without active use, significant skill decay can occur within 3-6 months. Bad news for those among us who aren’t riding much through the winter, or aren't in a space where ongoing and intentional practice, beyond the initial learning phase, is made easy and fun.

• Significance for MTB Progression: For new motor skills, the ‘use it or lose it’ principle applies, where lack of reinforcement leads to a rapid, roughly exponential decay of the neural pathways formed during initial learning. 

Knowing this; Here’s what we can do about it: 

If you’re serious about making Mountain Biking the most energizing, cup filling experice that it can be… you’re going to want to:

1. Find a structure or routine that removes all resistance points between you and riding your bike, regularly! 

2. Seek feedback to ensure that what you think you’re doing matches what you’re actually doing. We can’t correct what we can’t perceive! 

3. More intentional mileage! Ensure whatever lesson, course, program, or practice you follow incorporates all 4 learning phases - the skill introduction, development, experimentation, and application - most often, it’s the ongoing practice and application that the strong intermediate and advanced riders I work with benefit most from. 

4. Delete winters! No, just kidding, I know we have some skiing fans here too. But on a serious note, if you can keep the momentum rolling by either donning a rain jacket, praying for sunshine in January, OR following the sun with one of our Global MTB Expeditions, you’re going to be a stronger, more stoked rider for it. 

Following these steps closes the learning loop, taking new skills from the consciously competent stage (where we have to think a lot, and new skills fade fast), to the unconsciously competent stage (where skills become automatic, with strong neural pathways that are now honed in, and will stand the test of time).

This is exactly how we help riders reach the flow state before ‘riding season’ even rolls around. Want to learn more - Reach out!

- Jake