How to Learn Skills Faster

The episode is presented as part of a month on physical performance. It covers athletic performance, recreational exercise, weight lifting, running, swimming, yoga and skill learning. This installment is about learning skills more quickly, with motor skills as the main focus. The host says the material also applies to musical skills and instruments, but the emphasis is on movements of the body beyond the hands and fingers. He says the principles also support the formation, consolidation and performance of other kinds of skills.

The episode promises specific protocols that the science "points to and has verified" for learning faster, keeping what has been learned, and building skills faster than one otherwise would. It also previews mental visualization. The host says some visualization protocols are "absolutely striking": they speed up learning and help people remember how to do things better than they would without mental rehearsal. He stresses that the pattern and timing of the rehearsal turn out to be vitally important.

Before turning to skills, the host goes back to the previous episode on temperature. That episode described data from Craig Heller's lab in Stanford's Department of Biology. The data showed that cooling the palms in particular ways and at particular times let athletes and recreational exercisers do more pull-ups, dips and bench presses per unit time, run and cycle further, and feel better doing it. The host links these findings to the vascular system and its role in cooling the body.

Dozens of listeners had pointed out an apparent contradiction. One episode recommended cooling the palms during exercise, and the episode before it said heating the body helps release growth hormone. The host answers that both are true and that they are separate protocols. A warm-up should always come first, and he says it will not raise body or muscle temperature enough to reduce work capacity. He describes palm cooling as an efficient route to cooling the core, in fact the most efficient way, and its purpose is better performance. Heating the body through exercise or sauna is aimed at growth hormone release. The practical rule is to use palm cooling when the goal is more work, and sauna or the other heating tools from the growth hormone episode when the goal is growth hormone release. Both can be part of a training regime, but at separate times.

The host also returns to caffeine, which he says can help or hurt performance depending on whether a person is caffeine adapted. He ties this to caffeine's effects on body temperature, vasodilation and vasoconstriction. In his definition, an adapted person drinks caffeine three to five or more times a week. He gives 100 to 300 milligrams as a typical daily dose and notes that some people take more and some less. For these regular users, he says caffeine before training is fine and will not affect temperature or blood vessels in ways that hinder them. For people who do not use caffeine regularly, he says a cup of coffee will not produce a large performance boost. It is likely to raise body temperature and change blood flow, especially in the palms and face, which will "likely diminish performance." His conclusion is that non-users probably should not treat caffeine as a performance-enhancing tool.

The host offers a tool for the side stitch or side cramp that can come on during running or swimming. He argues that it is not a cramp but a respiratory and nervous-system effect. He acknowledges that side pain can have "any number of" causes. The cramp-like sensation, he says, comes from collateralization of the phrenic nerve. This nerve runs from the brainstem to the diaphragm to control breathing, and it has a branch that innervates the liver. Breathing that is not deep enough can produce referred pain.

To explain referred pain, the host points to examples many people know: heart attack pain felt in the left arm, and back pain that spreads to the shoulder or face. Many nerves branch to different organs and body regions. Because of how those branches are woven together, disrupting the electrical firing pattern in one branch often affects the others.

The proposed fix is the physiological sigh: a very deep double inhale through the nose followed by a long exhale, repeated two or three times. He says this typically relieves the stitch by changing the firing patterns of the phrenic nerve, and that it can often be done without stopping exercise. He allows that a person with a stitch might be dehydrated, but says the cause is often breathing in a way that produces referred pain from the liver. He adds that some people, including himself, use the sigh during long continuous bouts of exercise. He mentions "decent data, although these are still unpublished data" that this may engage a regular cadence of heart rate variability. That claim is explicitly unpublished.

The core framework begins by dividing skills into two types: open loop and closed loop. Examples include a golf or tennis swing, free throws, dance and musical instruments, with athletic performance as the main focus.

In the episode's definitions, an open-loop skill is one where you perform an action, then wait and get immediate feedback on whether it was correct. The examples are throwing a dart and seeing where it lands, and hitting a tennis serve toward a target and seeing whether it landed in the court or near the target. A closed-loop skill is more continuous and gives moment-to-moment feedback, so you can adjust as you go. The examples are sprint and speed work with a coach correcting stride, ladder or hopscotch-style footwork, a swim stroke, and keeping a rhythm on a drum. In each case the learner can adjust step distance, speed, posture or tempo in real time. The host says this lets the learner do more practice per unit time.

The host's first practical instruction is to identify whether a skill is open or closed loop before trying to learn it. He says he will return to why this matters later, so this section does not yet explain how the distinction changes practice.

The host names three components of any skill that involves movement. The first is sensory perception: what you see and hear, attention to your own movement (such as your arm's path or your feet in dance), or attention to something outside you (such as a musical cue or a partner's movement). The second is the movements of the limbs and body. The third is proprioception, often described as a sixth sense of where the limbs are relative to the body.

He illustrates proprioception with picking up a pen: he does not consciously track where his hand is, but he is aware of it at a deeper, subconscious level. Learning, he says, usually means paying more attention to proprioception than normal. A leg that has "fallen asleep" shows what happens when proprioceptive feedback is missing. Gait suddenly feels strange, and he has to pay attention to each step.

Next, the host describes three sources of movement in the nervous system. Central pattern generators (CPGs) in the spinal cord produce repetitive, rhythmic movement such as walking, running, cycling and breathing. After a skill is learned, much of the work is handed off to them. The host stops mid-explanation to correct an abbreviation slip: CSPGs, chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans, are "entirely different" and unrelated to this topic.

As evidence for CPGs, he cites textbook experiments from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s on decerebrate animals. Cats, dogs or mice with the neocortex removed still walked and adjusted their speed on a treadmill. He adds that humans who have lost neocortex to massive strokes but keep their central pattern generators also walk "just fine." He calls the animal work "a barbaric experiment" that he is glad he did not have to do.