Forgetting Curve

Taking the daily classes has helped me perfect the practice and really get the nuances. I am now able to accomplish the rib anchor, which I was struggling with. Also, the daily motivation that I get from checking in and feeling the energy from the group—it has just been an amazing opportunity.
Elizabeth Kubicki, Gokhale alumna

Gokhale Method® teacher and editorial writer Clare Chapman explores the When and Why of Gokhale® Exercise with its creator, Esther Gokhale.

Clare: Can you tell us how the Gokhale Exercise program got started?

Esther: For a long time now, our teachers and I have been surprised at how much our alumni—graduates of our courses—can forget. This despite their being delighted by the courses and their results. Of course, it shouldn’t be surprising at all, given that humans have forgetting curves as surely as they have learning curves, and that our beginner courses cover a lot of material in a short time frame. 

The forgetting curve was developed by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus and depicts the way learned information falls away over time. Research confirms that, on average, students forget 70 percent of what is taught within 24 hours of a training experience. 90 percent is forgotten within a week. Image: www.organisingstudents.com.au

On January 1, 2020, I decided to try a new format—an online 21-day challenge. Each broadcast was short, reminding alumni of one basic principle of the Gokhale Method that would be familiar, if semi-forgotten. I chose it to be an exercise program to additionally fill the well-understood need for more movement in daily life.

Esther answers a question from Gokhale alumna Elizabeth Kubicki about the posture principle of straightening the back leg in speed walking.

Clare: And before long COVID hit, correct?

Esther: Yes, along with shelter-in-place orders. It became clear people would be stuck in their homes without their usual access to sports and exercise facilities, or their usual interventions for their aches and pains. We had a tested offering whose value had suddenly increased dramatically—it felt important to continue the program, and also to open it up to a wider audience. It gathered a large number of daily participants and evolved to include a great variety of music and dance, art, anatomical education, community and mutual support. Many participants told us that this is what kept their bodies and spirits afloat through the dark period of the pandemic.

Clare: How did Gokhale Exercise evolve its current format?

Esther: Gokhale Exercise started with 1-2-3 Move, which uses dance as the vehicle for posture education and entertainment. It continues to this day without having missed a beat! The 13-minute class is our main program, focusing on 1 posture principle, 2 dance moves, and 3 images. It is preceded by a joyous, free-form, 15-minute Dance Party.

Dance is a human universal, and besides providing a fun way to revisit posture principles, it improves cognition, staves off dementia and depression, brightens spirits and community feeling, and more. Traditional dance is especially true to our ethos of taking lessons from other cultures. Various members of our teacher team contribute: Sabina has deep knowledge of blues and swing styles, Eric loves Latin, and Lang is expert in Capoeira and Brazilian dance moves. My passion is Indian, Brazilian, and Congolese dance​​. . .

Gokhale Exercise has now blossomed into multiple offerings, adding Gokhale Fitness, Moving Meditation, Fitness for Cyclists, and Yoga, with an increasing number of teachers offering their expertise throughout the day. 

Gokhale Exercise teachers enjoy sharing their movement expertise with a “Gokhale filter.” 
Top left to bottom right: Roberta, Julie, Esther, Kathleen, Eric, Sabina, Tiffany, and Lang.

Clare: Can you say more about how these different forms of exercise encourage healthy posture?

Esther: Every 1-2-3 Move class uses traditional rather than modern dance moves. This comes with a level of reassurance about their suitability for the human body; we know these moves have been vetted by entire populations who didn’t have modern pain. 

Gokhale® Yoga, Moving Meditation and Gokhale® Fitness also explore posture principles that are not emphasized or respected in the average class: anchored ribs, recruiting the inner corset, kidney-bean shaped feet, etc. Respecting the body’s natural blueprint enables us to increase fitness, strength, and flexibility without risking injury. 

Across all the classes we follow a Posture Principle of the day—for example, Healthy Rotation of the Torso—so whichever class(es) students participate in, they get the range of healthy posture reminders they need at regular intervals. 

Each Gokhale Exercise email comes with a daily Posture Principle image to remind and inspire. This vintage baseball illustration shows healthy rotation of the torso while keeping good form throughout the body.

Clare: Who attends the Gokhale Exercise program?

Esther: Classes span a variety of pace and challenge, so for example, our Gokhale Moving Meditation classes are gentle enough for even the most physically challenged members of the community, while Gokhale Fitness pushes almost everybody’s boundaries (while giving easier modifications of the exercises offered). 

Clare: Is the Gokhale Exercise program suitable for beginners?

Esther: The ideal starting point for beginners is to take one of our comprehensive courses (the in-person Foundations course, or one-day Pop-up course, or our online Elements course). This is especially true for those suffering pain or dysfunction. In these courses, students can learn with optimal sequencing and detail, and get the one-on-one attention they need. For students who would like a free introduction to the Gokhale Method we recommend signing up for an in-person or online free workshop. For comprehensive personal advice, consider taking an in-person or online Initial Consultation to determine which course is best for you. 

Many people start with the Gokhale Exercise program because it has a free trial week and costs very little thereafter—we are glad to be able to provide this service for people who cannot afford our courses or who are curious to see what our offerings are like. Having the program open to the public also means that alumni can invite their friends and family members along to try it without any obligations.

Clare: What is next for the Gokhale Exercise Program?

Esther: We want all our students to have a minimum of one month’s live support, available every day, as they approach the end of their courses. So we are delighted to announce that all our valued alumni—from the in-person Foundations, Pop-up, or online Elements courses—will be gifted a free month’s membership of our Online University, which includes the Gokhale Exercise program!

Online University member Claire Phillips explains how membership has inspired her progress.

In addition to Gokhale Exercise, our Online University additionally offers two 45-minute Live Chats every month with me, Esther Gokhale. Topics include flexibility, the human spine, posture and emotional health, to squat or not to squat, and more. There is also unlimited access to our On-Demand Video Library of over 60 topics including advanced posture techniques and practical applications like gardening, cooking, etc.

Clare: Thanks Esther, Gokhale Exercise is an inspiring and continuing journey!

FREE 10-Day Back to Basics Challenge

Alumni often tell us they get a lot of benefit from reviewing the basics—so we are also offering an exciting Back to Basics Challenge, designed for alumni, but also open to beginners, as part of our 1-2-3 Move program and starting September 26 for 10 days.

Here is the Challenge:

Each class will review a different Posture Principle, with exercises for practice and challenge. We have prepared a downloadable booklet for participants to print and journal their postural changes and progress. 

How to take part:

Online University and Gokhale Exercise members automatically qualify for this challenge—their daily emails will tell them about it. 

People who have not yet taken a Gokhale Method course and who are therefore not alumni are also welcome to join, and listen in to the Q&A sessions by signing up to our Gokhale Exercise program with a monthly subscription—with our free trial you can test it without any obligations.

We look forward to seeing both new and familiar faces! 

Gokhale Method alumnus Ben Bernstein PhD appreciates daily reminders of what to work on.

Learning and internalizing techniques doesn’t always happen immediately — or without assistance from a teacher.

I spent many years developing and perfecting the Gokhale Method Foundations Course. After years of crafting the language, honing the metaphors, and rearranging the order in which techniques are taught, I considered the course well-constructed and comprehensive. I was proud to empower students to be independent in taking their posture journey forward. I was proud to not be peddling products gratuitously, nor to insist students keep coming back for additional lessons. 

The results of this approach were not always stellar. Though some students functioned just fine after one go-round of a full 6-lesson Foundations Course, most students, not surprisingly, needed ongoing repetition to “get it” in their minds, their bodies, and their memory.

The example that brought this point home vividly involved a student who is a physician. She had undergone one back surgery and was scheduled for another. She had extreme sciatic pain that made her want to lie down as much as possible. Driving herself anywhere was impossible, so she hired someone to drive her to her private clinic, where she worked the few 2-3 hours her pain levels would allow, and then was driven home again.

Physicians are among the many groups whose work environments can predispose them to posture issues, especially when they tuck their pelvises or stoop over patients or computers. This doctor in Angola, likely because of healthy cultural modeling, demonstrates the lovely upright bearing that’s possible (and desirable) in this context. Image courtesy Francisco Venâncio on Unsplash.

After working on the basic techniques in a few private lessons, she was able to reduce her pain level to 0 and cancel her scheduled surgery. She followed up with some recommended maintenance lessons and then let the lessons come to a halt. 

A year later she made an appointment during which I was shocked to find her in approximately the same condition she first came in with. I probed gently to discover what had happened. It emerged that one of her patients, a fitness instructor, had invited her to a weekly fitness class. Over time, she had conformed to tucking her pelvis as instructed. In the process of relating the story to me, a realization dawned on her: “Oh yeah, that’s what caused my troubles last time…” Wow. In listening to her a parallel realization dawned on me. Here was a highly-trained medical professional who had gone from being in a dire situation to being completely pain-free, and still the teaching had not held.

Fitness instruction advocating a tucked pelvis ended up making things worse for my physician student who suffered from sciatica. Image courtesy Anupam Mahapatra on Unsplash.

That was when I realized we needed a maintenance program. It’s obvious in hindsight, of course. Adults especially can feel that new information doesn’t “stick” because it gets harder to learn as you get older. I suspect that we actually overlook just how much repetition we did to learn most things when we were younger! That’s why we took over a thousand lessons in school in Math and English! If you have learned to play golf or do certain dances, how many times have you practised that swing, or rehearsed those steps? Learning takes exposure and repetition. It works.

Like perfecting a golf swing or learning a new dance step, posture techniques need regular practice in order to “stick.” Image courtesy Andrew Lomas on Unsplash.

We see some students returning to our classes after gaps of many years, and, like the physician, in that time they have often been culturally “reprogrammed” to tuck the pelvis, to slump, or to sway. We also see clearly that the forgetting curve is very real, and how easy it is to backslide into old habits. When we teach these alumni alongside more recent graduates whom we advised better about the need for revision and follow-up classes, the difference is very obvious. Humans simply learn better with repetition, and the Gokhale Method is no exception to this rule.

A great benefit of the Gokhale Method is the sheer variety of mediums available to reinforce and diversify the learning process.

To meet this need, consider refreshing the material or switching up the format. For example, all of our qualified teachers offer private lessons to alumni. It's surprising how much can be learned in a single lesson once the basics have been covered. If you've taken a Pop-up Course, consider taking a 6-lesson Gokhale Method Foundations Course — or vice versa; if you've taken a group course, consider taking a private lesson. Retreat programs at locations like Esalen Institute, Omega Institute, Kripalu, and 1440 Multiversity are helpful for newcomers and alumni alike and offer the opportunity to learn in a restorative, memorable setting. And some of our teachers offer small-group continuing education classes. All of these are rewarding pathways for relearning and refining the basic techniques, and coming away with different takeaways.

Working with students and actively helping them learn is a great joy for me and our many other Gokhale Method teachers.

Regardless of which specific new tack you choose, we recommend taking your first refresher class within 1-2 months of graduating from the Gokhale Method Foundations Course or the Pop-up Course. The next refresher happens best within 3 months of the first one. From then on we recommend doing an in-person session —  private or group — at least every six months, and sooner if there are still significant challenges. Working in-person with a teacher is always best, but if that’s not possible, a session can be scheduled online, which is surprisingly helpful for troubleshooting and keeping your own known posture challenges on your radar. So if you are one of our Foundations Course or Pop-up Course alumni, schedule that session! Our experienced teachers are ready to help.

Hands-on learning with a Gokhale Method teacher helps students refine and refresh the techniques, whether they’re just beginning their posture journey or whether it’s been years since their first lesson.

We have also created an Online University which includes 2 Live Chats with me every month and unlimited access to our on-demand library of over 60 instructional videos. Each lesson focuses on a specific posture topic, such as Beyond Stacksitting, Cooking with Healthy Posture, Foot Health, Yoga with Healthy Posture, dance, exercise routines, and so on. You are then able to revise and extend your posture expertise at any time for an entire year.  Now wouldn’t that be a great idea for 2020?

If you are one of our Foundations Course or Pop-up Course alumni, you can sample a free session of Online University content here. And from now through December 20, 2019, all of our alumni can save $100 on a year-long Online University membership! You must call our support team at 1-888-557-6788 to receive this special rate.

We wish you a peaceful holiday season filled with good posture!

When we first learn new information, we create shallow neural pathways in our brain that can quickly disappear. To retain information for the long-term requires reuse. Beyond the learning techniques referred to in Don’t Forget The Forgetting Curve (Part 1) (mnemonic devices, association, and multi-channel learning), re-engagement with the material is crucial in deepening the related neural pathways. Some aspects of re-engagement that play a big role in mitigating the effects of the forgetting curve are:

Repetition
Recall
The Halo Effect

Repetition is one form of engagement that is built into the Gokhale Method Foundations Course. Each technique is taught repeatedly in the course, and in multiple contexts. The most-repeated techniques in the course are:
Stretchsitting: we begin the course with this technique, repeat it whenever we prepare to watch slides, and use it to do our check-ins at the beginning of each lesson.
Shoulder roll: the simplest and easiest of our techniques, it is a part of stretchsitting, stacksitting, tallstanding, and glidewalking.

The shoulder roll is repeated throughout the Gokhale Method Foundations course

Butt-squeeze walking: Students learn this in Lesson 1, and return to it adding additional features in Lessons 3, 5, and 6.
Breathing into the back: This is a subtle but key concept that students meet in Lessons 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. In spite of the emphasis and importance placed on this technique, it seems to get forgotten easily.

Repetition is crucial for kinetic experiences, as it establishes muscle memory and gets you comfortable with new movements or body positions. It builds physical patterns as well as mental ones (think about how an annoying pop song that plays repeatedly on the radio can get stuck in your head!)
 

Recall, or conscious remembering, is a type of re-engagement that is superior to repetition for certain learning experiences. Rereading your textbook after class constitutes repetition; taking a booster quiz qualifies as recall. A booster quiz might use multiple choice questions that ask you to think situationally about the subject to choose a best answer, or it might include short-answer questions that require you to think critically and apply your understanding of the learned concepts. The effectiveness of recall quizzes as booster events for memory is demonstrated in the graph below.  

The graph shows the difference in the amount of material remembered between two groups, one of which took time to reread the material, and the other of which took the same amount of time to answer questions asking them to recall the material.
 

‘Booster events’ in the hours, days, and weeks following learning dramatically impact how much you can recall on the subject matter, and for how long. Repeat booster events give you a bigger return for each consecutive effort.

Each green line on the graph represents memory retention after a booster event. The rate of memory loss decreases with each successive event.
 

“If your goal is to produce long-term retention, and if your goal is to produce behavior change, then what you do after training is more important than what you do during training.” Art Kohn, Professor, Portland State Univ School of Business, on holding corporate training programs.

Now you might think that to retain all the information you learned in the Gokhale Method Foundations Course, you will have to recall every topic covered. Luckily, this isn’t the case due to something called the halo effect. The halo effect shows us that recalling just a few ideas improves retention of the whole learning experience. Seeing the nubs of a Stretchsit® cushion can help remind you to traction the back against the backrest, which will help recall a shoulder roll, more expansive breathing in the chest, and a general feeling of wellness and being in “good shape.”

In the Gokhale Method, each technique you learn connects with other techniques, body parts, feelings... For example, rib anchoring not only lengthens your lumbar spine, but sets up a natural spinal self-massage accompanying the breath, delivering an overall feeling of well-being. It may also cue you to elongate your neck, adjust your pelvis, and shape your feet whether standing, sitting, or laying down. Any of these hooks can serve up the halo effect and benefit your posture and your wellness.

The rib anchor is a key concept in primal posture. Recalling it can trigger the halo effect, bringing about length in the lumbar spine, a shift in breathing pattern, and a sense of well-being.
 

Towards the goal of providing our students with better booster events, the Gokhale Method Institute is building some additional services:

1. An online complement to the Gokhale Method Foundations course, including mini-quizzes, a way to track progress, recaps, etc. We will call this the Posture Oasis. If you are a graduate of the course, you will be able to work and play in the Posture Oasis retroactively.

2. Geographically-based Chapters that will allow graduates of the Gokhale Method Foundations course to connect with each other for in-person study groups, review and online discussion.

Of course, we will continue to send you these bi-weekly newsletters and encourage you to attend Alumni Workshops and sign up for our Online University for graduates. For those who haven’t taken the Foundations Course yet, that’s a great place to start! We look forward to a society that has better posture, less pain, and great function!

Pop quiz: What posture technique(s) does the poised Burkina woman below remind you to do?

 
Burkina woman drying her laundry

_________________

Notes: For more information on the history of the concept of the forgetting curve, you can read more here on Wikipedia. These research articles, “Benefits of Testing Memory. Best Practices and Boundary Conditions,” and “The Power of Testing Memory,” go into more depth about the forgetting curve and how to overcome it.

As a posture teacher, I am very aware of my students’ tendencies to forget the finer points of the Gokhale Method. The longer students wait between classes or refreshers, the more they’ve forgotten. Although there’s always room to improve our teaching methods, forgetting is and will always be a natural phenomenon that accompanies any kind of memory acquisition.

According to nineteenth century psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus and his theory of the Forgetting Curve, people have a steady rate at which they forget material over time. After learning new material, we forget the majority of what we have learned within 24 hours; we forget even more in the following days.

The Forgetting Curve shows how much information we lose, on average, hours, days, and weeks after a learning event.
 

Normally, discarding much of what we learn throughout the day is an important task for our brains. Most of our memories are useful for the short term, but are not needed by the next day: it’s not crucial to remember what you wore to work last week or what time you walked the dog. To handle all the information you receive throughout the day, your brain purges most of its active memories in order to focus on crucial information. But your brain doesn’t always know how to distinguish the unimportant stuff from important material you want to keep a hold on.

From this article in Learning Solution Magazine on the forgetting curve, we learn that in training programs, “research shows that, on average, students forget 70 percent of what is taught within 24 hours of the training experience.” 90 percent is forgotten within a week. But we also learn that there are ways to let our brains know which information is important, and which isn’t.

Getting ahead of the curve

One method of priming information for long-term memory is through better presentation of material, including using mnemonic devices. Scientists and teachers alike have often found that presenting information using tools like rhyming, patterns, spatial or kinetic cues, or in otherwise relatable ways aids it in being more easily remembered. For example, when teaching tall standing, Gokhale Method teachers use the mnemonic device “three, three, and three.” The symmetry of remembering the steps in threes is a cue that groups related steps into very digestible amounts of information. This technique also helps trigger physical memory, since the three steps always follow in order and move sequentially. Can you recall the three sets of three steps for tall standing, in the feet, lower, and upper body? (Answer: kidney bean feet, feet facing out, weight mainly on heels; soft knees, soft groin, behind behind; ribs tucked, shoulders rolled back, neck tall.)

Many of us learned the mnemonic device ‘Every Good Boy Does Fine’ to remember the notes represented by lines on a music staff, and ‘FACE’ for the notes in the spaces.
 

Multi-channel learning or multimedia learning is another technique that often leads to better memory consolidation and recall. The redundancy principle teaches that presenting non-text images (like animations) at the same time as auditory text helps improve information absorption.

In the Gokhale Method Foundations Course, we present as much of our information as possible with accompanying images to demonstrate the concepts we discuss, and to link the auditory information with visual understanding. We are able to go further than is possible in most academic environments, and add in kinetic and social learning as well. The broad combination of input methods we take advantage of in the course—hands-on instruction, images of good and bad form, instructor demonstrations, repetitive practice, watching other students move and receive adjustment (which hones the eye), commenting on what we see and feel, using tools like a skeleton (sometimes) as well as posture aids like chairs and cushions, feeling our own bodies for physical cues, using anecdotes in addition to medical and historical support (to address the intellectual aspects of the course information)—creates a rich and layered foundation of knowledge to support comprehension and retention.

One reason this multi-channel learning is so powerful is the effect produced by associating newly learned information with previously stored information. This association enables and improves the process of moving information from short-term memory to long-term memory. When we connect something we learn to something we already know, we are actually building upon information retrieval pathways in our brains that we already have practice in accessing. This increases the likelihood that we will succeed in remembering this new information, because we can cue recall by accessing the previously stored information.

We love to take advantage of this association, both by providing the type of rich learning experience discussed above, which increases the chance that students can make personal connections between course info and fields they already have experience in, and by using familiar analogies to explain new concepts. When we talk about hip-hinging, we like to compare the movement to the drinking bird toy:

The drinking bird hinges at the hip without distorting his spine, just like we should! This image helps new students to understand the movement.
 

When we discuss stretchsitting, we often talk about hanging the back against the back support the way a picture hangs on the wall; in stretchlying on the back we liken our backs to a hammock that contacts the bed one segment at a time, lengthening all the while. Because these analogies are all based on memorable, simple images, they are very easy to both understand and to recall when a student returns to the subject to practice. They help trigger physical memory, because an association has been built between the physical and muscular sensation, and the already-stored image presented in the analogy.

In a future blog post, we will talk about a few more techniques that enable you to get a handle on the forgetting curve, and take charge of your own memory retention. We want you to get the most out of our offerings, so we continue to create tools and opportunities that help students engage with and  remember the techniques they learn.

Whether you have read the book, taken the course, or simply subscribe to this newsletter, what are some ways that help you remember to have good posture?