7 Tips to Accelerate Motor Memory for Athletes

Introduction

As an athlete, your goal is to learn and remember correct movement patterns and game strategies. Whether it’s perfecting your jump shot or executing a flawless routine, motor memory plays a crucial role in performing these skills automatically and with precision.

But how exactly does motor memory work, and how can athletes accelerate their ability to recall and repeat movements, even after a long break?

In this post, we’ll look at the memory process, then highlight 7 tips to accelerate motor memory that you can use every day in practice and training.

What is Motor Memory?

Motor memory is the ability to recall and repeat physical skills after extended periods of time, allowing athletes to perform complex movements without consciously thinking about them. It’s like a well-worn path in the brain that becomes easier to navigate the more it’s used.

The process of developing motor memory is a mind-body learning experience where your brain creates strong neural pathways to your muscles that allow you to perform movements with ease and precision.

The Memory Process

Developing motor memory involves a 3-stage process where the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves information related to motor skills and movements.

This 3-Stage Memory Model shows how athletes pick up information from their surroundings, narrow their attention to important information for short-term memory, and practice so the correct movements are stored in long-term memory. The process plays a crucial role in learning and executing physical tasks, allowing individuals to improve their coordination and proficiency through practice and repetition.

The process starts with sensory memory, our mental view of how events in our surroundings look, sound, feel, smell, and taste. While we can sense lots of things at the same time, the most vivid details of sensory memory seem to fade quickly.

With a limited capacity and short duration of just a few seconds, sensory memory is responsible for selecting the most important things an athlete senses and associating them with skills and events they already know.

When a coach cues an athlete to narrow their attention to important information and movements, they are quickly organized into short-term memory. This type of memory is limited to about 7 pieces of information and lasts about 15-30 seconds before it’s lost unless you rehearse it.

But if the athlete pays attention to the right cues and repeats the learning process in practice, skilled movements go into permanent storage in long-term memory in the form of a motor program. Like riding a bike or dancing, you can remember skills for decades because they become programmed into memory.   

A motor program is like a blueprint of correct movements organized in sequence in the brain, nervous system, and muscles. It can be retrieved when an athlete performs the same or similar skills.

One other point—don’t confuse motor memory with muscle memory, which refers to the physical changes that occur in the muscles themselves, such as an increase in size and strength. Current scientific evidence is inconclusive that muscle memory exists in animals or humans (Snijders et al., 2020).

The brain is the master of the muscles.

7 Memory Tips

Effective memory strategies are grounded in mind-body research. I’ve used these tips to help athletes master skills, improve performance, and retain movements in sports, training activities, and lifting exercises.

These memory techniques are essential not only for learning new movements but for ensuring they stick—whether it’s in practice or competition. Here are some valuable memory strategies that can boost learning and retention:

1.   Get it right, right from the start. Initial learning is most impressionable. It’s important that coaches give good instruction early on so athletes learn and practice correct movements to avoid bad habits and errors from settling into long-term memory.

It’s important for athletes to understand the goal of the skill. what key movements should look like. They will make lots of errors in the beginning, so early guidance and consistent feedback are essential.

2.   Make your words meaningful.  When communicating with athletes, it's important to use language they can relate to. Too often, coaches rely on technical jargon that athletes might not understand, which can hinder performance. The key is to consider each athlete’s level, background, and past sport experience stored in memory to make instructions and feedback meaningful.

Ask athletes to repeat your instructions in their own words to make sure they grasp the concept you’re teaching. Tailor your cues to their understanding so they can connect and apply the instructions effectively.

 3.   Chunk instructions. We can generally remember 7 pieces of information (like a phone number) give or take 2, but athletes must often perform skills within less than a few seconds. There’s no time for them to process overcomplicated instructions. Instead, chunk information into simpler, more digestible parts.

Chunking increases an athlete’s capacity to learn and remember more information about how to move.

For example, if you’re teaching a tennis serve, rather than listing all the movements step by step, focus on one overarching cue that combines several actions. Rather than overanalyze, find one cue that chunks a series of correct movements. Break movements down only as much as necessary. Overanalysis causes paralysis!

4.   Use associations to help athletes relate new movements to something they already know. By associating unfamiliar movements with skills or actions already stored in their long-term memory, athletes can more easily grasp the new technique.

For example, you might tell a beginning javelin thrower to associate the overarm movements with the throwing a baseball or softball, highlighting similarities and differences between the two.

An athlete can also visualize an experience from memory, real or imagined, to help them learn a skill.

For example, “imagine that your arms are cables” is a common cue to teach athletes not to flex their arms prematurely in weightlifting.

5.   Teach rhythms. Rhythms are powerful tools in memory and retention. Athletes tend to remember rhythmic patterns more easily than isolated movements, much like how we remember rhymes faster than random words.

A rhythm-based approach, such as teaching a “slow-to-fast” pattern or “long-short-short” sequence, helps athletes internalize the timing and flow of movements.

For example, using the rhythm of a basketball layup to teach the last steps in the high jump can help athletes recall the timing of their movements.

Rhythms can be communicated visually, through sounds like clapping, or kinesthetically by asking the athlete to feel the rhythm in their body movements.

6.   Capitalize on the primacy-recency effect.

Athletes tend to remember the first (primacy) and last (recency) things they hear better than the middle.

This happens because athletes are usually paying attention when you begin to give instructions. They often recall the last thing you say because it’s still fresh in the athlete’s short-term memory.

Coaches who teach athletes a series of skills, like gymnastics routines, may teach skills in the middle of the routine first to take advantage of the serial position effect.

In the same way, Olympic weightlifting coaches teach the middle of the clean and snatch first to emphasize the pull to full extension onto the toes to ensure that beginners perform this critical movement correctly.

7.   Include mental practice. Mental practice, or imagery, is just as important as physical practice. When athletes visualize a skill or competitive scenario, it activates both the brain and muscles in a way that primes them for action.

Mental rehearsal helps athletes plan how they’ll execute a skill, boosting confidence and calming nerves. Research has shown that mental practice combined with physical practice can accelerate learning, memory, and retention better than just physical practice.

By mentally rehearsing a skill, athletes create a subconscious experience that feels just as real as physical execution, speeding up their learning curve.

Takeaways

These 7 memory tips aren't about rote, mechanical learning; they are about connecting the mind with movements to enhance long-term retention.

If you haven’t already tried these, give them a shot! They can make a difference.

Use meaningful cues, associate new movements with known skills, and incorporate rhythms so athletes can accelerate learning and motor memory.

With the right instructions, consistent feedback, and mental rehearsal, athletes will be able to retain skills and execute them with ease—whether they're on the field, in the gym, or competing in a high-stakes game.

Remember: when you engage both the mind and body in the athlete’s learning process, you unlock the full potential of motor memory, leading to greater confidence, improved performance, and faster learning outcomes.