Why the Bits in Between Matter
What the science of memory and motor learning tells us about the seven days between sessions — and why coaching only on the pitch leaves most of your work behind.
By James | Vorsa Football | 8 min read
Picture a Tuesday night session. You spend ninety minutes working on body shape when receiving — half-turns, scanning before the ball arrives, opening up to play forward. By the end, the players are getting it. They look sharp. You drive home feeling like you cracked something.
Then Saturday rolls around. Kick-off. The first ball into midfield, and one of your players takes it on the wrong foot, back to goal, no scan.
It's the moment every coach knows. And it's not because the player wasn't paying attention. It's because by the time Saturday came around, most of what you taught them was already gone.
The bits between sessions aren't dead time. They're where the learning either sticks or disappears.
The forgetting curve is brutal — and it applies to your sessions
In the 1880s, a German psychologist called Hermann Ebbinghaus did something a bit mad. He spent years memorising lists of nonsense syllables and testing himself at different intervals to see how quickly he forgot them. The pattern he found became known as the forgetting curve, and it has been replicated repeatedly in modern research, most notably by Murre and Dros at the University of Amsterdam in 2015.
The numbers are sobering. Without any reinforcement:
Within one hour, people forget around 50% of what they've just learned.
Within 24 hours, that climbs to roughly 70%.
Within a week, around 90% is gone.
Ebbinghaus's original work and Murre and Dros's replication both showed a steep initial drop, with forgetting slowing after that. The first 24 hours do most of the damage.
Now apply that to a once-a-week football session. By the time your players turn up for the next training, they've lost the majority of what you taught them. By the time match day rolls around, you might be coaching against a blank slate.
This isn't a motivation problem. It isn't a quality-of-coaching problem. It's how human memory works.
Motor skills aren't immune — they might be more vulnerable
You might think that physical skills are different. After all, we say things like "it's like riding a bike" — implying that once a body learns something, it sticks. But the research tells a more nuanced story.
Motor learning happens in two phases. The first is acquisition — what happens during the session itself, when performance improves trial by trial. The second is consolidation — what happens in the hours and days afterwards, when the brain locks the new pattern into long-term memory.
Consolidation is fragile. Research published in PLOS One has shown that when training takes place in the morning, away from sleep, motor patterns can actually deteriorate before they're stored. A single bout of moderate exercise immediately after practice has been shown to significantly improve retention 24 hours and 7 days later. Even a 24-hour gap between practice and a follow-up session affects whether a new motor pattern is retained or lost.
In other words: the work the brain does between your sessions is doing more for retention than the session itself. If nothing is reinforcing the learning during that window, the brain has no reason to keep it.
Acquisition happens in the session. Consolidation happens between them. If you only coach the first half, you're leaving the second to chance.
Why distributed practice beats massed practice — every time
Cepeda and colleagues' meta-analysis of 254 studies (2006) confirmed something that goes back to Ebbinghaus himself: distributed practice — spreading learning out across multiple sessions — produces 10–30% better retention than massed practice, where all the learning is crammed into one block.
Roediger and Butler (2011) went further. When you combine distributed practice with active retrieval — actually trying to recall and use the information — forgetting can be reduced by up to 80% over the course of a week.
The numbers behind those studies have a clear practical message for any coach:
A single 90-minute session each week is massed practice. The brain treats it as one event.
Three shorter touchpoints across the week — even 10–15 minutes each — is distributed practice. The brain treats it as repeated exposure, and locks it in.
If those touchpoints involve the player recalling what was worked on (rather than just being shown again), retention rockets.
This is well-established science. It's also, conveniently, exactly what coaches struggle to deliver when they only see their players once or twice a week on a pitch.
What this looks like for a youth footballer
Take a typical academy or grassroots player. They train with you twice a week and play a match on Saturday. That's three football touchpoints in seven days, with four days of nothing in between.
During those four days, three things determine whether last session's work survives:
1. Whether they revisit the idea
Even briefly. Research on retrieval practice shows that the act of recalling a concept — without re-teaching it — strengthens the memory significantly more than passive re-exposure.
2. Whether they get personalised feedback
A 2021 systematic review on video-based feedback in physical education found that self-modelling video feedback was superior to verbal feedback alone in seven out of eight studies. A 2021 study on weightlifting technique during COVID lockdown found that video feedback combined with a pedagogical activity produced retention effects that lasted a full week beyond the training period — while video feedback alone did not.
3. Whether the parent is part of the loop
Research published in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, conducted in an elite English youth football academy, found that parents are persistently "in the dark" about what their child is working on. The recommendation from that study was straightforward: bring parents into the development process from the very start. They don't need to coach. They just need to know what to reinforce.
When all three of those things happen between sessions, you stop fighting the forgetting curve. You start riding it.
The honest assessment of most coaching
Here's where I think we have to be honest as coaches. Most of us — myself absolutely included — have been pouring our energy into the wrong 25% of the week.
The two or three hours a week we have on the pitch are precious. They're where the new learning actually happens. But they are not where the learning gets retained. That happens in the 165 hours we don't see.
The traditional youth football model has no answer for this. The session ends, the kids go home, parents don't know what to ask, players don't have anything to refer back to, and by the next training a chunk of the work has been quietly lost.
You're not just competing with other coaches. You're competing with the seven days of forgetting between every session you run.
What actually works in the bits in between
Looking at what the motor learning, memory, and youth development literature actually recommends, four things come up again and again:
Personalised video feedback shortly after the session
Specific, individual, and viewable repeatedly. The research on self-modelling video and combined visual-pedagogical feedback consistently shows superior retention compared to verbal feedback alone.
Short, focused at-home tasks during the week
Distributed practice doesn't mean doing more. It means doing a little, more often. Ten minutes of focused recall and reinforcement two or three times in the week between sessions easily outperforms an extra full session at the weekend.
Visibility for parents
Parents are the most underused asset in youth football development. Not as coaches — as informed supporters. When a parent knows that this week is about "scanning before the ball arrives," they reinforce it on the school run, in the back garden, in front of a televised game. That reinforcement is gold for retention.
A way to track progress over time
Research on grit and skill development in elite youth soccer (388 players in the Hodges/Tóth-Király studies) showed that what differentiated successful young players wasn't just hours practised — it was the consistency and structured nature of that practice. Players who could see their development tracked were more likely to engage with the work between sessions.
What this means for how I coach
This is the thinking behind everything we're building at Vorsa. Not because we want to replace coaching — there is no replacement for what happens on a pitch — but because the science is unambiguous about what fills the rest of the week.
Players need to revisit, recall, and reinforce. Parents need to be in the loop. Coaches need a way to extend their work beyond the 90 minutes they get.
If you're a coach reading this, the practical takeaway is simple: your sessions are doing more than you realise, and less than you hope. They start the learning. What happens in the bits in between decides whether any of it sticks.
Coach the in-between as deliberately as you coach the session itself, and you'll see the kind of week-on-week progress that single-session coaching almost never delivers.
Research referenced in this article includes: Ebbinghaus (1885); Murre & Dros, PLOS One (2015); Cepeda et al. meta-analysis (2006); Roediger & Butler (2011); Tulving & Thomson (1973); studies on motor consolidation and acute exercise published in PLOS One and the Journal of Neuroscience; Rothstein & Arnold and subsequent work on video feedback in motor learning; the 2021 systematic review on video-based visual feedback in physical education (Springer); Haugaasen, Toering & Jordet (2014) on football-specific practice in elite youth players; and qualitative research on parental involvement in elite English football academies (Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 2022).
Want to bring this approach into your coaching? Vorsa Football helps coaches run online programmes built around exactly this principle — personalised video feedback, between-session tasks, and visibility for parents. Visit vorsa.app to learn more.
