No Strain, No Gain!

10 min readMay 27, 2020

6 Strategies That Need To Be Part of Every Learner’s Study Routine

While your brain isn’t a muscle, in many ways it learns like one. Just as exercises involving little physical exertion won’t build strong muscles, study techniques that require low mental effort won’t produce strong learning outcomes. Effective studying requires slowing down, using strategies that increase mental challenge, and embracing errors as necessary steps on the path to knowledge. While this will feel uncomfortable and less productive at first, it’s important to always remember: when learning is harder, it’s more lasting!

Unfortunately, our brains are naturally lazy and prefer study techniques that involve low mental strain. This results in learning that is shallow and quickly lost. While many popular studying strategies (e.g., rereading, highlighting, & cramming) create a sense of rapid learning, this is often an illusion — revealed the moment you try testing yourself later or using your new knowledge in a different context. Don’t let your brain fool you!

So let’s learn some secrets to studying smarter by using strategies that will make your brain really sweat.

1. Show What You Know

Just as repeatedly curling 1-pound dumbbells won’t build strong biceps, study strategies that don’t involve the hard work of actively pulling information out of your head won’t create lasting memories. Although it may sound backward, your primary study activity should be testing yourself on course material, while activities like rereading your textbook and reviewing notes should be done less frequently.

Spend less study time using mentally easy strategies like rereading, and increase your mental effort with these methods instead:

Test Yourself: Take advantage of any available practice tests, reflection prompts, or end-of-chapter questions in your textbook to regularly quiz yourself. And when taking notes during class or reading your textbook, you should think about what ideas are likely to be future exam questions and write these down as questions — e.g., “What is classical conditioning?” — and then use these self-made tests to quiz yourself during later study sessions.

Use Pretests: Before starting a study session, briefly test yourself on the topics you plan to review and try solving any problems without assistance — even if you think you’re unlikely to be successful. Pretesting will help you identify areas where you should focus your studying efforts while having the added benefit of improving your recall when you eventually learn the answer.

Debrief Your Learning: After class, find ten minutes to write down all the ideas you remember covering that day. Although you may feel like you’ve run out of ideas after several minutes, keep trying for the full time. You can also set aside time to go on a walk after class to mentally review and organize the ideas you covered that day.

2. Take Brain Breaks

Just as building strong muscles must be done gradually over time rather than during a single workout, creating lasting knowledge requires giving your brain frequent rests so that it can build strong memories. Because our memories need time to grow in strength, you’ll often need to start studying for a test or exam much earlier than you think is necessary.

Ditch the all-night cramming sessions, and use the following strategies to create long-lasting memories:

Space Out Studying: Schedule your study sessions so that you have multiple opportunities to review course material with time passing in between. How much time should you have between study sessions? This depends on when you’ll be tested. If you have a test in a week, space out your study sessions roughly every 1 to 2 days; if your test isn’t for a month, space your study sessions with approximately a week in between.

Review Regularly: Flashcards are an effective strategy for memorizing facts and terms using regular and spaced review. Use the Lietner system with flashcards to focus your studying on the material you haven’t yet mastered, while still regularly quizzing yourself on content you know well. You should also devote time during your study sessions to reviewing content covered earlier in the course, this will help maintain strong memories for previously learned knowledge — especially important if your course exams are cumulative.

Plan Shorter Study Sessions: A benefit of frequent and spaced out studying is that you can shorten the length of your study sessions. Shorter study sessions means you’ll be able to maintain more focused attention while avoiding distractions. Using the techniques described in this guide, you’ll find that intensive and spaced study sessions lasting only 30–45 minutes are more effective for learning than drawn out cramming sessions involving hours of review.

3. Build Strong Connections

Just as the most effective exercises involve using several different muscles groups working together, you’ll learn better when you create connections between the ideas you want to remember and things you already know. Isolated bits of knowledge are difficult for your brain to recall successfully and are quickly forgotten. Ideas that have been thought about deeply and connected to other pieces of knowledge, however, are much stronger and easier to remember.

Don’t be satisfied simply knowing the correct answer, use the following techniques to fully integrate new ideas into your knowledge network:

Engage in Self-Explanation: When reading your textbook, pause frequently to ask yourself questions like the following: “What did I just read? What are the key ideas? How are ideas related or different?” For example, while reading a psychology textbook you might stop to ask yourself, “How are short term and long term memory related? How do these memory systems differ?” And if you’re working on a math problem, you might regularly pause to ask yourself: “What am I doing here? Why am I doing it? How does it help me make progress toward the solution?”

Create a Foundation: Try to read assigned chapters and attempt unit problems before covering them in class, taking time to write down any questions or areas of confusion. Although it will be a struggle, puzzling through your course text and attempting chapter problems creates a foundation of knowledge that will support greater learning when you listen to your instructor’s explanations and work through examples during class.

Map Out Relationships: Create a summary sheet at the end of each unit, week, or section of class showing on a single paper how the ideas and concepts you’re learning are related. For instance, in an anatomy & physiology class you might create a map of the biological systems you studied the previous week, using pictures and key words to illustrate how they relate.

4. Mix It Up

Just as frequent switching of exercises and positions (e.g., cross-training) is an effective way to strengthen muscles, the benefits of studying are greater when you vary how and where you study. The strength of our memories is strongly tied to the methods and contexts of our studying efforts, so ensure your learning gains extend across settings and situations by adding variety to your study routine.

Avoid making your studying predictable and consistent, instead mix things up for your brain with these strategies:

Interweave Study Topics: When studying, avoid focusing on a single topic or type of problem until you can answer perfectly and instead frequently alternate topics. For example, if you’re studying rules on adding, multiplying, and dividing exponents in math class, rather than practicing each rule until you’ve mastered it (e.g., 111–222–333), interweave the topics in a random way while studying (e.g., 132–231–213). Not only will this encourage you to space your practice with a topic, it will require that you repeatedly identify the type of problem you are working on and think about the specific steps needed to solve it.

Consider Multiple Perspectives: When appropriate, try to use and understand different strategies for solving a problem. For example, in math there are often multiple ways to successfully answer a problem, and knowing how to arrive at the solution using different strategies will strengthen your understanding of the underlying concept. You can also improve your understanding of a problem by trying to work backwards from the answer or changing what variables are known and unknown.

Change Study Locations: Variety is not just important when it comes to how you study, but also where you study. While it’s important to choose a study location that minimizes distractions and temptations to multitask, you’ll create stronger memories if you regularly change where you study as opposed to always studying in the same place. So try to find multiple distraction-free places where you can study — e.g., library, quiet room at home, or even the park.

5. Use All Your Senses

Just as you can’t build a strong upper body by focusing solely on your biceps while neglecting other muscles, learning will be more lasting if you incorporate multiple senses when studying. You may have heard the recommendation to study according to your preferred learning style (e.g., visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.), but there is no good evidence that this improves learning. Instead, the best learning outcomes result from taking advantage of all the different ways information can enter your brain and identifying the methods most relevant to the topic you are studying.

Don’t rely solely on reading or listening when studying, instead engage your brain on multiple levels using these techniques:

Use Visual Imagery: When encountering new ideas in class or while studying, take time to imagine all the steps in a process or draw connections between concepts. For instance, if you’re learning about human respiration in your textbook (i.e., breathing), you might pause to mentally visualize the sequence of bodily processes involved in exhalation and inhalation, or make a quick sketch illustrating the sequence of steps.

Use Physical Objects: In some cases, physical objects can help you better grasp abstract ideas you’re trying to learn. If you are working on the topic of adding and subtracting fractions, for instance, using physical objects such as blocks or strips of paper may improve your understanding of the logic behind the mathematical rules. If you’re in a statistics course, on the other hand, it might be useful to spend some time taking different sized samples from a jar of colored M&M’s to improve your grasp of sampling and probability.

Use Your Words: The mental challenge required to verbalize our ideas strengthens memories and highlights gaps in understanding. Take advantage of this fact by finding a friend or family member willing to let you explain or even teach them the ideas you’re learning in class. And even if no one is available to listen, talking yourself through problems, practicing presentations in front of a mirror, and creating rhymes or songs will greatly improve your ability to remember information.

6. Make It Personal

Just as better performance outside the gym comes from exercising in ways that reflect real-world tasks, your study efforts will be more effective if you tie course material to realistic problems and your personal experiences. You will retain and understand course material better if you can identify meaningful connections to your daily life, make abstract ideas more concrete, and use analogies to relate new ideas to things you already know.

Instead of studying course material absent any context or relevance, use these strategies to make what you’re learning more meaningful:

Connect to Your Experience: It is often beneficial when learning to identify connections between what you’re studying and familiar experiences in your life. For instance, if you’re learning about the principle of conduction in a science course, you might think about examples such as how a cup of hot chocolate warms your hands on a cold evening. Or if you are learning about persuasion in a social psychology class, you might try to identify persuasive techniques used in the marketing advertisements you see during the week.

Use Analogies: Another useful strategy for improving your understanding of complex ideas is to use analogies. An effective analogy will link an unfamiliar process or idea that you’re learning in class to a concept you’re more familiar with. In a math course, for example, thinking about the properties of a scale can help you grasp the general strategy behind solving algebraic equations. And in a science course, you might use the analogy of water flowing through pipes to better grasp how electrons flow through a circuit.

Take Time to Reflect: You should always set aside time to reflect on how well your study strategies are working and think about how to improve. After getting the results back on an exam, for instance, you might ask yourself the following: What went well, what didn’t? What do I need to understand better? Are there alternative study strategies I could try that might work better than what I’m currently using?

In this blog we’ve covered six evidence-informed strategies to help you improve the effectiveness of your studying efforts, but ultimately it’s up to you to decide which strategies will be most useful given your personal study preferences and the content you’re trying to learn. You don’t need to use all the techniques listed here to be a successful learner, but adding several of these strategies to your regular study habits will greatly improve the impact of your studying efforts.

Whatever study techniques you decided to use, just remember that the best study strategies have one thing in common: They engage your brain!