As physical skills trainers, is there something we can learn from the educational researcher Robert Bjork?
Much training in physical intervention skills focuses on a linear learning process — start with “the basics,” progress through “intermediate” skills, and reach full competency. But one researcher studying a Breakaway training package found something alarming: with a long list of techniques and a short training day, trainees practised each potentially life-saving skill for an average of just over six minutes each. Fifteen techniques. Six minutes per technique. In a competency that could save a life.
“Conditions of instruction that make performance improve rapidly often fail to support long-term retention and transfer.”
Robert Bjork
What Makes a Difficulty “Desirable”?
Bjork’s counterintuitive insight is that the training methods which feel most satisfying — the ones where learners improve quickly and leave feeling confident — are often the least effective for long-term retention. The methods that feel harder, slower, and more frustrating produce better results when it counts: on the job, under pressure, months later.
“Conditions of instruction that appear to create difficulties for the learner, slowing the rate of apparent learning, often optimize long-term retention and transfer.”
Robert Bjork
Bjork introduced the term “Desirable Difficulties” — and the word desirable matters. Not all difficulty is useful. The difficulty must be something the learner can successfully navigate. When they do, the act of retrieving information under challenging conditions becomes a potent learning event — more powerful than simply studying the same material again.
💡 Key insight: Retrieved information becomes more recallable in the future because it was retrieved — not in spite of the effort. The act of retrieving is itself the learning event.
When Difficulty Becomes Destructive
There’s a fine line between desirable and undesirable difficulty. Bjork warns that difficulties become counterproductive when the learner is not equipped to respond to them successfully.
We know of one training organisation whose scenario-based training focuses on correctness of technique performance rather than operational task success. Their learners are, in their own words, “beasted” during scenarios. When we spoke to people who had been through this process, they didn’t recall skills or strategies — they recalled feelings of inadequacy and failure. That’s undesirable difficulty. It creates negative motivational baggage that can critically undermine the operational effectiveness of the entire training programme.
Building Scenarios That Stick
Bjork offers a practical guide for what good difficulty looks like:
“It is also desirable to induce successful access to knowledge and procedures in a variety of situations that differ in the cues they do and do not provide.”
Robert Bjork
This has direct implications for physical intervention and self-defence training. We recently visited a cadre of instructors who had eliminated all role-play and scenario training from their programme — they saw it as an injury risk. Yet during our discussion, it became clear that the instructor team valued the implicit learning happening when learners were put through challenging scenarios:
- The training required information retrieval in the form of use-of-force decision-making — not just technique recall.
- The training elicited operational levels of stress, along with the physiological changes that accompany real conflict.
- The training gave learners a chance to experience difficulties they had not encountered in “static” training.
Using scenario training, role-playing, and deliberately designed Desirable Difficulties allows us to improve decision-making competency — both the physical and mental resources needed to successfully navigate unknown and unknowable future confrontations. Desirable Difficulties may be the key to ensuring long-term competence and therefore the safety of those who need to perform the skills we teach.
✅ Action: Our Self-Protection Trainer certification course incorporates this theory and provides practical examples of how to embed Desirable Difficulties into training design — without crossing the line into destructive “beasting.”
Gerard O’Dea is a conflict management, personal safety, and physical interventions training consultant. He is the training director for Dynamis, a specialist in personal safety and violence reduction initiatives, and the European Adviser for ‘Verbal Defense and Influence’, a global programme which addresses the spectrum of human conflict. www.dynamis.training
