Alex Sarama is joined by Shawn Myszka, Founder of Emergence, to discuss the concept of alive movement problems and its application in basketball performance.
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In this episode, Alex Sarama is joined by Shawn Myszka, Founder of Emergence, to discuss the concept of alive movement problems and its application in basketball performance. They explore the ecological dynamics framework and how it impacts the way coaches and practitioners approach skill acquisition in basketball. Shawn emphasizes the importance of creating practice activities that are alive, dynamic, and allow for emergent decision-making.
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This transcript follows the original English audio.
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Welcome back to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. Delighted today to be joined by Shawn Myszka from Emergence. And Sean is an individual who's had a huge impact on me and the whole team at Transforming and everything we do. So now the book is out.
It's a pleasure to finally have Sean on the podcast. Sean, thanks so much for being here.
Alex, my friend, and obviously I appreciate the words, but I also, I would offer that same sentiment to you and the rest of the team at Transforming Basketball, because I view all of these types of interactions much like you. In a shared, mutual, reciprocal way.
Hopefully I pour into you, you and the team at Emergence here. So obviously we owe you a debt of gratitude for everything that you are doing within the skill acquisition community and changing the way that people are viewing movement behavior in sports. So for that, I appreciate you.
And obviously I'm delighted to be here as well.
I really appreciate that, Sean. That's really kind. So this is— I should have actually told you before, but I'm going to— we're going to release this as a 2-part series. You've got the pleasure of going first, followed by Tyler on the next one.
So it's going to be back to back of Emergence on the Transforming Pod. And I wanted to start with this question, Sean, and that is an alive movement problem. And I think this is something I've taken from you guys because I think it really helps coaches when you talk about making practices more alive.
And I think that's a really good entry point for coaches discovering this. So could you just touch upon that and just what it means to the coaches listening?
Yeah, I love the question because we have found, and of course, we've posed it within our papers, our recent papers here from 2023, and now moving forward as well. We have posed it to the skill acquisition community and really coaches to be able to digest some of the ideas that are underpinning ecological dynamics.
Obviously, ideas that underpin our form of life, mine and yours, emergence and obviously transforming as well. This idea of aliveness or alive movement problems. Here, at least for me personally, when I view American football and movement, obviously on a football field, I feel as though it's all a problem-solving activity where the movements are just used to produce those necessary solutions.
And that I'm stealing from Dr. Mel Stiff and Dr. Yur Verkhoshansky. This idea of problem-solving. Yeah. Has often been kind of threaded throughout many of the skill acquisition practitioners' work when we see it applied practically, which is what really matters to us, right?
Like we go back and date back to Bruce Lee and Jeet Kune Do, and that's actually who we've adopted this idea of alive movement problems from. So to give credit where credit is due, it's obviously owed to Bruce Lee in this way. And he talked about very similar, very parallel to Nikolai Bernstein, this idea of when we face a task within sport and we're trying to carry out a solution or resolution to it, it's not about mere repetition.
It's not about calculated movement patterning, but instead it's about this aliveness that exists between the environment and the performer. Or between the problem that the environment is presenting to the athlete and the solutions, which would be underpinned by perceptions, cognitions, and actions, and this intertwined, interwoven relationship between these processes, we find that they are inseparable from one another.
And Bruce Lee was talking about this in Jeet Kune Do. It's the reason why he said, boards don't hit back, right? It's about this finger pointing away to the moon. You have to look at the moon that the finger is pointing at to truly understand the relationship.
And I say all that to say this in regards to alive movement problems. They must be then an emergent one. It must allow for emergent decision-making. It must allow for information detection. And ultimately, it must allow for adaptability of actions in the moment.
Because as Bruce Lee would say, you are interacting with the what is. The what is is always different. We never stand in the same river twice. We're not the same man and the river's not the same either, right? So this idea of alive movement problems begins to capture these interactions in the mutual relational nature of oneself interacting within an environment which is dynamic, it's complex, it's often chaotic, particularly if we're looking at the sport of basketball or the sport of American football or anything in between.
And I think that's why coaches have been able to kind of gravitate to alive movement problems and maybe more so than like representative task Or some of these other ideas of affordances, like those ideas still live and breathe within alive movement problems, certainly.
But when you hear alive, you know it can't be static. You know it can't be cone drills. You know it can't be my worst enemy, the ladder. You know you can't be those things because you know when you start those activities, you know exactly where you're starting, you know exactly where you're ending, and you know exactly what you have to do from A to Z.
If an athlete gets to the line in a drill or activity and they know where they're going and how it is that they need to execute throughout it, it's probably not very alive. Instead, it's probably very dead.
I love that, Sean. So I want to come back actually to Bruce Lee and your being water paper after. So it was great because you provided a segment, but I had something else I had to ask and I couldn't go away from it.
So, and this is the fact that a dead movement problem would be an on-air drill, which we see in basketball and football, I guess, things like tackling sleds. And I, I am actually intrigued to know what the alternative to that would be to an ecological approach, because we had a couple football coaches listen.
I've sent them obviously to you guys. But yes, you can add an opponent, you can add a defender, and that's obviously the easiest way to make it alive. But it's about a lot more than just that. It's about how coaches intentionally use the constraints, right?
Because what we're seeing is, yes, coaches now may be moving towards more alive things, but Maybe they don't know how they're using constraints intentionally with a reason, with a purpose.
Yeah, I think you're onto something here. And what I have seen people begin to do, even in our 2022 paper about applying an ecological approach in American football, and we offered case examples within that 2022 paper. But what I started to see people do, and maybe this is on us as an authorship team and group as to how we didn't articulate it clearly enough, I started to see people, Alex, constraint to constraint.
Like they thought they were involving aliveness just because there was an opponent there or because there could be some constantly changing nuances, but they were robbing the athlete of their own agency. They were robbing the athlete of how they would approach it authentically.
And I'm not just talking about from an action standpoint, I'm talking about an education of attention and intentions. I'm talking about what information an athlete might be picking up. If you and I face similar behaving problems, we're likely to pick up and detect different information.
There's perceptual degrees of freedom, just like there would be motor system or action degrees of freedom. And then again, intertwined and interwoven with that, inseparable from that, is the cognitions and the intentions and the decision-making. We need to equip the athlete with the opportunity to explore and search that degrees of freedom problem at a bigger level.
And I think that's the biggest thing. That's why we put the checklist that we did, the Alive Movement Problem Setting Checklist, in our 2023 paper. And that Alive Movement Problem Setting Checklist starts to talk about maintaining that intertwined, interwoven nature of problem and solution.
So the changing states of organization, 2 things that are changing in an indeterminate and unpredictable way. The perceptions, cognitions, and actions being the athlete having the ownership around that and exploring their own degrees of freedom problem. And then also the affordances and the opportunities that are present there.
That to me begins to like make this link between alive movement problems and what is happening within the sport. So we don't want to constrain to constrain because what happens there talk about the alternative really briefly here. We constrain to constrain. We rob the athlete of their own agency.
We're telling the athlete how to move. We're telling the athlete what they should see. We're telling the athlete exactly what outcome should happen, as opposed to constraining to afford, which would be offering a richer landscape of affordances or opportunities to act. Where they would get to kind of explore that landscape a little bit more, if you will.
In fact, in the Movement Behavior as a Problem-Solving Activity paper from 2023, and I hate to keep dropping these things out, you know, like in there we actually have a basketball example in the very first paragraph. We talk about a point guard dribbling down the court, scanning the entire width and depth of the court for opportunities to act.
They're dribbling and obviously interacting at that moment. That's a local movement problem that is part of a bigger, more macro global movement problem, which is the seconds ticking down on the clock. They're down by 1 or whatever it might be. You know, you can kind of set the tone.
So you start to see how context shapes content. And that to me is constraining to afford. It's a rich landscape of affordances, and we're not telling the athlete how they must interact. We're presenting a problem that speaks to them that they need to connect to in their own authentic way and couple their movement behaviors in relation to.
And of course, there's simultaneous affordances, but also, as we both know, successive. So you make this one decision, you elect to dribble past the defender, and it opens up new opportunities to act. Successive affordances based on the ones that we act upon In that moment, it's just this constant, what we would refer to as context-condition variability.
The problem is always changing, therefore so is the solution.
Love that.
So the next kind of segment is forms of life. And I wanted to talk about Bruce Lee, which I know has had a big impact on you and Tyler. And there's a quote which I've just got here. And what I loved at the end of the paper, you took the opportunity to reframe this quote in a more ecological sense, because I think there was a lot of what Bruce Lee did that I think we could say was somewhat ecological.
And what I've seen, the reason I wanted to do this, Sean, is I've seen a lot of traditionally inclined coaches use this quote to justify them using drills. So the quote was, I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Could you just talk about how you and Tyler kind of unpacked that? I think it was in the conclusion or the end of the Being Water paper.
Yeah, it was near the end, Alex. And the reason why we did that is to actually adopt the Bruce Lee idea, the one that I offer literally in every presentation that I give to any sport coaching group. The very first slide I offer: research your own experience, absorb what is useful, discard what is not, and add what is uniquely your own.
Like, I feel this is the journey that we all should be on. So if we look back at what Bruce Lee did or what he might have said, whether it's hitting a bag or trying to convey an idea, there were plenty of other ideas that offset that really truly talk about what essence he embodied.
Shoot, we can even look at it and I knew I was going to be able to find it. So you can see right here, this is the Jeet Kune Do logo. And now Jeet Kune Do, for those who don't know, is Bruce Lee's interpretation of the martial arts.
In that logo in Cantonese around, it says to use no way As the way. So I want listeners to kind of think about that and then contrast that to the quote of the fearing the man who has repeated the kick, right? But Bruce Lee's very emblem, his symbol, his— which should convey his essence, said to use no way as the way.
And then he talked about obviously the highest technique is to have no technique. My technique is the result of your technique. My movement is the result of your movement. So all of a sudden I've one-upped Bruce Lee. Now, God rest his soul, because he obviously can't argue with me on this.
But the point here that I'm making is there are plenty of other anecdotes that we can even take from Bruce Lee, examples that he's using where he talks about through the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, why it's about not being in this rote repetition, this rehearsal, this way of doing and being that Bernstein would've discredited at around the same time, Alex.
Like, you look at the timeframe that both of these counterparts, you know, like, I'm— go ahead and make a stand to say that I don't think Nikolai Bernstein and Bruce Lee ever read each other's work, right? But at the same timeframe when Nikolai Bernstein is saying it's about the process of repeating the process of solving the problem, right?
It's repetition without repetition.
Right.
Mere repetition should be discredited. Nikolai Bernstein saying that. Bruce Lee's over here saying that mere calculated repetition is just robbing combat of its messiness and aliveness. They're both saying very similar things, conveying very similar ideas, which both contradict the repeating of a certain kick 10,000 times in a deliberate fashion, right?
So I think people have adopted that, and then we change it, of course, that we would fear the person who has faced 10,000 movement problems that are all of varying nature across situations and across conditions, right? The 10,000 opponents is the ones that we would fear the most, the ones who have solved those varied movement problems and have found the nuances, the opportunities, the challenges and perturbations.
And work themselves through it adaptively. That's who we fear, at least from our perspective, right? And of course, it aligns very closely to the Nikolai Bernstein, the idea of dexterity, the ability to solve any emerging movement problem in any situation and in any condition.
It's the same idea, right? And of course, now we're first coming onto these ideas a whole heck of a lot more. People like you and hopefully myself, we're embracing that more. Practically, and we're seeing the fruits of that labor when we watch the athletes go and compete across situations and across conditions, because that's how they live and breathe within their practice.
And that to me is the movement problem-solving form of life, if you will.
That's fantastic, Sean. So now it gets to how we actually apply this, and I want to title this series The Role of NSAS in Professional Basketball. And we've spoken a lot about this, and obviously it was the— you and Tyler wrote that fantastic contribution in the book on this topic.
So we've got a whole host of questions we want to unpack in this. Maybe we could start, Sean, with quickly touching on what this role actually is, because a lot of coaches and practitioners listening won't be familiar with the term. And then we can get to all the more complex questions that come within that role.
Yeah, I love it. First, I will say it's of no fault to theirs that they're unfamiliar with the role. Because the sporting world hasn't adopted the idea nearly as much as I feel they should. You know, like when we look at staffs across the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, or whatever, we can take whatever leading sports organization we want.
We see a staffer for just about every damn thing you can possibly imagine, right? Like you have 6 water boys, but you don't have anyone who's in charge of The skill acquisition methodologies and principles, or ensuring that the team is adhering to contemporary and more proven skill acquisition ideas, theories, and research.
Right. And I guess that to me is the impetus for this idea of the skill acquisition specialist. Now, it does exist in some countries, Australia and New Zealand being a few, right, where it is a little bit more prominent. I've been beating on the drum, as I think you well know, for a long, long time here in America about hopefully teams beginning to hire one here.
And what they would do. First and foremost, Alex, they would assess the practice environment, the practice design being implemented on a day-to-day basis to determine how relevant it might be to transfer to the potential sport, right? Or to potentially transfer to that respective sport.
We know what sport the athlete is going to in most of these cases, because I'm proposing it happen at a higher level, whether it's at the pro level in the NBA or NFL, or maybe in the Division 1 college ranks. And then of course, trickle up, trickle down.
But with that assessment comes to helping the coaches, supporting the coaches in this way, in the design of practice activities that channel more functional and adaptive skill. And because I find, just I'm sure as you have as well in the NBA, I find in the NFL that most of the practice time is not actually doing that.
Right? It's often oriented around tactics, very rarely oriented around the enhancement or the exploitation of skill, the true skill as we know it in a functional adaptive relationship between oneself and that dynamic complex environment. So to have somebody on staff who is doing that holistically, but they would analyze and assess movement behavior in context, Along with the coaches and the sports scientists, right?
To actually look at these changing problems and the solutions that the athlete is organizing while they face them. We would look at being able to assess and determine the true gaps or rate limiters of that respective player. Again, not just action capabilities and motor system, but also perceptions and cognitions and how the athlete is actually coordinating, controlling, and organizing a movement solution functionally fit to the problems they're facing.
Thirdly, then, to determine where that athlete's challenge point might be. When we talk about those gaps after we've assessed what they're doing, what are the opportunities for them to act? You know, you and I kind of connect around this idea. We're taking the film to determine the weaknesses to then set practice tasks.
So it isn't just an analysis and an assessment of a player's skill, but it's allowing it to inform us about how we might design practice activities That are set to that respective player. And then of course, fourthly here, to assist coaches in ways to facilitate that movement skill, to manipulate constraints, but also in how we guide and communicate to the athlete.
Again, we already kind of beat the dead horse here in that everybody is telling the athlete how to move without giving the ownership and autonomy over to the athlete. And I find these coaches kind of like joystick coaching from the side. And I used to be there and do that, Alex.
Like, I used to be that guide from the side, but I was like a puppeteer trying to pull strings. Like, no, you should have cut this way without actually asking them more questions or analyzing the performer-environment relationship at a much deeper level to try to determine maybe why they're moving in that fashion to begin with.
And so I think the skill acquisition specialist role and idea can fill this niche in this void that we often find in professional sports where we have people who are adopting practice methodologies that are just traditional and dogmatic. And the problem that we find here is we just continue to do what we've always done because that's the way we've always done it, or that's the way we were coached initially.
30, 40, 50 years ago. We haven't seen very much evolution in practice methodologies. And that's why I think like your book and why I've been shouting from the rooftops about it, that I'm very impressed by your ability to convey these ideas in a practical way that a coach can take it.
This, I would say this, Alex, whether myself and Tyler had a contribution in it or not, like to take it and actually like live it and breathe it. You know, one of the things that I think you were doing better than literally anyone else that I've faced or found within the skill acquisition community is like, you are living and breathing it and you're showing your work over and over and over again.
Not saying, hey, I got it all figured out. You're not that person. Now I might be that person in some cases. And that might be why I get some pushback, you know, because whatever it is, what it is, but we all got to be who we are.
But that being said, you're putting that work out there in ways that are practical, useful, relevant, digestible. So there is no longer this excuse. There used to be this big gap. We have this theory, we have this research, and then we have this practice, which is overly outdated and it's traditional and it's dogmatic.
Nothing in the middle. No one was being that bridge. And so I commend you for being that bridge. Of course, Emergence We founded Emergence on this same idea as well. So we are kindred spirits in that way because we both have the same initiative.
But I guess I say all that because there is the need or this niche for the skill acquisition specialist to help fill that same void that your book is kind of operating as a bridge and a conduit between.
Yeah.
But we could have that, and I propose we should have that in and across all sports. And I think when we do, we're going to see the skill actually flourish that much more in the sport itself.
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Completely agree, Sean. Like I was thinking just the first time I read you know the contribution from yourself and Tyler, I just kept thinking imagine what would be like to have one of you guys like in an NBA team and actually working with the coaches.
How incredible that would be! And if you've got the right coaches who are open to these ideas and you're in the practices, you're co-designing things together, involving all the practitioners. I kind of see it as that department of methodology role where you're really bridging those departments.
Yeah. I mean, the potential is staggering. And to do it, Sean, I think we've got to overcome some very, very entrenched forms of life. And especially in football, it's very regimented, very structured. Maybe even more so than basketball, but it's the same in basketball to an extent.
And what we also see a lot, Sean, is the front offices and coaches being concerned about what the players may think. But you've worked with numerous, numerous NFL players, some of the best football players on the planet. I mean, what I always say to these people is I've never had an issue with a player not enjoying an ecological workout.
In my experience, they never go back. Could you maybe touch upon that and why? we shouldn't be concerned with these things if an organization is wanting to hire an SAS and really go 2 feet in with this approach?
Yeah, I love the question here because I initially got that pushback also because it was, of course, if you have an ecologically centered practice activity, it is going to be replete with opportunities to interact. And that means there's going to be mistakes that happen, right?
The athlete is going to easily fall, especially if they're searching and exploring new ways of interacting with those respective problems. They are likely to make more mistakes in training or in practice, right? But the last time I checked, that's why we practice. Like, the reason I know how to ride a bike decades later after learning to ride the bike is I fell off the effing bike more than once, right?
Like, you'd start turning on a downhill, you turn too fast, you end up head over your, your handlebars, right? Next time, okay, maybe I don't shift the handlebars quite so fast when I'm moving as quickly down the hill. Right? That's how we learn to learn to move.
We learn to move through our problem solving, right? And I think our practices should convey this as well. The reason why I feel athletes never go back once they live and breathe this ecological mindset in the learning or training environment is they realize they're given the ownership and autonomy, number one, and they know that they're facilitating their best self.
Going back to Bruce Lee and stealing one of his ideas, honestly and authentically express oneself in the sport is why most players at the highest of levels, like why they thrive so much to begin with. Right. You know, we had a movement meetup just a number of days ago between your organization and ours.
And I brought up a question for you in regards to who the most dexterous mover in the National Basketball Association happens to be. Kyrie Irving was your answer. You look at how Kyrie Irving plays, right? What is it? It's an honest, authentic expression of himself painting on this canvas of a basketball court, right?
It could easily be on a basketball court, or when you see him in his fashion or the way that he expresses himself on social media and the like, like the basketball court or the football field should be an extension of who one is, how someone sees the world, how one— some, like how someone approaches the world.
The basketball court or the football field should still be that same extension. And once you offer that to them, there's a certain freedom that comes with that. And in that freedom to express one's essence in their sport, they thrive. Number 2, the other thing beyond that authenticity, they know that it looks, feels, acts, and unfolds closer to the way that the sport will.
And the reason why they're coming to us, whether it's for practice, if we're in a team setting, Or whether it's for training, it's to prepare to play the game. And so if all of a sudden you hit home to them that, hey, does this feel more like or less like the game than your typical training would?
Never have I had a player say that it feels less like the game than their typical training would. I mean, shoot, we've already kind of talked about it. Players are, you know, in your sport, they're rote rehearsal from a certain spot, a certain number of shots, right?
Oftentimes with very little defender opposition presence or presence of other teammates or opponents and the like, other contextual factors such as across situations and conditions. In my sport, I see players preparing to play the game by doing agility ladders and cone drills and the like.
And all of a sudden they have to make some people miss. And there's these layers of movement problem that are coming to them. And it's a pretty easy question to answer. Which one feels more like the game? And it's not saying that everything has to be in your sport 5v5 or in my sport 11v11.
Again, we can constrain to afford through slices and snippets of the game, but it must have opportunities to interact. It must have aliveness, and it must begin to allow the movement system itself of the player to become resonant to what is going to be there.
And I think that's why when Bruce Lee says Boards don't hit back. That's what he's talking about. The players know that and get that. And in fact, early in the offseason, when I have players who are returners back to our offseasons and our learning environments, they might have been with me for 3, 4, 5 years.
Early in the offseason, we have, I guess, more scaled complexity. And the players often are like, when are we getting to more of the complex stuff? Like, they're literally like, this isn't difficult enough for me right now. Like, and they'll still be not necessarily solving all the problems with 100% effectiveness rate or anything like that.
Like, they're still making mistakes. But what they're really asking me, Alex, is when am I going to fall off the bike a little bit more? Like, they actually ask me that explicitly. So if players were going to push back, they certainly would do it in my case where they're coming to me willingly.
Like, they're coming to me to pay money. Like, they pay my bills, right? At the end of the day, if they weren't going to come, they're not going to come. They're not even going to pull in the parking lot, as opposed to at a team where they have to go because they're employed, right?
So now we flip it back. Maybe the players just don't push back on opposed shooting drills and the cone drills or the agility ladder or the tackling the blocking dummy because you're requiring them not to push back. You're paying them not to push back, Mr.
Team Decision Maker and organizational structure leader? Like, have you ever thought about that yourself? You know, I've often thought that, like, when I've been talking to NFL teams, kind of posing this same idea, and they're like, I don't know, players, you know, they run the league, they run the organization, they run the group.
And it's like, yeah, they run the group, but not really. At the end of the day, you're still writing their checks. And maybe we should flip that on its head and see, hey, if we remove some of those dead drills, How is it that they actually respond and behave and interact around it?
Yeah, absolutely. And you know what surprises me even more, Sean, is especially in American sports, you have a lot of teams who are not— it's quite obvious they're not going to be a contender. Maybe in the NBA you've got 30 teams. So I think it's pretty obvious for about 24 teams, they're probably not winning the NBA championship.
So I always just think that if you are in one of those 24 teams, why would you not want to do something different anyway and just reap the dividends, you are in the position to actually do that. And it's really funny because just the conversations I've had with NBA teams, most of them are actually at the top of the echelon anyway.
And I often wonder, hmm, I don't think it's a coincidence that they're as it is and they're still curious. So my final question, Sean, is I've been saving this one for a month and it triggered me.
Oh man.
It triggered me. I knew I had to— you've brought it up, it's the ladder drills, but I'm going to give more context to it. So what we've started seeing more, Sean, especially in basketball circles recently, is coaches have been trying to take the ecological language and apply it to a traditional approach and kind of misunderstanding the terms and all of this.
And what we saw was a coach was talking about action capabilities, and they said that to make players more skillful, you have to do drills. And you have to decouple, and they use that word decouple because you have to isolate these action capabilities through things like speed work, ladders, et cetera, et cetera.
And yeah, it triggered me. I got angry when I heard this. And a lot of coaches reached out to us and like, blah, blah, blah, blah, what's your take? So I've been saving this one, Sean.
I think again, we look at the nature of problem solving. And this was something that we talked about again in the 2023 paper. And Alex, obviously, as I read through your book, which I got a week and a half ago and immediately started diving into, and I didn't just go right to page 299, mind you, which is the page that Tyler and I— I worked my way through it and gave it the respect that it deserves and the respect that you and, you know, obviously are owed in that way.
But what we find, if you were really adopting an ecological approach, As you and I both know, you have to be presented with a problem, right? And that problem is going to be different literally every single time we face it. Again, we never step in the same river twice.
We're not the same man. The river's not the same either. And I know that some problems in sport on the surface look similar to other problems that came before, but similar is not same.
Right.
And again, I think we can take what Bernstein is talking about originally with repetition without repetition. The inherent reality is that no 2 movement strategies and solutions are ever going to be the same in even the simplest of tasks and activities, such as taking a blacksmith hammer and hitting the same spot.
It's never even the same kinematic structure or motor action path. And if those things are the case, Why would we ever believe that we should separate the action capabilities from the perceptions and the cognitions, which are inseparable from one another? They are interdependent with, they are channeling in a tight circular way.
So when Rob Gray, our friend Rob Gray, would say, keep them coupled, he's telling us right then and there, just like Bernstein and Bruce Lee and numerous others before, That once you decouple, it is no longer even similar to, not even just same, but it's no longer similar to, right?
There's a reason why Usain Bolt, fastest man on the planet in a straight line by himself, went out onto a soccer pitch, was no longer fast out there. He couldn't interact with the problems that the soccer pitch required because he didn't have the requisite skill To express that speed in the same way, right?
Now, we might have freak athletes that can show some glimpses here or there, right? Like, I'm pretty sure that if we take like a Russell Westbrook and put him out on an NFL football field, he might be able to make a person miss here or there.
But across situations and across conditions, he wouldn't be able to express those same types of movement patterns and movement mechanics that you would see on a basketball court because context shapes content that much. Right. To do is to do something somewhere, as DeWaarton Keith would say, right?
It's about where you're doing it that leads into how you're doing it. So if all of a sudden we put a ladder on the ground or we decouple and isolate and separate from, we are separating the movement system's connection to what it will end up facing.
And the expression of it will be vastly different to begin with. And I think that's the thing that we need to recognize and realize. It's actually what led me to an ecological dynamics rationale and approach and led me to adopting it because I was that guy, Alex.
I was in that place where it was about perfect practice. And then all of a sudden it hit me like a ton of bricks as I was watching my players. Are they moving that way because of the work we're doing or in spite of the work we're doing?
When they weren't actually coordinating, controlling, and organizing those biomechanical Or motor system degrees of freedom, those cutting actions and the like, in the same way as we would rep after rep after rep when it was a perfect practice model. But instead, when you started giving them opportunities to interact, they started to have this extra connection and coupling too.
This is why I believe that all is said and done, if we can keep them coupled, as Rob would say, no matter what, that's the action expression that we're searching for. And those are the action capabilities that we're trying to actually enhance.
And it's like you said at the start, it's how well you constrain to afford it, I think, too, Shaun. If you're really constraining well, then, I mean, yeah, these action capabilities are developed within an alive environment. And that's what we're getting at. Just thinking here, like a player jumping to block a shot or having to battle with a defender to create space for a rebound, it's going to— like you say, it's different every time, and that can easily be replicated in specific activities.
Yeah. And it's why we see players might have a high proficiency in moving within the drill or executing within the drill. And then all of a sudden things ramp up or, you know, like they change in complexity in the skill and the expression of it is not the same as it was from the unopposed to the opposed world.
Right. They're 2 totally different movement problems. Like if you were to put me by myself on a football field and I were cutting on cone drills because of how, first of all, I'm 5'8 and 190 pounds and I've done a lot of cutting just to show players and I behaved in that way.
I can have as clean and crisp and sexy of biomechanics as any of the players I've ever worked with, say, out of the running back position. But yet when it comes to the complexity of the problems, I'm going to take them every day of the week, including Sunday, instead of myself.
Such a good way of putting it.
And I think that starts to tell us more of the story, my friend, about why we need to start asking ourselves different questions so we start to see the different perspective.
I love it. Sean, this was an incredible part 1. Tyler's going to pick up the questions I didn't get to ask you in part 2, but I've got some really good ones saved for him. So a big thanks for what you guys are doing with Emergence.
Yeah, this is a great episode. So really appreciate you taking the time.
My friend, I appreciate you and everything that you are doing. Obviously, we always appreciate the chat to interact and connect with you, but to see you have the success that you are with the book right now is really gratifying for us. And I hope you realize how much it is.
And then I speak for myself as well as the team at Emergence when I say that.
Much appreciated, Sean. Thank you.
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