How Should You Adapt Constraints in Practice

This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast, and I'm your host, Alex Sarama. This is the podcast where we help coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to create the ultimate resource to help make sense of how contemporary skill acquisition ideas can be applied within the basketball world.

Throughout the podcast, we'll unpack how an ecological dynamics framework alters our perspective So Adam, we are making a lot of progress with coaches understanding the differences now between games-based approaches and the CLA. So let's keep taking this further, and this is a very open question.

Feel free to take it like whatever direction you want to take it in. Why would we manipulate constraints in the first instances? What are we thinking as coaches when we introduce some form of new task constraint or whatever it is we're doing? You know, why, why are we doing it?

It almost like builds up off like the discussion around constraining to afford. What is it again? I, I want to get down and not talk around these things is what is a constraint? It's a boundary. I don't care what element of your life you're talking about.

It could be your personal life. You set boundaries. Like we have certain time limit where we're, we're gonna have this podcast. That's a boundary, a 10 to 15 minute constraint. This is so we better like get to the point here. Otherwise it, it doesn't invite certain behaviors cuz then we can be casual if it's like 60 minutes or, uh, somewhere between like 30 and like 70 or something like that.

No, putting in a boundary in order to elicit certain behaviors. And we set a topic today. We set the topic for this podcast that immediately, what it is, a constraint. It shapes like what is actually gonna emerge from this conversation. So when it comes to the basketball court, it's the same thing.

We're gonna put in certain rules or alter the environment in some fashion that we think will shape the behavior that emerges.

Adam, fantastic. This is the segue I've been waiting for on the podcast. So I have, for every episode, I have my kind of stash of notes and things I pulled from research papers over the years. And I've had this one for ages and I haven't been able yet to get it in.

Let's talk about it now and then we'll come back to it. This, I'm really glad you said this. So this quote comes from Duarte Araújo, one of the godfathers in this field. He's done, you know, incredible work, kind of, uh, especially early on outlining what an ecological approach is.

And I really recommend that you read some of his research papers. If you haven't heard of him yet. So this is his quote, and this was in actually his book. I think it was on performance analysis. So he wrote, it is important to clarify that constraints are not negative influences on behavior like oppressors or punishers which take away freedom.

Instead, constraints are seen as the way the components of a system are linked, forming a specific type of organization. And this is one of the biggest things I want to get across. It's not just a case of a constraint being a limiting factor, which I think many coaches are maybe getting confused as to what they really are.

That's funny. Like, I think we're like trying to put on these like labels of like, oh, good versus— it's a very simplistic way of viewing anything in life. Like, yes, it does limit behavior, but it also invites behavior. Like, are you capable of holding 2 ideas in your mind at the same time?

I hate to be condescending in that nature, but it's the reality of things. Like, and that goes for most of life. Like, I don't care if it's a word or an experience. Some experiences probably are purely like negative aspect, negative in your life that don't draw any sort of positives, but those are very rare.

For the most part, we can take any sort of experience and there's positive aspects of it. It's gonna invite new behaviors. And it's also gonna take away certain behaviors. So it's neither like positive nor negative. It's neither limiting nor expansive. Now we can bias it in certain ways that may, but again, it's because, and the only reason that we, again, it comes back to like that intention that we keep talking about over and over again.

Based on our knowledge of both basketball and of the players that we're coaching, We think that this boundary, this constraint will elicit that new adaptive behavior to improve their performance. That is why we're manipulating constraints.

Love it. Put it better. You hit the nail on the head. So for me, I guess the first things that come to mind are number one, principles of play. So, you know, we've got some principles of play that maybe we've identified with our team on offense and defense.

These are obviously going to be conceptually orientated if we really adopt an ecological approach. So we've got these principles of play. We have to think, okay, how can we bring them to life? What small-sided games, what constraint manipulations could lead to these things emerging?

So that's number one. And the second one would be rate limiters. So identifying, you know, the things which are maybe preventing players from becoming more skillful, whether that's affordance related, or something related to self, their self-organizational tendencies and how they're moving. And then, you know, looking at how we can manipulate constraints to address that.

Anything else maybe I'm missing with that, Adam? Would those be the 2 kind of key things that maybe spring to mind for you?

Sadly, I was kind of drifting off like when you were talking, when you were talking, because something sparked in my head. I'm like, oh, that's very interesting. I never thought of it that way. So I'll be honest, I kind of lost you there, but I trust you.

I assume you probably hit on like important topics.

Tell us what you're thinking about.

God, no, I can't even remember because I caught myself. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're in a podcast right now, dude. I'm glad that that happened. It was very nice that something happened. Oh, I started thinking about action capabilities and like, oh, actually, like shooting is actually like, to a certain extent, sometimes you need the capability of shooting from a longer distance, something you can actually train.

Well, that links to what I finished on with the rate limiters. So, so you're good. How about—

That's what sparked it was the rate limiters. There you go.

So, all right. So for our listeners, can you connect, please, action capabilities with rate limiters?

Action capabilities are like strength. It's an ability. It's simply, can you perform this specific thing? And you may not have like the strength, the speed, or like the ability I was just talking about right there. You may not have actually like the capability to shoot from that distance at this point in time.

So you need to explore that. Whereas it embeds obviously within a rate limiter. So like, that's gonna shape the performance landscape. If you're not capable of exploding through this gap or shooting from this distance, like we may see on the sideline, oh, he has space, he can shoot there, or he can drive in that.

But he doesn't perceive that because again, he doesn't, he doesn't have that capability of doing it. He or she, excuse me. So that's how it connects with rate limiters, but rate limiters obviously also can be Simple perceptual abilities. Like I was talking with one of the players the other day, I was just like, honestly, you just have to experience defense off the ball if you want to improve it more.

But you have to be intentional in it. Don't just randomly go through and like, oh, hey, I'm, I'm just going to play. No, I'm only off ball for this. No, we'll actually play around with it and say like, for this stretch, I'm going to bias towards helping on the on-ball action as opposed to making sure my man doesn't get a catch and shoot, or like have the goal of like.

Oh, my guy, he ain't even gonna catch the ball, or my guy, he's not gonna get a catch and shoot opportunity. I'm gonna close that down right away and force him to drive and just see what happens. So you need to be actually embedded in those environments to actually gain that knowledge of the environment.

Love it. So I think main takeaways just for coaches are when we are looking to manipulate constraints, we've got our principles of play like we've spoken about. And then everything relative to every individual player. So, you know, really what this means is know your players.

So even if it's, you know, you get your coaching staff and your athletic performance staff, physios, anyone who's in the program, you sit down and you just go through and maybe you try and identify 3 rate limiters for every player. And that could involve some of the action capabilities like Adam just spoke about.

And then what you can do is branch off that and draw several branches. And this is what we did at Prep last year. So then you can think, all right, so this is what we're left with. So we got our whole team here and we got their rate limiters.

Are there any kind of similarities here that we could hit in team practices, in maybe player development sessions? How could we group particular players? And then critically, what activities, what constraint manipulations could be useful to target these things? And that is a very specific intention.

That is the why behind why we are using the CLA. So it's not just a case of I woke up this morning, went to a practice and just did some very random small-sided games. Players solved some problems, had fun, boom, we went home.

That's not what this is about. So we want a highly specific approach as opposed to a generic and vague one. And I think some, you know, critics of a CLA approach of, used the terms that it's like a gym class in high school or PE.

And, you know, we laughed at him, but, you know, when we saw that on Instagram, all that is is a misconception of what the CLA is. You know, it's actually the complete opposite because it's an incredibly specific coaching methodology. And when we use it well, we are manipulating constraints purposely for a reason.

So that's it for today's episode. Hope we clarified some key kind of area that we really felt needed justification, and we'll see you back on another episode. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. If you would like to learn more about the work we do, head to www.transformingbball.com to access our resources and help spread these ideas throughout the basketball world.

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