Why Players Don't Need Blocked Practice

This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast hosted by Alex Sarama. This is the podcast helping coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to provide the ultimate resource for making sense of applying contemporary skill acquisition ideas within basketball.

Within this podcast, Alex and his guests unpack how an ecological dynamics framework Impacts our perspective of the game. If you're ready to join us in our quest to transform the basketball world, this is the podcast for you.

Joined by Greg Thomas, we're shooting another podcast episode, and I'm just going to read a comment we received on our Transforming Basketball Instagram, and Greg and I are going to unpack this during the course of this podcast episode. So here we go. The only basketball-specific research we have are players who have made it.

Those players did block and variable training. If everyone says that this, aka variable, is the right way to train, they're saying that skill acquisition is the primary focus point to being a great basketball player. This is simply not true. There are layers and many variables to take into account when working on your game.

Skill acquisition is one part. Block training, for example, is crucial for flow and confidence building, among other things. It's needed. I personally love variable training and use it as a primary piece, but I would never say one thing is better than the other simply because there are no basketball-specific research papers suggesting otherwise, and because there are many layers needed to be a good player.

My question is, why does doing well In blocked practice builds confidence and variable does not. I can't imagine doing something that's more difficult in many different scenarios builds less confidence. Also, I have an issue with the idea that people don't seem to understand that it's really hard to practice something and get worse, right?

You can practice in non-perfect ways and it still lead to improvement, even if it isn't the most efficient way to—

Train.

develop that skill. And I think that's a really, really big misnomer that people have is, oh, look, just these people did it. We talk about survivorship bias, you know, until we're blue in the face. But if that's not resonating, my question is, what are you doing repeatedly that you're actually getting worse at?

I don't know, you know. And I think that's an important thing to think about. What's your take on that?

Something Adam and I always discuss is like everyone says, all right, block practice develops confidence. A, I don't think there's any actual research on that, number one. And B, For me, it's false confidence, like you say, right? I mean, it's actually perhaps dangerous.

No, I'm not talking about in terms of injury risk, but dangerous in terms of it promotes a false sense of competency. And, you know, I would rather a player shoots less but in a more representative scenario than developing this kind of fake aura through easy 1-on-0 drills.

It's funny, um, the same proponents of blocked practice are also the same proponents of doing hard work and doing hard things. Wouldn't variable training be harder than blocked, right? So there's kind of a paradox there when you really get down to it. And I don't, I don't think people are really thinking about how they're applying their quote-unquote theory because I don't think they have.

First of all, everyone has a theory, but they, they don't even understand their own way of viewing the world because they're not taking the time to think that through.

I think too, it goes back to what I covered in the book in terms of it's, it's insane that we're still speaking about blocked versus random in 2024.

Right.

It's just, it's, it is so limited as a framework. And I think this comment highlighted too, just the lack of understanding of what skill lack is. And I think this is where I understand why, because skill lack as a term suggests that this is all about finding ways for players to more efficiently acquire skills, but that is absolutely not what we are talking about.

No, not at all. And I also, I want to be clear, I don't think this is a comment that we would be addressing if somebody was in good faith asking this question and didn't know any better. But if it continually comes from similar sources who are constantly pushing either an agenda or pushing back on something that kind of goes against their worldview, Then I think it's important to kind of break it down in these particular terms.

I will never knock anybody for not knowing better, but when you refuse to try and know better and still push the same kind of comments with the same sort of negativity, I think that's when it's fair to be— to address that in this manner.

And I think, you know, maybe if we break this down a little bit chunk by chunk, right? Let's start with the only basketball-specific research we have at the What does that mean?

I, you know, I— and I'm not trying to be rude, but made it where? And in terms of what? I, I just don't— I think, again, this is an example of something just being said to say it, you know, to include a research component, because that's obviously such a big part of what we do here at Transforming is, you know, we believe that, you know, evidence-based is the right approach to go about things, not just in basketball, but a lot of things, right?

And so I think there's a trend in recent pushback to try and appeal to research without actually understanding the research or even pointing to the specific research. So when I— when they say things like, the only ones that we have research on are the ones that made it, I don't think that's necessarily true.

I think a lot of research has been done on Undergraduates who never made it on any particular level.

Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's really quite a silly comment because it's, it's just we will never know what they could have been if not for the alternative. And I mean, imagine if you applied that as a justification for anything in life where you, you're just like, all right, well, these people have made it so far, so we're not going to continue advancing and trying to really think in an intelligent way about how we can better our field because, you know, we've already reached a

pretty decent level, right? And, you know, it's just, it's nonsensical when you look at it from that perspective.

It's short-sighted, and it also, uh, it's— there's no self-examination. And I think it was Seneca, I may be wrong, so forgive me if I misquote it, if I'm misquoting here, but essentially a life worth living is a self-examined one, right? And if there's no self-examination, I think that there's a huge— so I'm speaking in terms terms of, you know, uh, developing the theory or, you know, progressing or asking, is what we're doing correct here?

That's self-examination, right? And that is a worthwhile endeavor. So if you're not participating in that in any kind of way, uh, I think you're missing the point of what we're all doing here.

Absolutely. I think missing the point too goes to this whole block versus variable, because what we're doing, it's, it's not variable practice. Right. I mean, yes. All right.

Speak to that a little bit in your practical settings. Like, why? Because I agree, I 100% agree. But why do you think people have that?

Because, you know, we could just create a 1-on-0 and get them coming from different locations doing different things, and that would technically be variable, right? You know, and it's, it's so much more strategic than that, right? It's, you know, we're really— obviously we're using the constraints-led approach and We're thinking very deeply before the practice about, all right, what are our principles of play?

What are our rate limiters? What are affordances that we're going to design into the practice? And then how are we going to use constraints to design those affordances in? And then maybe we might think during the practice, all right, what are some themes that might appear?

What are some things we might have to prepare for? And then how could we change constraints again?

Yeah.

So that we can adequately respond to that. And it's a very measured, thoughtful process. So just calling it variable training, I think it just really doesn't do this approach justice, really, in terms of understanding what it actually is.

Right. And I, you know, the correct term may be informed practice. You can think of it as intentional practice, but it's not just variable for the sake of variability, right? It's not Strategic variability. Exactly, that's, that's the key. That's the key. All right, what's the next chunk?

So next chunk, I think we've, we've kind of dispelled this skill acquisition misnomer. It's anyway, it's skill adaptation. It's not, it's not skill acquisition to acquire an internalized movement or technique that the players are gonna, gonna use. I think the next piece would be dispelling this idea that It's one, you know, they're kind of saying that you can't have one or the other, and kind of, I guess, an it depends type framework, which we haven't actually spoken about really on the podcast yet.

Right. It depends. Might maybe just for context before you answer, Greg, and yeah, explain. Yeah. So you know, there's a group of coaches who are ecological dynamics has gained so much headway over the last. 2 years that I think a lot of coaches have to concede to the value of some of these ideas.

But what we're seeing a lot of is it depends coaches who, who believe that players still have to be taught something fundamentally before doing CLA activities, or, you know, the scenario depends, you know, depending on the group of players and, and all these different factors.

So it's, it's kind of like a, a mix It's a mix-and-match approach where you're picking and choosing things from the dominant approach and the contemporary approach. Right.

I think Rob Gray pretty much explicates the problem as well as any— with that as well as anyone here in the sense of it's okay to have mixed, probably, methodologies and try different things. It's not okay to have mixed theories because you want to be— you want your principles to stand firm, right?

You want to be principled. And the hard thing to do is turn your principles on and off. When you're doing that, you're actually lacking principles, you know? And I think that's an important way to think about it because it's really hard to go one way or the other.

And what's gonna end up happening is you're going to default to the thing that you know and the thing that you've been doing, as opposed to this sort of Omni Theory where you could— you can go any direction.

Love that. I think too, it's the best analogy I use, is it's like putting on a pair of glasses to view the world. You can't suddenly just pick up a completely different lens and start using that.

Right.

This is a theoretical framework that we are using to understand performance in basketball. So if you really buy into ideas such as self-organization, perception-action coupling, affordance landscapes, and, you know, all these other things from the ecological framework, there's simply no reason to use a drill.

And I think too, if, if you feel like you need to use a drill, you are not using the concept of task simplification well enough, right? You are not constraining the environment where the challenge level is sufficient. And I, I think too, a lot of this is this— we have so many mental models in basketball where coaches have many techniques kind of that they think players have to have or have to show before getting to more progressive, right, and advanced scenarios.

And personally, I feel like the biggest strides I made when I first adopted this approach was, was actually disregarding all the information I had, all the knowledge about— I had learned in terms of how to finish, finishing moves, how to shoot. Like, the sooner you can kind of ditch that stuff, the far easier it becomes to become a more adept CLA practitioner, right?

Do you want the player to have the most— which player would you rather have, somebody that gets the job done or somebody who looks like the job gets done but it doesn't actually get done, right? And I think though, in terms of functional variability and, you know, functionality, That's really important to think about.

So let's kind of unpack the very last statement, why an ecological framework is incredibly useful despite having basketball-specific research. And there is actually, like we mentioned on a previous episode, there is some basketball-specific research, and we are working on actually empirically producing more.

Absolutely.

But let's really just use this opportunity to kind of nip this in the bud right now. In regard to this point.

Yeah, it's a matter of semantics. For one, what's the study you've referenced before? Is it Gorman?

Gorman and Maloney, Representative Design of the Jump Shot.

Yeah, where the presence of one defender changes the release angle, the height, the speed, the percentage drops off about 20 points, right? That should be enough evidence in and of itself that that is a CLA type of study in basketball. Basketball, right? What people want to see is the, the words constraints-led approach and basketball next to each other, or they say they want to see that.

What's happening though is if you have the theory, if you understand the theory, you can pick up a paper that is using these principles, that are varying things in unique ways, changing the constraints, removing perceptual information in free throws, like in, uh, Truong 2023, uh, with occlusion goggles and earphones Uh, in testing these things, you don't have to have the words constraints-led approach to understand that it is operating within these principles, right?

So there is basketball research done at this level.

Yeah, I think too, just looking at some of the papers, I mean, it's— even if you go back to some of the information processing papers, yeah, because there's a lot done on the jump shot. I remember I kind of went through it all a couple years ago And they had a lot of work from information processing-based researchers on the jump shot.

And without knowing it, they're actually talking a lot about constraints and how constraints played a huge role in the outcome of a jump shot.

Absolutely. So there's a free throw study, I don't remember the author off the top of my head, we'll link it in the show notes. And there were 3 conditions. Essentially, they had people shooting from the free throw line only, free throw line distance, and then they had people shoot anywhere but the free throw line.

And the group that shot anywhere but the free throw line ended up producing better free throw performance overall over time. They had better retention of it. The skill emerged more consistently. That is manipulating constraints. That is exactly what we're talking about here. The approach wasn't referenced specifically, but anyone who even understands the most basic level of the theory can understand That's what's happening here.

So on that note, Greg, thanks for joining the podcast. We did a good job unpacking that answer, and we'd love to see, you know, from all the listeners listening to the podcast, please do keep sharing things you see with us on social media.

And if you, if you think there's something that we need to unpack, or maybe there's some resistance you're having within your program to helping other practitioners understand an ecological approach, Send in whatever you are struggling with to answer, and we will gladly do a podcast episode where we answer some of these questions and really unpack them.

If there's something that isn't explained well that you feel like we need to go back over, you know, across— and I say that by hoping that you go through the immense amount of work that Alex has done, read his book, read the blogs, read the free resources, watch the videos.

You know, and if still something's not clicking, please let us know. We want, we want this to be digestible. That's the whole point of Transforming. We don't want you to feel reliant upon us as information givers, but we want to empower you to take this theory and be able to understand it at a high level and, you know, deploy it in the work that you're doing with your teams, your organization, your players, whatever role you're in.

We don't want there to be barriers. barriers to this theory or, you know, barriers to understanding it.

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