Alive problems, the ultimate guide & more
Here's some Skill Acquisition content for you to explore over the weekend. I hope you enjoy it!
This week at a sconce
Research Insight: Creating Alive Problems
Podcast Snip: Amplifying & Exaggerating
Quote: Practice makes perfect
Resource: The CLA Podcast Guide
Tweet: Constraints Collective
Research Insight
(Re) conceptualizing movement behavior in sport as a problem-solving activity ( Myszka et al., 2023)
💡Key Insight
“Thus, coaches should aim to set alive movement problems to present to the athlete in practice and training. These types of problems are those where the strategies and outcomes are unpredictable”
The need for coaches to set ‘alive’ movement problems during training was the key message for coaches from this fantastic paper. One of
🧑🏫Practical Takeaway for coaches
Coaches should aim to create dynamic and unpredictable situations in practice. These "alive" movement problems challenge athletes in ways that are more similar to real competition. We can create these ‘alive’ tasks through manipulating constraints in practice. Here’s a great example of what one of these tasks could look like
https://twitter.com/EMERGENTMVMT/status/1648287577613451267
There are some very important considerations for coaches to be aware of when designing these ‘alive’ tasks which I’ll discuss now
Representative Information: One of the key factors of designing these tasks is including representative information. It’s important to know what this would be in the sport that you work in. For example in tennis, it would be ball flight information and opponents movements.
Scaling/Task Simplification: Here we want to reduce (the complexity of the task) while not impoverishing (removing the key information). It’s important that the task is suitably challenging for the player’s skill levels. We can do this by changing equipment, reducing the amount of players, disadvantaging the defenders etc. It’s really important that as player’s get better, we gradually increase the challenge
Repetition without repetition: The key idea here is that we want to repeat the outcome of achieving the task goal but using different solutions to achieve this. We can vary the starting position of the player, vary the direction they are facing, change the defender they are facing etc. The coach can be vary creative with their constraint manipulations here
As always, here’s the link to my more detailed notes 👇
Podcast Snip:
Amplifying Information and Inviting Affordances
This was a brilliant episode where Rob went through some of the key ideas of the Constraint-Led Approach to coaching (CLA). This very short snip captures one of the key ideas behind the CLA which is how we manipulate constraints to amplify or exaggerate the key information that we want our players to explore or utilise. There are a few nice ways to do this such as using scoring or manipulating the problem so that they are rewarded for exploring. A key point is that the players will still have the option to explore other ways to solve the problem so we are not forcing them.
Quote
“Perfect practice makes perfect? Not so. The effortful pursuit of perfect results in an appropriately representative environment designed to make attaining such results suitably challenging makes perfect. But don't forget to just play around too.”-Phil Kearney
I really enjoyed this piece that Phil Kearney (@Kearney_phil) shared on X recently around perfect practice. It’s a deviation from the age old adage of ‘perfect practice makes perfect’. There’s a lot of wonderful insights for coaches in this piece such as the importance of representative environments, finding the right challenge and the importance of play. The only slight change to this that I would make is maybe substituting ‘the effortful pursuit of consistently achieving the task goal’ rather than the perfect results.
Resource:
Podcasts have played such an important role in developing my knowledge of Skill Acquisition. One of the most common questions that I get is what’s the best podcast episode for people starting out to listen to? This is such a difficult question as there are so many different options and it hard to know what a coach actually needs. I’m currently in the process of building a free resource that has over 100 Snips of different podcasts (just like above) and putting them under the relevant headings. This should be ready to launch by the next edition of the newsletter so keep your eyes peeled.
Tweet: The Constraints Collective
The Constraints Collective-run by some of the leading figures in Skill Acquisition has re-launched recently. If you aren’t already, make sure to give them a follow because the information they will be sharing is sure to be amazing. They’ve also started a podcast that is going to be a brilliant resource for anyone interested in skill acquisition