Welcome back to Finding the Edge podcast.
I'm Garrett Poem joined with Kyle Dupic.
Something to discuss today, just given all the different
conversations we've been having. I think a lot of it all comes
back to, all right, transfer of training, the basic principles
of transfer of training, because all the questions revolve around
practice. What are we doing in practice?
What about this thing? What about that thing, and
should we do it? How should we modify it or what
should we be doing? And to me, it all comes back to
the principles of transfer of training and then and or
flipping it back to understanding the performance
environment and even to building off of something that Sean
Mishka really talks a lot about is putting yourself in the shoes
of the athlete. And and so to me, the only way
to really be able to in in some ways put yourself in the shoes
of the athlete in some ways is also to have been there
yourself. And yes, if an athlete can tell
you, you can do the best you can of like imagining yourself in
those situations. But by and large, for the most
part, even for myself, I, I feel like the more that I have
stepped into the, the been a part of the practice task.
Meaning, for example, often Times Now I'm I'm ABP thrower
And so and, and also having been a player that's really, really
struggled and been awful and terrible.
Having to figure out how to overcome those things helps me
put myself in the athletes shoes, both when both from the
times where I've had success myself and then also when I have
struggled and failed. And so having both of those
experiences has given me insight into being able to think about,
OK, what is going on in the performance environment.
And then how can how can I help that athlete?
And partially because of like what's helped me.
And so as someone who has been diving into ecological dynamics,
for me personally, I felt like it's really helped explain
things and then helped me hone in on what is important and
gives me a fuller picture of like how everything kind of fits
together. Yeah, we've been talking about
some of the basics of ecodynamics.
And as somebody who's really only been engaging deeply with
this content for now year and a half, one of the things that
became that I became aware of or I noticed was how it not that
they're different things, but that this idea of, you know, in
light of transfer of training, some people seem to be running
at the CLA, the constraint LED approach side of it using
constraints, you know, physical and rules and whatnot,
environments, etcetera. And then other people were
running hard after representative learning design
and and still others are mixing those.
But it definitely seemed like those were spoken about as not 2
separate things that couldn't mix, but definitely 2 separate
things at times two different. Like you could make something
more representative and not necessarily be working as hard
to manipulate constraints and vice versa.
It could, it could not be representative at all, but
you're really manipulating constraints to try to help them
explore the solution space. So I'd be interested in transfer
of training. Maybe The thing is to zoom in on
either one of those for a minute, kind of define what the
difference between those two things are, how they're nested
within an ecological worldview, and then talk about why or how
are some examples of how those things might help with transfer
of training. Yeah.
And I think this goes back to one of our other conversations
of the practice environment in the context often times is quite
different from the actual game environment.
And one thing that ecological dynamics kind of begins to talk
about is the fact of the sensitivity that the system has
or rather the way a system behaves is based upon the
constraints that are placed upon it.
And so because the constraints, basically the, the environment
and the constraints that are within the practice environment
are different from that of the performance environment.
You may not see the things that you, the behavior, the
movements, the actions, etcetera, that you see in
practice may not show up in the game.
And vice versa, what you see in the game may not show up in
practice. And so we've all experienced
this where where a guy, you know, does really, really well
in practice, then you put him in the game and he really
struggles. You also see that same player
who does really well in the game struggle and practice.
And so this to me, like ecological dynamics explains why
that is that we see these things in our minds as coaches.
We want to reward the the, the good, the hard work.
You know, we want, we want to reward the buy in that players
have in the practice setting. And we and we hope that that
sets them up for success. But sometimes I remind myself of
like, like, OK, it's not so much about the always to be the
mechanical behavior, you know, in terms of the movements all
the time or even the fact of like, OK, I know for example, my
for for hitters, the machine setup that I have is way way.
It's, it's, it's leaving a lot to be desired as far as, OK, I
got multiple machines here. They're not necessarily set up
at the right angles. They're not set up at the right
heights. The velocity is not right, the
movement isn't right. The sequence, all this sort of
stuff is just not right. But at the end of the day, for
me, it's actually more about, or rather in our previous
discussion, it was asking the question of like, OK, what
transcends these practice environments into the game?
You know, what is this thing that becomes the bridge or the
through line that helps us transcend the the fact that
things are different, you know, the practice environment to the
game environment, vice versa. And so for me, it comes back to
this whole notion of problem solving.
If, if skill is a search and a search to converge onto a
functional solution, the, the athletes that are better at
adapting and searching and honing in on a solution are
going to have success in my mind, or going to be able to, to
be more adaptable and all that sort of stuff.
And so for me, it's actually trying to figure out what are
these things that kind of transcend it.
And so a lot of it goes back to in some ways it actually you're,
you're starting to even again, look at the more intangible
things, the things that are a little bit harder to measure
because these to me are the things that transcend in a way.
So for example, in one of our other episodes, we talked about
intention and the role of intention and the importance of
intention. So to me, intent is something
that transcends or that you can take from the practice
environment to the game environment.
So to me, like it's it's the in some ways the mental side are
some of the things that you can you can actually port over from
one spot to the next. And really what you're trying to
do in my mind of like, OK, because even though the
representativeness is never going to be scaled at 100,
because even if you were inner squad and you're scrimmaging,
that's still not the same as a game when you're playing against
an outside opponent with an umpire, you know, like that,
that changes the whole dynamic. It's not the same as
scrimmaging. And so again, and it's not the
same as having fans. It's not the same as, you know,
playoffs. It's not the all these sort of
things, right? So because of that, really what
you're trying to do within practice is create these
different. You're trying to, in my mind,
you're trying to have them go through different experience,
different things where they're going through these different
processes, where they're honing their process of converging on
solutions and finding success. And sometimes that does look
like what we've talked about in the past of exploration.
You're exploring, you're trying to learn how to gather
information, how to become sensitive to that information,
and then how to take that information and exploit it and,
or find ways to couple your movement to it to have
functional outcomes. And so for me, that's, that's
initially kind of how I'm, I'm thinking about it as far as
like, you know, how am I transcending the fact that even
if my, my best representative practice environment may still
be not enough. So what are the things that
transcend? And so the thing that I'm going
to kind of try to land the plane on is This is why I think as
frustrating as it is to me in some ways, but it's humbling in
a good way of like, I've actually learned more from the
people that I think are wrong often times than the people that
I agree with. And here's where I'm going with
this, because I think the thing that transcends often times is
culture, right? Teams with good culture often
times outperform those who are doing all the technical things
correctly. Now, a good a good a team with
good culture also does the technical things well, but they
may not do it as well as another team that really heavily focuses
on it. And and the reason why I think
the culture team wins is going back to kind of loop this in of
like they're the their thing actually transcends their
practice environment. It it can transfer over to the
game environment. And so that that's at least my
thought process of like where things start to like the old
school, you could say the softer skills really in my mind are the
separators when it comes to the execution of these things.
I think it's important to point out that, you know, sometimes it
feels like if you're just stepping into this world, that
this idea of making things more representative, One side of the
coin that I've seen is it's always better to turn up the
representative scale. It's always better for it to
look, feel and act more like the game.
And I think in general that's true, but not always.
And I think we one example that pops for me right away was when
I was a school teacher and had a young man who played basketball
on the weekends for AAU tournament.
He'd always want to come back and tell me how he did.
And so he'd tell me all the points he scored and all the
things he did, and I'd always ask him the same question.
I go, did you ever like finish on the left side with your left
hand and you go, no, like, why does that matter?
And, and like, I was trying to guide him a little bit to be
like, because when you go play in these environments where the
performance is really important for him, he's playing really
good competition. He's going to go back to the
things that work for him, the attractor states, the things
that he's comfortable with that he's done over and over that he
will find success with. He won't try to use his left
hand, his weak hand, his offhand to become a more well-rounded
player. And, and I think that's the
purpose at, you know, like can we create environments that help
the athlete explore different things, build and an abundance
of, of movement solutions regardless of their sport?
And while we're doing that, can we turn the representativeness
up a bit, recognizing that maybe we as coaches don't always have
perfect control over that, as you just identified.
So I just want to at least put that in there quick to say if
you heard what Garrett just said and you said, oh, so it has to
has to be just like the game all the time.
No, it's just we're probably pushing back more on the more
drill based like that doesn't look like the game at all.
And so can we turn that up and make it look a little different.
A lot of times we have to take them out of the game in order to
immerse them in an environment where they're going to work on
the things that they are struggling with.
That's exactly what's happening, I think with where actually
representative learning design and the constraint LED approach
sort of coalesce is. I'm trying to put constraints on
my players based off the things that they need to work on while
keeping the environment as similar as I possibly can to the
game so I'll have better transfer training.
Yeah. And I think there's a couple of
things. One, I think we we'll see.
I'm sorry to lose my trying to do 2 things at once.
One, I think we should probably go over and cover like what are
the what are the principles for representative practice design
or learning design? These like there's two, there's
two main things that that that play into representative
learning design. One is functionality and that's
the the degree to which the same specifying information is
available as it would be in competition.
And then two, action fidelity, the degree to which practice
movements are similar to the movements performed in
competition or in the game. And what's really interesting to
me on that last point specifically is if you go and
look, I remember when ZAP first came out and they had all these
pro hitters that they had used for their models and all this
sort of stuff. And you go and you watch any pro
guy, not any, but like the majority of pro guys must use
Mike Trout as an example. The way he swings in BP is not
at all what what his swing looks like in a game.
And I think for me, that's a really interesting thing because
then you're like, OK, So what is transferring there?
Yeah, OK. Some of it might be feels this
and that or whatever. But like, even I saw today on
Twitter, Glass now talking about, you know, being back and
and pitching again. And he was talking about, you
know, yeah, maybe I'll focus on mechanics and practice and might
be butchering this. But his main thing was like,
once I get to the game, I'm not thinking about any of that.
I'm just trying to be as athletic as I can be.
And so to me, that then says because most of these guys,
right, when they're playing their best, they're not really
up there thinking too much. They might have some specific
intentions that they are they're focused on.
You know, with Mike Trout, I heard that for him, his approach
was basically if the ball's away, I'm going to hit a line
drive over the second baseman's head and if it's in, I'm going
to hit a line drive over the shortstop set.
You know, I've also heard that he's there, the trash can out in
left center. Like he aims for that, right?
So like his, his thoughts or intentions are pretty minimal.
He's not sitting there thinking about mechanics.
And so that's where to me it becomes like, OK, how much are
these fields and these different things that we're doing in
practice? How much do they actually
matter? Like how much is it actually
transferring? Because if you go back to the,
the, the, the 8020 rule, OK, 20% of what you do derives 80% of
the results that you get and then 80% of what you do gets you
the last 20. So that makes me wonder how like
really it's a small, it's a small set of things that are
actually getting you most of the results.
It's probably the things that look and feel a lot more like
the game rather than that those things that don't.
And so that just says to me of like, OK, why is it that a guy
looks great, like we talked about before in practice in BP
and he gets in the game and that doesn't show up, right?
Those movements, those moves don't show up in the game.
OK, So this this to me comes back to all right, maybe maybe
the specifying information going back to functionality, maybe the
specifying information was not their present, enabling them to
couple their movement to 1A to pick up and then two or B, then
they can't use that to shape their movement.
So now you're missing those things and that's why the
movement doesn't look the same. And so to me, this is where we
have to start to think about our practice when we're doing our
practice design and we're actually implementing our
practices. I mean, these are some like, I
know I'm saying something that like all good coaches are like,
well, duh, I want this to look like the game, like you need to
take it serious. Just walk through, you know,
what the the reps and all that sort of stuff.
And that's, that's where to me, like we need to reiterate that
more and more of like, OK, so then maybe though, if, if the
athlete isn't moving in a way that looks game like, then maybe
we need to tweak our practice design.
We need to tweak our practice activity.
We make some changes, do some constraint manipulation to start
to trying to search and defined the right constraints or the
right setup within our in our practice activity so that it is
so that the the athletes movements start to look and more
like the game. So for me, that's that's one of
the things that I'm always keeping in the back of my mind
is like, OK, what is what's going on there?
Now the second point, I want to kind of now that we've kind of
established that I think that's non controversial and I'm going
to sort of I think we need everything is about knowing
where it lives and breathes, right?
It's it's about where does all this fit?
When do we use it and what situations and all that sort of
stuff. So I want to now throw something
else in there in here to moderate this because if we're
always at really high representativeness, maybe our
exploration, we're not able to explore as much things are too
rigid, right? You start looking at something
like banana ball, right? All of a sudden now there's,
there's a lot more exploration that's going on now.
A lot of that stuff may not come back, but this gets into going
back to all right, trying to build, what is it abundance?
What is the term that you used before?
Like building a big bigger toolbox, right?
So I'm, I want to build a bigger toolbox.
I want to have more movement options, more ways of moving,
all that sort of stuff. Then maybe we need to actually
open it up, loosen things a little bit, make him less
representative so that we can do more exploration so that we
become more sensitive to to the information in the environment.
In our other, in a, in another podcast that we, we did around
John Verbaki and, and he was talking about machine learning
and neural networks and how a lot of models will will overfit
to the data and you need to introduce some noise so that you
don't overfit to, to the data and you can actually drive
proper insights. The same thing is true here when
it comes to practice. If we're always doing the same,
same things over and over again, we fall into different sort of
attractor states, patterns, natural patterns, and we start,
we stop exploring. And so to me, this is where at
times we actually need to maybe switch some things up.
So those are kind of my, my initial thoughts on, you know,
when we're talking about transfer of training,
representative practice design and then also exploration,
'cause these to me these are like the three pillars of like
player development. I have heard the, you know, the
phrase slices of the game was something that the folks over
emergency use a lot. And I think that it's easy to
the miss that a slice of the game is not a slice of the game,
so to speak, if it doesn't have some of the things that you're
talking about there, the functionality and the action
fidelity. So keeping it on my phase of the
game that the pitchers, just because I'm doing a three to 1
and everybody's taking a Rep, that's not a slice of the game.
They know what's going to happen.
They're not making a pitch. There is no goal, there is no
connecting to any information that would cause me to have to
execute a pitch then get over. That's not a slice of the game
in the way that they're talking about you're.
Talking about a PFPA three to 1 is.
Yeah, a traditional pitcher's fielding practice kind of just
doing the same thing over and over.
It might look like a piece of the game, right?
It might look like something that happens, but it's
completely decontextualized from how that thing actually emerges.
And so the question becomes, well, we need to work on that
and it doesn't happen very often.
So how do we do that? And so for me, like part of that
is if if I don't have a catcher, I don't have a good situation to
have the the pitcher throw a baseball.
That would be my first choice is that we would still have some
sort of goal consequence point system where they still have a
goal of they just throwing a strike.
Maybe I don't have a batter and I need to control more.
I need to get more reps, you know, because we know that like
obviously that helps. Obviously seeing that thing more
and more and experiencing it more and more is going to help.
So let's just say I don't have that.
I don't have a catcher and I can't connect it.
That is a piece that's important.
Well then at the very least I'm going to do something like not
let them know exactly what's happening, right?
Like maybe I would hit it over there or maybe I would squirt a
bunt, or maybe I'll just hit the ball to a totally different
place. Like they wouldn't necessarily
know what's coming. Maybe I would put base runners
on at different places and have the balls hit to different
places. Is that perfect, perfectly
representative? Of course not.
But I think it starts to get towards what we're talking
about, that the slice of the game is trying to turn up the
representativeness so that there is at least some specifying
information that is similar to the game and that it is looking
similar to game movements. So often what we see is a fake
pitch and then just jogging over and and it's not the same.
And so I think that that's also a piece that probably needs to
be highlighted, is that a slice of the game is going to have
exactly what you talked about. It's going to have, you know,
functionality and action fidelity in those two different
areas. One of the other things too that
I was kind of thinking about when I was trying to look up
here is there we also I think when it comes to the practice
design itself, I think because we're all limited by time,
right? And so it's like a question of
like, because I was thinking about this today, right?
The first time we run through something and rather, OK, I'm
going to back this up. We myself and Baker take a lot
of inspiration and even Sean and others take a lot of inspiration
from parkour and, and, you know, capoeira and all these other
sort of movement disciplines. And with them, like there's,
there's a level of man, I'm losing my, my mind here.
My apologies. I don't remember where I was
going with this. Did have to do with like, oh
man, it's a good thing that we might not be releasing this one.
You'll just have to chop it up like crazy.
Yeah, I suppose. Oh, OK.
So when it comes to to like other other movement practices
such as parkour and capoeira and these other things that both
Baker and I have drawn inspiration from, what you learn
when you are trying to begin to learn new movements, you're
starting to you're starting to try to interact with your
environment. You don't start going full bore,
right? You will do a couple of like
slower speeds, run UPS, just kind of feel it out and that
sort of thing. So to me that's like your base
level, it's a little bit of exploration.
It's, it's a lot slower, it's a lot more, it's a lot less
variable, although that you can try it in a few different ways,
all that sort of stuff. And I was thinking about it
today as we're doing some of our, our defensive work and
we're, we're implementing different plays.
It's like, OK, it's sometimes nice to actually walk through
something first rather than just do the whole thing, have it be
live and trying to figure it out because there's just so much
information. You have no idea where to
attend, where to go, any of that sort of thing.
And so it, it kind of comes back to you need this initial
constraint of an example and that starts to guide your
movement, guide your actions. And then from there you can
start to explore off of that. And so to me, like there's this
progression that goes on in, in terms of practice of like, OK,
where, where are we and what do we want to, how we want to start
interacting with things? Because I think eco D has in
some ways, rightly, because this has been the predominant way of
doing things and to try to break people out of this of like just
this mass, I think it's mass practice.
What's a just constant practice, right?
Of like doing the same thing over and over and over again
with this idea of drilling it when you, when you start to
think about it, Well, one, the research shows that the
stickiness of doing things over and over and over and over and
over again, it's basically, I mean, we've all experienced
this, that what you're doing is cramming.
So how much of all of the tests that you've crammed for, how
much information do you remember after the test?
Like not very much, right? And So what they find is that if
you want learning that's going to stick around for longer and
to transfer and across different situations and experiences,
etcetera, that you actually want to space things out, you want to
allow some level of forgetting to occur.
And so I think we have to part of like this idea and this
notion of like creating some variability allows for some
forgetting. And I think that element needs
to get played in. But at the same point where I've
come to with this whole notion of, OK, every Rep needs to be
different. I think there's, there's a flaw
in that. There's a flaw in that thinking.
Not because, because I don't think we, we, we quite always
those of us who are in the ecological world and, and all
the sort of, oh, what's the word?
I'm looking for all the rhetoric that's out there.
I, I, I, I think rather we don't appreciate that eco deep
principles are always present all the time.
They're always acting and the, the whole notion of Rep without
Rep is true even when you are doing the same thing or even
when you're doing constant practice doing the same, like
you're drilling the same thing over and over and over again.
Self organization is still present, it's still active, it's
still working. And Rep without Rep is still
happening. It's still active and it's still
working. So, and, and so to me, it's like
actually, if we don't rather it gives us an opportunity.
Cause when we go back to what we've talked about before of the
importance of intention, right? What's our intention when it
comes to doing these different types of activities?
Whether it's constant practice of like, I'm just trying to feel
the straight up ground ball over and over again.
I'm trying to throw my fastball, whatever middle, etcetera, or
I'm just trying to throw, let me throw 5 fastballs here.
I think you can still apply ecological principles in
constant practice. And I actually think there's
value to it of doing that. And so that's actually where my
mind is kind of changed a little bit and where I kind of wanted
to, to start challenging some things because we like I, the,
the, the language or the rather the rhetoric that you hear.
And that what we're, where we get knocked is like, Oh, you
guys just do a bunch of random stuff.
Like all your stuff is all about just being random.
It's like that actually, there's a time and place for that.
You know, some of the some of the stuff that I've I've run
across too isn't necessarily from eco D, but one on just
learning right. And in learning, if you wanted
to get really good at art history, you would think and the
way most people study is just to study one era at a time.
But if you actually want to get good at picking out what era art
is from, you actually need to study multiple eras at once,
because then you can start to notice the differences.
And so I say all that or there's there's other study about like
learning music or a song or whatever and just doing like
small strips, like of the sheet music.
And all of a sudden you get much better at all these different
types of things. And so there's, there's a level
of, yes, you do need some structure and randomness can
help create some level of flexibility and you can actually
start to see patterns when you do that.
But at some level, what I've also experienced is that that
guys can sometimes struggle when you go back to something that is
just a pattern. And so you also have to it.
Well, I wanted to share this one video cause this one person I
was listening to, he was talking about how, and he's also an
artist and this is interesting, right?
He was used. He, he was saying that.
What was it? No, I didn't pull this up.
What's this clip? Repetition is the soil in which
spontaneity is birthed, is what he said.
And it's, and he's talking about like kind of in a way doing the
same thing over and over and over and over again.
And when you start to like when you look at something like dance
and flow stuff, really when you start breaking it down, dance is
just a bunch of repeated patterns.
And when I was learning swing dance, I thought I was doing
something really boring. But when you start thinking
about it more to, to somebody who's watching it, they're like,
oh, wow, that's kind of, that's really cool.
And so like, I just strung together a bunch of like basic
moves. And that's kind of the thing
once you look at like the animal flow, guys, I don't think animal
flow is the right word, But you know, the, the movement flow,
not, not the baseball 1, but like the, the, the fitness type
people, their stuff. They're just like spins and
different things. And it's just like repeated
patterns. And through that, though, they
create some very, very creative things.
And so I say all that to say is that actually I'm starting to re
think about, are we really super anti repetition?
Like do we actually need to moderate that, you know, because
people in the past have found that, well, when I, when I
practice a bunch of, you know, throwing more fastballs, I tend
to throw my fastball better. You know, when I practice this,
you know, if I want to get feel for my change up, well, I'm not,
I'm going to eliminate all these other pitches and I'm so that I
basically have to throw more change UPS, right?
Or like, I think it was like Johann Santana, in order for him
to learn his change up or whatever, they just basically
told him, you're going to throw nothing other than change UPS,
right? And so like, I guess that's
there's that clearly helped him in some way.
So I I think we have to, we have to, we have to have an account
for that. Yeah, I would add that one thing
I've noticed since applying this is when you're applying it with,
you know, my team, for example, my pitchers, etcetera, your
group, it feels like when you start talking about the
principles of not doing the same thing the same way over and over
and over again, because that's not actually what emerges in the
game when you look at it with a, you know, fine tooth comb, so to
speak. What tends to happen is let's
just take catch play, for example, what you do, you know,
all your in fielders are doing it, outfielders, etcetera.
All your pitchers are doing it before they go to the bullpen,
they're going to go play catch play.
And whether you're, you know, a proponent of certain distances
or Alan Jagger or whatever, right, like there's this form or
this structure that a lot of people put in.
So when I institute something like we want to have more
athletic catch play, we we don't want to just be robots the whole
time, but we want to move and flow and do different things.
What tends to happen is that guys feel like every throw has
to be 180° different than the one before.
And that's been frustrating for me because that's not actually
what's happening during the game.
I want to acknowledge that. I think exploring way beyond and
even just slightly beyond what they're experiencing as a
pitcher still has crucial, important benefits.
But for instance, yesterday during practice, because I've,
I've captured that and seen that so often, I finally just had to
controls the wrong word, but zoom them in much, much
stronger. And what I did was, is I talked
to each set of partners for catch play and I said, hey,
player A is going to start the catch play with something that
they want to start with. A lot of our guys will start
with like they'll just do circles with their arms and then
they'll just let the ball go. I go, the other person's
required to copy that once. And then what's going to happen
is the the original person who sort of chose the initial drill
movement, whatever you want to call it, you have to figure out
a way to do it such that when I look at you, I go, oh, that
looks similar, but it's just a little bit different.
And then the other person needs to build on top of that.
And now they're going to do it and I'm going to go, they're
doing the same like throw, but he just took a step to the side
or a step backwards. And you're going to do that 5 or
6 times. You're going to try to build
onto each other and you're going to sort of play a game where you
watch the other person. You go, oh, that makes me think
I could subtly vary it in this way.
And you're going to do that for the entirety of your catch play.
And you're going to do it 5 or 6 times.
And then the other partners now going to pick a new thing to do.
They're going to define what it is.
You're going to go back and forth for five to six reps each.
So you're getting 11:50, hopefully unique and different,
but still within variable, but not.
So I just have to do crazy stuff.
And I think that what can emerge from that is really creative
things such as what you're talking about with you on
Santana having to throw only change UPS.
Well, he's not only, especially if he was being asked to do that
in the game, if he's coming up in the minors, he's gone.
Well, then I have to figure out how to do different things with
this to get guys out if it's the only pitch I can ever throw.
And so that's where I think that what you're saying can have some
really beautiful creativity is that with when you constrain
them and you say this is the only option you have, you have
to start getting really creative with how that gets expressed.
Even if from a 30,000 foot view, it looks like the same pitch
over and over or it looks like a very similar movement over and
over, at a more granular level, it becomes very variable.
And I actually think that's something I'm looking for my
guys to do more of. Not when I do my plyo work.
Everything looks like a totally different job every time, but
they're finding subtle ways to move and solve the problem that
they're trying to do. Whether they're being more
internally focused and they want to focus a little bit on some
sort of mechanical thing that they want.
I'm not going to push back against that all the time.
Or if it's more of an external target goal and we're just
putting different things. So I think that that's an
important piece that you're bringing out about that
repetition. And, and I think that we see
this, there's a website where it's, I think it's only haikus
about spam. And it's like, how silly and
weird is that? But they put such a crazy
constraint that what you get is incredible creativity about
haikus within spam because that's the only thing they can
write about. And I think that that's what
we're kind of talking about here is that there's incredible value
in that because our game does look fairly similar thing to
thing to thing. It's not like a football game
where it's going to be, you know, the movements are going to
be dictated and very different whether you're closer to the
sidelines, bigger hole position, etcetera.
Ours do tend to at times look a little bit more similar.
And I think that that's maybe we're talking about a little bit
here. Yeah, I'm going to try to do
something here. I don't know if I'm going to be
successful. I'm going to try to tie a bunch
of things in here together. Let's see here one of the things
that because I mean there's a lot there that I want to kind of
touch on. Let's see here all, all that's
running away from me. So when it comes to going back
to what we've, we've been talking about transfer of
training, OK, we want to see things transfer to the field.
So this is something that Sean brought up when he was working
with Everson and he would like the, their whole offseason theme
was exploration. And so he's exploring, trying to
be creative, finding ways to get stuff done.
I, I feel like I've said this multiple times on the podcast,
but anyways, hopefully this this will start to resonate and make
more sense in the context here of OK, so he is doing all this
exploration. He's getting into pre season
where he needs to win a job and he's still exploring in pre
season when he needs to find us, find the most parsimonious
solution and get the job done. And this for me, like that story
illustrated to me this, this tension, this that you're
playing here of exploration and creativity and the most
functional solution. And this actually comes back to,
to me of like one of the vital things that ecological dynamics,
especially ecological psychology is trying to get us, is trying
to get us to understand is it's about connecting to the
environment, to the information that is present right now,
right? This is the thing of like, you
know, all the, the, the mental performance coaches, right,
Brian Kane, etcetera, right? They keep talking about being
present, right? Being present to the what is,
what is present and how am I coupling my movement, my action
to that. And what all this exploration in
this creativity stuff is trying to do is trying to allow us to
connect to the what is and also to begin to be more sensitive to
the to the, to the affordances that are available, not just one
affordance, right? Because we go back to the
attractor states that we kind of talked about before, like our
natural tendencies are favorite solutions, right?
If we only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,
right? But if you start to play with
the hammer and start to see other ways of using the hammer,
once you get into situations where you're like, this is a
little puzzling. All of a sudden, the, the, the
affordance or the, you begin to see another way to solve that
problem with that hammer, how you can use things when you're
missing the tool that you that would be ideal for it or you'd
have no idea. All of a sudden now, because
you've done all this exploration, all this creativity
stuff, you become, you be, you're able to find a solution
in that moment that fits the problem instead of trying to hit
it like it's a nail when it's not a nail.
And so to me, this is, this is kind of where things need to
start to transition of like, OK, instead of trying to be as
creative as possible, how can I be most in the present and just
let things flow? And like, like I was talking
about before, this whole notion of repetition is the soil in
which spontaneity is birthed, right?
Being in the moment, the more you can get into the moment.
Because some of this has been a hard thing for me to reconcile,
you know, in, in my faith practice.
And there's so much about the, the, the being Eastern Orthodox
that is very, very similar to ecological dynamics, this whole
notion of being present, of embodiment and participation and
all these sort of things. But yet there's all this
repetition within the, how things are going, like your
prayer rule, all this sort of stuff.
And that it's, it's, it's, you already know what's going to
happen. But there's something about it
of like when you are so in tune with what's going on, you
basically can give yourself fully to it because you, you
basically this is this is, This is why you need rules, right?
This is why there's rules in baseball so that you can give
yourself fully to it and know what to expect.
And and not like just out of completely left field have to
worry about, you know, somebody just coming out of the stands
and just like tackling you like it's football, like just
something just completely random, you know.
And so this is this is where you kind of get back to of like you,
you want rather there are patterns within within the game.
And the more that you can get into the moment, the more that
you can start to introduce like this is this to me comes back to
the CLA of of skillful and artful manipulation of
constraints. All right, the system is moving.
All right, let's throw, let's throw a little little curveball
into the mix. All right, How does that, how
does that change what's going on?
And you we're because I've now I've spent a little bit more
time looking at dynamic systems theory and some of this stuff
came up when I was initially first reading dynamics of skill
acquisition. So what you begin to see when
you look at the the movement behavior is that or even like in
the brain, right? There's brain waves.
And when you have coherence, it's actually very rhythmical,
OK? And the same thing is true when
it comes to movement. There are going back to
attractor states, OK? So there's this idea and this
concept of like, OK, out of dynamic systems theory or chaos
theory, a dynamical system is very sensitive to the initial
conditions. You change the initial condition
conditions just ever so slightly and you're the outcomes that
you'll get are going to start to diverge.
Like they're never going to follow the same exact path.
You're never going to repeat the same exact thing.
But early on it will look very similar.
But the longer things play out, the more divergent there is.
So this is This is why because they use, they use chaos theory
to that's how we get our weather.
This is why they can't predict more than 10 days out with any
level of accuracy is because the further the model goes out, the
more the more the error begins to, you know, get magnified.
You know, it's the same thing, right?
If I'm off just a little bit at the beginning and I want to go
to, you know, McDonald's or whatever.
If I'm off just by a little bit, no big deal because it's still
going in the direction that I'm trying to go.
If I want to go north of even if I'm off just a little bit to the
West, I'm still heading north. But the further out I go, the
more off of north I'm going to be.
So this is true when it comes to our, our movements and whatnot,
is that these, these small conditions start to make these
big changes later, like longer down the road.
But also within that you see this pattern, these patterns
emerge in these dynamical systems.
And these patterns often times, well, to me, the, the way that
they're, they, they move, they're, they kind of have like
a, they have a rhythm to it. There's something, there's
something about them that. So for example, a lot of the,
the different tasks that are like oscillations.
And so there's where I'm going with this is that rhythm seems
to be a huge component in order for us to move in a fluid way.
And this is something that in the sport movement skill
conference, Rafe Kelly talked about, in talking about like
what are the basics of, of locomotion or, or whatnot.
And so to me, this is where rhythm and what is rhythm?
Rhythm is a repeated pattern. And so this is where, OK, so if
you can get in rhythm, all of a sudden now you can start to be
creative. You can do, you know, you can
syncopate things, right? Like this is, or you can slow
things down, whatever. You know, you can take a pause,
all these different sort of things.
And still, as long as you stay in rhythm, your movements are
able to, to be to to flow and to stay connected to the what is.
So anyways, that's that to me is like something that I've been
thinking more about is, is what is this interplay between
repetition and never and Rep without Rep?
How do these two things play together to get US1 creativity
but also skilled performance? It makes me think of that that
our starting catcher had this past weekend, he was late on a
fastball and then for some reason the lefty threw him a
breaking ball and he was way out in front of it but got his
barrel to it and hit it right down the line for a home run.
And not only was the sequence I thought terrible, but it was
such a perfect example of how to look at one side of the of the
equation, so to speak. Having the same swing every
single time will not work. Now.
What would be the, when we're doing a dynamic warm up or we're
doing catch play, and I'm talking about that example and
it's like you're making every Rep different.
That feels like it can be a lot crazier different when you're
swinging a bat. Like there's not a ton of
different ways. There's not ways to me that I
currently think of that I'm going to swing that bat.
It's going to be drastically different in terms of having to
hit a ball coming at me, but I could, I could pull the ball by
trying to get jammed. I could pull the ball by being
on time. I could pull the ball by being
out front. Essentially, I could find these
creative ways to do the same thing, to pull the ball and and
to see if I could have success hitting it down the line.
Because in this situation, like it didn't look super pretty.
He wasn't. I don't think he was necessarily
fooled because he was late on the previous pitch, but he was a
little out front of this, but he had a functional solution and it
was a great one. It was a home run.
It was the best solution that you could possibly have as a
hitter. And I think that that's that's
what it makes me think of just a little bit is, is, is how do we
zone in our repetition rhythm, etcetera, that you're talking
about our Rep without Rep to accomplish different things in
the same way, but but not accidentally communicate that it
has to look drastically crazy weird.
But but that we can look at a lot of these players and
programs that are they having success because they're doing
the same drill over and over. I think we would fight back on
that. And I think we would look at the
more long term development and acknowledge that those guys are
being embedded in a lot of game environments, etcetera.
But I think that that's one way that we could look at that and
go, why? Why might that player be getting
better instead of ruined? Because sometimes I think maybe
the way that we talk about ecodynamics is like, we almost
like, what if you're going to do the same thing every single
time, then that's going to ruin you.
And, and that's not what we're saying.
What we're saying is that there's a better way to do it.
You'll probably get better at hitting a baseball if you hit
the baseball in the same way every single time because you're
still hitting a baseball. The human body is an amazingly
adaptable. We just think that this way will
make you better faster, it'll make you more adaptable.
It'll make you have solutions like our catcher did this past
weekend, ones that maybe don't look perfect, that are
completely functional for the situation that emerged.
Well, and also to, to that point of you're more adaptable and
this going back to your point of yeah, OK, well, OK, so I got, I
got a response on a, on a comment that I put on a, a
YouTube video about about traject and my, my thoughts on,
on that. And they took it to me.
And like, oh, well, then if, if that's the case, you know, then
we should see guys getting worse and we don't see that.
And it's like, no, that's not all what I'm saying.
What I am saying is that you might not see a transfer.
And here's the other thing, right?
With all things that we do, OK, this I, I learned this
specifically in strength and conditioning.
There is a there's a bell curve, right?
The whole the whole rating scale 80 was it 6020, right that that
they use that scouts use, right? That's the bell curve.
OK. So there's a bell curve on any
training modality where you're going to have your high
responders and you're going to have your low responders.
And so and also too, you have multiple different things of
like survivorship bias, all these different types of things
like that that are that we have to remember when we start
looking at the success that a facility or program or whatever
has, it's like, OK, for how many guys that it worked for?
How many guys did it not work for?
Do you have? Because again, it just goes back
to this whole thing of like, well, if all you've got is a
hammer, than everything looks like a nail.
And if you happen to be a screw, you're going to just get smashed
like your nail, that might not go so well because it a screw is
not designed like a nail. So anyways, you know, the whole
like, you know, circle or square peg circle type of thing, right?
So the other element that needs to be remembered is that these
ways of like we even talked about in one of our previous
episodes of like, you know, thinking that, OK, if I zone in,
you know, you might have success If you if especially if your
opponent hasn't adapted yet, their strategy, OK, your
strategy might work because maybe your strategy fits a niche
like within within the current landscape of how the game is.
But if the game keeps developing and changing strategies, This is
why, for example, the flyball revolution was just went
gangbusters for a little bit, right?
Is that everybody before was their mentality was all right.
I'm just trying to hit a ground ball to to the second to
backside, you know, low line drives all this sort of stuff
station to station. And then pitchers are getting
even more nasty. And then the defense is getting
better. Guys are becoming more athletic.
And so then all the sudden the strategy isn't not as effective
as it used to be. All of a sudden you tell guys to
like hit the ball in the air and surprise, surprise, like, you
know, and two, be ready for the fastball.
Most, most pitching, like the pitching side used to be really
fastball focused. You know, try to and they preach
throw in strikes, get strike one.
So then you could sit there and you could you could train
fastball, be on time for the fastball and just go ham on
that. We're not there anymore.
That game is that game is largely moving on.
And so this is where from a from an offensive standpoint, this
whole like, OK, just get your a swing off all the time.
I don't think that like it. It will work for some, but I
think that's not going to work for everybody.
And so you need to. Have to run into a picture where
it doesn't work. Right.
And so it's like, OK, are you, is your offense only
one-dimensional? And this like we're using
offense as an example, but like, is your game just whether it's
offense, defense, whatever, is your game one-dimensional or
does your game have flexibility so that it you have multiple
tools in the toolbox so that, OK, we run into a certain
constraint, the wind's blowing in.
OK, Do you have another way? Do you have a way to adapt?
And if you're this go like, and I think, you know, this comes
back to I think this is the wave, sorry to cut you off, but
this is the wave that I feel like it's kind of in in the air
within the the baseball community of like, OK, what
Glasnost said being athletic. What does that mean?
OK, I think that's always been in there.
But what does it mean? I think ecological dynamics can
explain what that means in a very detailed way that's
concrete, not just this kind of abstract concept of athleticism,
right? Like, whereas like what we're
saying is athleticism means that you have multiple different ways
to solve the problem, you're adaptable.
So yes, that's, that's still a broad term, but I think it's
more, it brings more clarity to what is being asked and said
rather than just like, Oh yeah. Like, because even that was said
to me. Oh yeah, you're you're athletic.
OK. What does that mean?
Oh, well, you do things that are different.
OK. But is it functional?
Because that was my thing was like, I mean, it's not as
functional. Yeah.
OK, maybe I move different ways, whatever.
I don't know. But I did not perform at a high
enough level, right? So like that's that to me
becomes the the the other piece of it is like athleticism has to
also play. So that those are at least kind
of my my initial thoughts when it comes to all right, we need
to I don't even know what I'm saying.
What were you going to say? I think This is why scouting
reports can work and do work, quite frankly, and why teams
why? And I think we've learned this
from football. I'll confess, I'm not like a
huge, I'm going to sit and watch 8 million clips.
I I've never been in the football world, but I think we
really adopted that from them. They watch a lot of film.
You heard Peyton Manning do that all the time, and so you
absolutely pick up on tendencies and things that are going to
guide your search when you're in that situation.
I think This is why scouting reports work is because you'll
watch a team, you'll see a tendency, something that you can
exploit, and then you go do that as a pitcher, as a hitter on the
defensive side of the ball. We just had a scouting meeting
for our first few teams. We play on spring break and one
of the teams that came up was like, Oh yeah, this team hits
for a lot of average. Like they've good hitters, high
average. Oh, by the way, they also like
crush balls. Oh, OK, so they do damage.
Yeah, but they might like steal and bunt on you too.
OK, so pretty much they'll find a way to win the game in any
way. How are they?
They'll be like the best team we play.
OK, that makes sense. And so that's kind of what we're
talking about here is if you are that one trick pony, it it'll
it'll definitely probably work. And, and I think we see this a
lot in so many different places that you know, well, I'll, I'll
say I'm an Atlanta Braves fan and couple years ago, I think
they won 100 and some games they like.
I think they tied the twins home run record like then unreal
offensive year. And then they got into the
playoffs, played the Phillies, and they had guy after guy after
guy who were throwing smoke and like hard breaking balls out of
the pen. And they lost the series.
And obviously it's a short, it's a random game.
It's not, as you know, baseball can be so random like that.
But I think the point is, is that's probably why scouting
reports are very useful. But that's where the advantage
could be had for you is if you are training in a way that is
functionally finding solutions to win games in different ways,
you're going to be really hard to beat.
And that could very well be the next thing that people run after
here is how can you help a player score in different ways?
How can you help a pitcher pitch in different ways to be able to
get any sort of hitter out? And I think that that's what
we're kind of saying with the back to the repetition pieces.
Can you do the similar outcome thing in different ways and not
just? Get the ball hard in different
ways. Can you score in multiple
different ways? Those those are the teams that
are quite frankly, the hardest to beat because how do you
exploit that team? I don't know.
You just have to execute better. You just have to be more
talented. You just, you know, that's
really, really hard to exploit. And one of the things too on, on
what you're saying is I think part of the reason why
tendencies and why we're seeing so much success at the
professional level of exploiting people's weaknesses is because
they just that's the athletes or hitters or doesn't matter which
side of it aren't trained to be adaptable.
So they're, they're left swimming once their weakness is
found out. You know, and, and also to, to
go off of what you're talking about with with the Atlanta
Braves, it makes me think of the Minnesota Vikings, right?
They've had a great year and there's two different
strategies, right? There's the strategy that gets
you to the dance, meaning the playoffs.
And then there's the one that wins you the playoffs because
the teams, in order to get to the playoffs, you need to win X
number of games. So your strategy needs to be
able to beat more than half of your opponents, right?
And so like that's, but then to win the playoffs, your strategy
needs to be able to beat the top or like they're top teams of the
whole league. Those two things are not the
same. And like that's where even like
the Minnesota Twins, I feel like that's what that's that's why
they can't ever go far in the playoffs or why they get
eliminated almost right away, is that they they're built well
enough to get them through the season.
They're not built to beat the best teams or the teams that
have that, that have different strategies that are unique or
whatever. They their matchups to them
aren't very good. Their matchups may be really
great for the bottom half of the league, but they're not as well
or not as good at the top, right.
And this is kind of the thing of like, OK, yeah.
All right, we we beat all the teams we're supposed to, but how
do you do against the best teams?
That's really the measure of like how good you are in some in
some respects, right. If we're going to look at past
performance, predicting future performance, I'm going to go off
of like, how do you play against the best now?
Do you play down to the worst? Meaning if you start all if you
also lose to the bottom and while beating the top, like I
also think there's something wrong there.
But anyways, that like, and so I think that's that also plays
into again, back to how are we thinking about what we're trying
to do, our intention right there, the intent to well, you
know, the Seattle Mariners, we're just trying to win 53 or I
can't remember 54. I can't remember what the number
was 56% of their their games. That's what that that's their
intention. So their whole strategy and how
they think about their team and how they organize and run their
team is around that, right? Whereas, you know, I don't know
what the Dodgers mentality is and what their strategy is, but
it's it might be, you know, they have a different way of thinking
about it. So this, this kind of comes back
to how much intent and what your principles are really drive the
content and the, and the later on outcomes and the
sustainability of those outcomes.
And so for me, that's where an ecological approach allows you.
If your whole motto is like to be adaptable, I don't know how
that goes out of style, because as the, your opponent adapts,
you adapt to your opponent. And so if you are, you know,
kind of in a way like the Dodgers and you're staying out
ahead of it, you you got the, you got the lead and you're
going to keep iterating. And adapting, not a baseball
example, but here's probably a better example.
And granted, we know baseball, the randomness is much
different. So having this type of sustained
success is really hard. But one of the things that the
New England Patriots were, you know, famous for, so to speak,
is, you know, people said, well, they're a different team every
week, that they they find these things to exploit and they
become different. Now, some within the locker
room. And I think this is actually a
really good example of exactly what we're trying to talk about
here. It kind of got blown up in the
media as like they're a completely different team every
single time. And within the locker room they
said, well, no, we're not like we're, we're sticking to who we
are. And yet we adapt little by
little to the team that we play. And look at the success that
they had in that run. Now, obviously incredibly
talented players, one of the best quarterbacks of all time.
You have to have those pieces in place, but how then when you're
doing exactly what you're saying, when you're getting to
the playoffs and you're playing the best of the best, They have
this ability to make these minor adaptations to continue to win
and be the best amongst the best.
And that's essentially what we've gotten onto this train
with is sort of Rep without Rep, not being completely different
all the time, but sort of potentially for the paths,
staying true to who you are and yet finding different nuanced
ways to exploit, become adaptable, Do it in different
ways, win in different ways, because ultimately the only
thing that matters for them is winning titles.
And I think too, like it comes back to, you know, like we kind
of talked about before mindset, if it's already part of your
mindset, your intention to be adaptable and that adaptability
is something that you prioritize, then all right, when
things start to go like you're able to shift and, and it goes
back to again, what I was talking about before, the the
principle of, of staying in tune and connected to what is what
currently is going on to being present.
And adaptability is in my mind, really tied to that.
It's not adaptability for the sake of adaptability.
Going back to transfer training, kind of the, the whole point of
this is like it's about finding a functional fit.
It's about the execution, it's about the outcome, it's about
the performance outcomes. It's adaptability around that
and every like another key component of, you know, what are
the basics of ecological dynamics, right, is it's all
especially the ecological psychology side of it.
It's all about relationships, your relationship to the
information, the environment and the relationship to your
movements, your actions to the outcome.
And so your adaptability needs to be tied to that towards
working towards that end of finding success.
And so to me, that's that's what why an ecological approach is,
is extremely helpful to me, like, and why I'm so passionate
about trying to advocate for it. Because this way of thinking,
going back to like what I was talking about before of like,
OK, if you're off just a little bit, OK, early on, you may have
good results. But the further you go down that
road, if you don't have any self correcting mechanisms, you're
going to end up like your run of success is going to be short
lived. Maybe it's, you know, the, the
window that you have is going to be shorter than if you have
these self correcting mechanisms.
And to me, this, this, when I look at it like eco D the the
ideas, the concepts will keep you on the path that's going to
extend your window of success. And so for me, that's that's why
I think it's so powerful and is why it's so different than
everything else. And also again, it's a Michael
O'Connell put out a released a sub stack article today that I
thought is, is kind of where I think things need to get going.
As far as everybody is talking, you know, the, the this era has
been the era of data, you know, in being data-driven.
I think the next phase and where the next advancement lies is in
being principally driven because data doesn't doesn't tell you
what to do. Data needs to be analyzed.
So you need principles and frameworks to be able to help
you utilize that data in the most effective way.
Data doesn't interpret itself, you know, like, and you have to
be able to discern from good, bad, all this sort of stuff.
Like data is just just is data. And so you actually need a
framework, you need principles to actually know what to do with
that stuff. And so I think really ecological
dynamics, it gives you principles and a framework, a
way of thinking to be able to fully utilize everything in my
mind from the past and the the old and the new school stuff.
And allows you to sift things and to figure out what is good
and useful and functional and, and to know when and where to do
that. So that's kind of my pitch for
that. You got anything that you want
to land the plane on? No, just I think the the most
helpful thing is as we're searching for those principles,
I think that you highlighted it twice, once the beginning here
and then now again near at the end.
You know, being connected to the outcomes that you're looking
for. Not necessarily yeah, ones that
a spin rate or something, but something that's connected to
the game and and allows you getting yourself on base, right,
getting the next guy up as a hitter or or getting the batter
out as a pitcher. You know, the thing that that is
the very thing that will help you win the game.
That is the very thing that you're trying to do.
So I think staying connected to that and then ultimately kind of
what's underneath that is, is what you said at the beginning
that it really one of these principles is, is very clear
that it comes back to problem solving and having the ability
to solve multiple types of problems regardless of what
emerges. Yeah, I agree.
All right, until next time.