"Drillers are killers (they just don't realise they are killing themselves!)" a conversation with Bren Veziroglu

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi everyone, Stewart here before we get into today's podcast,
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Sometimes that impact goes as far as family members and

(00:23):
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(00:43):
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(01:04):
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(01:26):
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(01:46):
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Speaker 2 (01:56):
Welcome to the Townent Equation Podcast.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
If you are passionate about helping young people to leash
their potential and want to find ways to do that better,
then you've come to the right place. The Talent Equation
podcast seeks to answer the important questions facing parents, coaches,
and talent developers as they try to help young people
become the best they can be. This is a series

(02:22):
of unscripted, unpolished conversations between people at the razor's edge
of the talent community who are prepared to share their knowledge, experiences,
and challenges in an effort to help others get better faster. Listen, reflect,
and don't forget to join the discussion at the Talent
Equation dot co dot UK.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Enjoy the show.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Well, I'm really really pleased to be able to have
this conversation because it's one of those times where you
stumble across somebody who has really, really great content. And
I also owe a debt of gratitude to this gentleman
because he introduced me to Julia Blau and Jeff Wagman

(03:23):
through the interview he did with them, which was a
face to face interview.

Speaker 4 (03:28):
Jealous of that, I'll be.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
Honest and introduce me to their great book which I
have been devouring into, into Ecological Psychology. They were on
the previous podcast. We did rehearse his surname. I'm gonna
have a go at it again. I'm probably gonna get
it wrong, but we'll do my best. Bren ves Aolu,
Bren Welcome to the time Equation.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
Beg you sturet. Yeah, amazing to be.

Speaker 1 (03:52):
Here, great, great to have you. So I wonder if
I could just start the conversation off. I'd just love
to hear your story. I know a little bit obviously,
you know, following your content, haven't about it all yet,
still relatively relatively nube into that, but I'd love to
know a little bit about you know, your whole journey
in the in the in what you do what you do,

(04:13):
and also a little bit of like how you got
into the whole ecological space and who was it who
gave you that blue pill and now you know now
down that full rabbit hole. So yeah, just just give
me the whole tabang.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
Sure. So the abridged version is basically in high school.
I think a lot of like strength coaches will identify
with this. In high school, I started football and I
wasn't very athletic, and so I was terrible at it.

(04:47):
And I was getting bullied literally on the field by
another athlete, and he would just do whatever he wanted
because I was so I was so skinny, unathletic. Week
I was five three hundred pounds flat, you know, so

(05:09):
super you know, the perfect victim, you could say. But anyway,
so the first season of football goes by, and I
just said to myself, man, you know, like I don't
feel physically capable of defending myself right, Like we could

(05:31):
say that affordance wasn't present in my field of affordances,
right of being able to do what I wanted to
do on the field. You know, it just felt completely
at the will of other people who were stronger and
faster and more athletic. So, okay, I start I start lifting,

(05:56):
and I started lifting, you know, three hours a day
every day. You know, I was there super dedicated. I
think between freshmen and the end of senior year, after
the first football season. I think there might have been
two days the gym was open that I wasn't there.
One of them was because the wrestling coach tried to

(06:19):
recruit me. But anyway, so I was one of those
people that you might call like a low baseline high responder.
So I responded really well to the strength training strength wise,
muscle mass wise, and it was interesting because it came

(06:42):
became sort of like a almost like an aesthetic deterrent,
you know, like people yeah kind of stopped bullying. You know,
I didn't look like someone you would want a bully anymore.
You know. Yeah, that really became the main thing in
my favor, and so that was great. But as far
as actually getting better at football, which was kind of

(07:03):
my main goal, I really didn't improve despite getting way stronger,
significantly bigger. I put on forty five pounds of muscle
between you know, freshman year and senior year, thirty of
which was in the first year, and I got significantly faster.

(07:26):
I think my forty time went from like five six
seven to like a four to nine, so like a
pretty big improvement. And so like in the traditional strength
and conditioning sense, it's like, Okay, now you got all
the things you need right to be a good player,
and I didn't experience that at all. So that was

(07:48):
my first little hint of like something something's missing in
this equation that you know, this strength coach that we
that's how we think about football to a large extent, right,
And for those more familiar with like the research and
some of the stuff with the NFL combine, you see

(08:08):
that with the NFL combine, you test everyone's athleticism and
you have people that do really really well, that do
pretty terribly on the field, and you have people that
do kind of okay or badly on the combine tests,
and then what do you know, it's Tom Brady. Anyway.

(08:28):
So I started college, I was like really into science
and really into biochemistry, and I was looking at like
disease prevention stuff. I was working on, like really interested
in Alzheimer's disease, but I ended up working on more

(08:50):
Parkinson's cancer. I did some like protein X ray crystallography
for like the nerds out there, and so it's it's
hyper isolated, and so it's it's really not just you're
not focused on the disease so much as like the
pathway and the specific protein within the disease. And it

(09:14):
really started to feel like a luck based process that like,
you hope your protein is important, and you hope your
small molecule will target that protein effectively, and you just
don't know if it will and if it will have
side effects. And I started around the same time that
I started noticing that, I started getting drawn into the

(09:38):
work of someone named Edo Portal. Oh yeah, and he
talks about movement a lot. And so so this idea
of being a general movement practitioner rather than a specialist,
and this thing movement intelligence, you know, like one could
say skill, Like it's skill in a general sense as
far as how can you use your body rather than

(10:01):
like what can your body? What can you do on
a bench press and a forty yard yeah, forty yard dash?
And so I started moving in that direction. So I
finished my degree and by that time I was just
getting more and more into the movement direction and nutrition
and really thinking, like, you know, rather than trying to

(10:23):
just work on this one protein, maybe it's a better approach.
Maybe I could do more social good by working with
working with the system in a more holistic sense. Right, So, okay,
maybe this one protein, maybe I would have success with that.

(10:47):
Maybe not, there's like a very small likelihood of like
a really outsized return. Or I could work with kind
of facilitating movement for people and inspiring people to do
more movement and sleep better and eat better and all
this stuff that is a very high likelihood of actually

(11:09):
quite good effects.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
Right.

Speaker 2 (11:10):
We know this, We just we kind of ignore it.
We sweep it under the road because we know it.
Because it you know, you can't it's probably unlikely that
you're going to cure too many diseases by just having
generally healthier habits. But even that, like, it's yeah, there's
a question about that, And what's unquestionable about that is

(11:36):
you're going to do a lot better for a lot longer. Right.
So that's when I started working on movement and I
started teaching movement professionally, and then from there, I guess
the last big shift was I learned about ecological dynamics.

(11:58):
There was a grappling coach that was using it, and
so I spent like the last I've moved out here
to study with that coach train at the gym, and
UH been basically making a documentary about it for the

(12:18):
last two years now. I just really started with like, Okay,
I want to make a video about this. This is important,
and then it just the scope of the project just
kept expanding because I'm like, this is so important and
I need to dig deeper, and there's so much to
dig into and for the people that I was talking
to a coach a week or two ago and he

(12:40):
was telling me, you know, this is a very successful
coach And he was telling me, man, you know like
this ecological dynamic stuff. He's trying to make a video
explaining it to like the lay people, right, and I
was helping him with that. He's like, man, this stuff
is so hard. Like I don't know if it's hard

(13:01):
for you, but like this is so hard for me
to understand, and and I was just thinking for everyone
that's like in those situations, I really think ecological dynamics
has been harder for me to learn than quantum mechanics,
with the quantum mechanics lessons I did in college, Like
this is tough. There is so much depth everywhere. It's

(13:27):
depth and breath right, because there's so many different fields
that are all amalgamating to like what is ecological dynamics.
Like usually when people define ecological dynamics and they say like,
okay it you know, parent fields are this, this and that,
like they skip over a lot of different fields that
are actually quite of like it's it's enormous. So it's

(13:51):
been a huge project and very exciting. And the more
I learn about it, frankly, the more excited I am
about it, and the more I've been practicing it and
lately starting to apply it to other fields, it's really interesting.
So for for movement practitioners, So this is the thing

(14:13):
of like drilling, right, and I think you're you're big
on the not drilling thing, so you know, like minds.

Speaker 4 (14:22):
But.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
It's this, It is this pervasive coaching assumption, right. This
is coming from probably ideas about a general motor program
about fundamental skills that we can we can learn, we
can store in the brain and then you can recall
them later. And it leads coaches to want to isolate

(14:48):
those things and drill them and get them perfect and
have the students do it just right, just like you
like it to be done, because you think that's the
most effective way to do it, and you have you
probably have reasons to think that way, right, and that
has some effect on skill like it clearly has some

(15:11):
you learn something right, But what we're saying in ecological
dynamics is more that you're you're not learning what you
think you're learning. And because you're not learning what you
think you're learning or what your coach thinks you're learning,
it's actually a much less effective practice than it's designed

(15:31):
to be. Right, Like one might assume if we were
storing motor programs that drilling would be a lot more
effective because then you could recall it. And then and
then you should see that drilling outperforms things like the
CLA and differential learning in practice, which is not what
we see. And and then a lot of the evidence

(15:52):
for how coordination happens and perceptual learning in ecological dynamics
wouldn't It wouldn't be there, but it is right anyway.
So for sport practitioners, when you specialize, it's not that
big of a deal in some ways because it's like, Okay,

(16:14):
you're practicing a movement that at least at least that
movement or variations of it are in your sport, right,
So okay, right, Like for instance soccer, right, maybe you're
you're drilling scoring penalty kicks, right, and maybe you're doing
it without a goalie, right, Well, at least you're gonna

(16:39):
do penalty kicks at some point in soccer, right, you're
going to have a goalie. But but at least there's
going to be some sort of penalty kick in movement.
When we look at this like really broad scope, now
we're looking far beyond like even soccer, right, So if
you're to drill penalty kick and then look at your

(17:01):
transfer to like dance, yeah, that's going to be far
far less. So it's it's for movement practitioners. The effectiveness
for us of the cla ecological dynamics approaches compared to
like drilling and repetition based approaches is so much higher again,

(17:24):
and I think that's because at a fundamental level, it's
just more consistent with how we think everything is happening.
And that's that's sort of where I'm at now.

Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, wow, there's so much to unpack. But I mean,
that's such a great introduction. I love it, and I
love I love that sort of that journey. There's there's
a few little areas I want to just creads I
want to pull on.

Speaker 4 (17:49):
The first one was one.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
Of the things that struck me, and in all the
time I've been doing this and speaking to different people,
there does seem to be a pattern emerging, which is.

Speaker 4 (18:02):
That individuals have.

Speaker 1 (18:05):
Had a negative sports experience in some way due to
physiological challenges or something along those lines. So for me
it was similar. I was probably about, you know, at

(18:26):
fifteen or sixteen, still probably about five to three hundred pounds,
which is one of the reasons I found field hockey
as opposed to say rugby or soccer were because you know,
the physicality elements just didn't have as much of an impact.

Speaker 4 (18:41):
But I was also born with.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
Disability which was corrected through surgery at birth, but did
lead me with some physical limitation. And so of course
then you're finding the sport that you know you're adapting,
aren't you to try and find the sports that you could.
So I had that sort of experience, and then subsequently,
through my own like journey, if you like, that sort

(19:09):
of developmental journey, I found myself looking for different solutions,
looking for those answers, you know what I mean. And
so I suppose it's almost that journey of discovery and
that journey of adaptability that is definitely a feature. And
I think I've heard these similar stories too with lots
of people that I've spoken to over the years that

(19:30):
you know, they've had some sort of unsatisfactory sports experience
that was defining for them as young people, some sort
of traumatic not dramatic necessarily that we're going a bit
too far. But anyway, the other thing I was going
to say that was really interesting was when you talked
about ecological dynamics being really hard and really like you know,
like you say, really deep and really broad. I think

(19:52):
it is, but it depends how it depends how much
of the death and debt you want to go into,
because I actually think in reality it's actually and I've
often heard people say that for practitioners, like it's just

(20:13):
so complex for anyone to take on board. I'm not
sure it is in the sense that I work with
a lot of young coaches who seem to grasp onto
it really easily. And I think it's almost like the
you know, you have to when you have to relearn
a language, like you know, whereas if you're if you
grow up in a you're just immersed.

Speaker 4 (20:34):
In it, it just becomes normalized for you.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
Because I actually think it sort of speaks to a
very naturalistic way of learning and learning to move and
all those sorts of things. It's just that because we've
almost got used to this overly scienceified, super reductionist, super technical,

(20:58):
technically driven model of coaching and learning in movements pedagogical approaches,
those that's become it's hard to unlearn. So I'm like
one of the classic practitioners where I twenty years of
my coaching was steeped in information processing cognitive approaches. I

(21:22):
was all about structure. I was all about rigidity. I
was all about drilling and repetition and choreography almost and
the more organized and structured we were, the more successful
we were going to be. And that does get you
quite far, particularly back in the day when there weren't
many coaches around, just getting a team a bit organized
meant you had an advantage generally speaking. But it only

(21:45):
goes so far in the sense that then all of
a sudden, some team does something different and your team
can't adapt, and that's when you just lose your mind
as a coach and you just feel like you've got
no chance. So it's just really interesting to so so anyway,
just circling back to that, I actually think that when
you have to unlearn that. And I still struggle, you know,

(22:10):
because there are times when there is a naturalistic tendency
because of your training, in your years of training, that
you're having to unlearn. And it's one of the reasons
why I advocate for ditching the drills, because I had
to put a constraint on myself to completely leave behind
all of the artifacts from previous techniques and to only

(22:30):
immerse myself in a new prose. It was a bit
like it's like an akin to moving to another country
and never using a translation device or whatever. It is
just just immersing yourself in the language and the culture
and then learning as you go through.

Speaker 4 (22:44):
A battle and error, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 (22:46):
So I just made that decision to put that constraint
on myself because I felt like it was my only
real way of properly exploring this particular world. Plus it
had just so much explanatory power. It just mapped onto
my worldview. I was so unsatisfied with my previous experiences,
so like, I was so much conflict, so much pension,

(23:10):
so much challenge, spent lots of time apologizing to people
because of the you know the fact that things weren't
going right. I was getting frustrated with them for not
adhering to my idealized notion. I made myself sound like
I was an absolutely horrific coach. I don't think I
was that bad, but I feel like I was that bad.
Now now I've discovered something else. But that was nothing

(23:30):
like my childhood, that was nothing like the joy I
found into physical activity. And I'm having to coach in
a way because I felt like it was the only
way to do it that really didn't graft on to
my own values and my own sense of who I was.
And it's only really through me, and I nearly gave up,
very very close to giving up. And it's only through
finding ecological dynamics that I actually found, Wow, I've got

(23:52):
a whole new lease of life, can actually explore an
entirely different paradigm that actually felt much much more.

Speaker 4 (23:59):
Alig to how I felt coaching should be.

Speaker 1 (24:04):
And only since I you might have heard me speak
about this, I don't know, But only since I've been
coaching ecologically have I actually ever experienced flow in coaching.
And I've experienced it about five or six times, purely
immersed fully integrated challenging, difficult, but just in the space

(24:26):
and the time disappears and it's magical. And actually some
of the things that happen with the Fleets is magical.
It feels magical because like it's happening, but it's not directed.
You're not being a puppeteer. You're not having to force it.
You're not having to put somebody into like this industrialized

(24:48):
notion of how they ought to become something that they
may or may not want to.

Speaker 4 (24:52):
You know, you're not saying do this.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
I know it's not inherently enjoyable, but it's going to
be good for you in the future. You're not force
feeding broccoli in people's basis. What you're doing is you're
saying to them, here's something really tasty, and you know
what's really nutritious as well. It's like the ultimate win
win proposition as a sports experience practitioner.

Speaker 4 (25:09):
Sorry, I was on a rant A.

Speaker 2 (25:11):
Pause, No, I love the When I when I talked
to Cal, it was the same way, like he had
a few rants and I had a frants and we're
both like it's great. I mean, it's so. I wonder

(25:33):
if if some people maybe don't who haven't made the switch,
yet maybe will struggle to understand why we're so passionate
about this and why people are so passionate about this.
It's it's totally I totally back up what you're saying
here that it's like there's so many coaching problems that

(25:57):
with it we just couldn't solve with the trichditional approach.
And if you really like, the more you care as
a coach, the more that's it's so tough, right, And
when you're when you're adhering to that traditional approach and
you really think that there's this one idealized way to
do this thing, like here's how you're going to kick

(26:18):
a soccer ball if you want to score a goal,
and here's how you do it when you're going to pass,
and it's just like, ah, these guys, why aren't we
drill it? We drill it, we drill it. And then
why aren't they sticking to that? Right? Like they're just
not disciplined enough. Maybe we need to do more reps
and then and then but they still and now they
still did something different, but like uh, he scored, so

(26:41):
like okay, like well we'll let that one go, but
like that's still a bad habit, right, because he didn't
he didn't hit make contact with the right part of
the shoot, right. And it's yeah, it's so freeing to
be able to let that go through a better understanding
of what's actually happening and why athletes want to make

(27:05):
contact with different parts of the shoe, you know, why
they want to do the solution differently every time. Right,
It's a different problem every time, different intentions, different environment. Yeah,
And I also, yeah, I really like what you what
you said about how about the difficulty of this? I

(27:27):
think probably you're right that maybe I think most of
the difficulty comes if you're trying to go deep into
the theoretical landscape, right, And that's not necessary for most coaches.
And I've actually had given the same advice already to
you know, because now it's it's really cool because I'm

(27:47):
starting to talk to a lot of coaches lately that
they're like, okay, ecological dynamics, Like I don't totally get
all of what it is yet, but like all right,
I'm on board, Like I unders stand enough that I'm
on board, Like, tell me, how should I go about
doing this? Like what what should I How should I change?
What I'm doing, like what should I do instead? And

(28:09):
and I give the same advice like for you know,
it would depend on the sport, but in function oriented sports,
so sports where how you do the solution. For instance,
if soccer was judged by how you kick the soccer
ball rather than did you score a goal, then we
would want to do more drilling so that people kick

(28:29):
the soccer ball in the way that like they're going
to get scored on, right, rather than actually scoring the goals.
So for coaches in sports or outside of sports, like
as far as like movement coaches practitioners, I give the
same advice like don't have your students drill anything, No

(28:54):
drill like only tasks. And I think I think if
you adhere to that, I think you can skip a
lot of the depth of like the theoretical stuff. Like
I think I think you're right that, like it's it's
the coaches that we've really been steeped in this stuff
for decades that we've got to really go back. You

(29:15):
have to really understand why we're saying that we should
use tasks. If you're really that deep in using drills already,
probably because because what I see a lot of now
is like, Okay, there's coaches that have been doing drills
for a long time, they switch to ECO, they're using tasks,
they switch to ECO, but they still do drills here

(29:37):
and there, and it's still somewhat repetitive, and they they
don't do them too much. But again it's coming from
then it's like, Okay, if you really understood this deeply,
you probably wouldn't be doing that, or you at least
wouldn't be doing that in this way. Yeah, and so
that's where, yeah, you probably got to grapple with some
of the books now, right, But but yeah, for the

(29:58):
for the newer practition is that like, I haven't had
any of that stuff yet. If you're in a dynamic,
function oriented sport, like just use tasks and like already
you're you're you're going you know, and then I think
there's there's still probably some depth. Actually, that'd be an

(30:19):
interesting question for you if you had a young coach
they're in a function oriented sport, say they're they're totally sold,
They're like, man, I'm just only going to use tasks.
We're not going to drill anything repetitively. Would you say
they need to go deeper into the theory, and what

(30:42):
do you think they would get out of that?

Speaker 1 (30:48):
Well, when you say deeper, I suppose it depends on
on what how deep you need to go. It's an
interesting discussion, that is So, for example, do I find
the concept of tao useful in my practice? No, you
know so, but actually understanding and knowing that there is

(31:14):
this thing called tao which is about, you know, the
rate of closure of an object that I might then
use in an interceptive capacity. The fact that I know
that I know that, and I know that it exists
and it's a thing is enough. It's enough for me
to know that that's I don't have to know the

(31:35):
precise calculations that you know, dynamical systems theory would want
me to do and get all mathematical about it. No mathematician,
trust me, I'm not. But I know that there is
an idea and a concept that talks about rate of
closure as a thing, and it's and when you understand

(31:55):
rate of closure in that way as a juxtaposed against
previous ideas about like essentially the brain making predictions based
on you know, kind of the information it was gaining
and then determining where we need to go and actually saying, no,
there's a this dynamic interaction continuously flowing between environment objects

(32:21):
human organism, and it's a system in itself, not a
not two things in isolation and one making sense of
the world. So when you understand that notion and then
you understand that that, all that does is basically give
you the framing you need in order to think about design.

(32:45):
Think about environment design as a as a learning space now.
But so what I'm trying to say is is that
that that's about as deep as I think I need
to go to be a really effective practition. Now, if
I was working, say in a high performance environment with

(33:05):
extremely detailed you know, almost getting to the like what
you were doing, where you know you're almost getting to
the is it the protein and the pathway that's actually
going to make that? You know, you can get down
to that level of granularity with by you know, working
at that level and really beginning to understand what the

(33:30):
key impacts are and the kind of key.

Speaker 4 (33:35):
What's the word I'm looking for the thing that catalysts.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
If you like that begin the process, you can get
into that, and I think it's probably important for scientists
to do that to fully understand some of the mechanisms,
but at a practice in a level, I.

Speaker 4 (33:50):
Don't think you need that.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
Somebody said to me once that being a having a
PhD or being a PhD candidate is knowing everything there
is to know about the smallest little thing. Being a
coach or a practitioner is knowing a bit enough about.

Speaker 4 (34:08):
A lot of things.

Speaker 1 (34:10):
The more specialized you become as a coach, I think,
the more limited you potentially become. But you still have
to have enough depth. It's always a difficult question to
know where that depth is. So the bigger challenge I
think with ecological the ecological approach is the breadth right,
because I actually think there is a lot to know,

(34:32):
and there's a lot to explore, and there's a lot
to sort of take into account, and there are so
many dimensions that sometimes actually that becomes a bit paralyzing.
The more you know, the more almost you become a
bit paralyzed. And there had definitely been times when I
haven't necessarily in the moment been able to make the
right adaptation, partly because I had about four conflicting ideas

(34:55):
in my mind, whereas previously I wouldn't have had that problem.
So times there can be a bit too much information
can be an issue. That said, one of the things
I think that's more important to understand for practitioners in
particular is that this is just a completely different lens
through which to look look at the development of movement

(35:19):
movement in humans. It's it's not a lens where what
you're doing is you're you're analyzing the component parts of movements,
chopping them up into their into their component parts, working
on the component parts, and then reassembling them in some
sort of competitive environment. Right. That's a fundamental idea about

(35:42):
learning that was only really brought about through sports science,
video analysis, and our ability to look at things in
slow motion so that we could see what these movements are,
we could name them, we could give them technical ideas,
and then we could we could teach them. So we
have been a technology has in as acted as an
affordance to enable us to teap break down movement patterns

(36:04):
and teach them. And that then because of that, because
of the technology, we're able to study it, because we're
able to lab based study it. We develop an industry
based on a flawed idea of how people learn. Got
loads of information about techniques and the assumption is that
we develop a technique and that's going to become a
magical skill. Technique and skill are totally different things. So

(36:28):
when you understand actually that the environment presents you with
information that is absolutely critical to the development of movement capability.
When you understand that, when you work backwards from the
environment towards the individual and then work interactively between those

(36:52):
two things, everything shifts. Everything changes. You're no longer interested
in the information you can put into the huge human
so they can make sense of the environments. You're interested
in creating an environment and then and then seeing how
the human interacts with it, and then we really start
to play together, and that's when the joy starts to happen.

(37:15):
And once you get into that and you see not
only the impact of it, but also the the the
enjoyment and the genuine sense of curiosity, exploration, freedom, creativity
that comes with working with somebody in that way, you
just can't go back.

Speaker 2 (37:38):
Hydriper said, it's kind of like you were saying earlier
about like, yeah, like it's hard, but it's also so
much more fun and engaging. Like that's one of the
things I've been playing a lot lately with mobility tasks
and so like, rather than you know, ability training right

(38:00):
now is very still very isolated. Right, It's like, okay,
we're going to do this stretch. We're going to do
that stretch. We're going to do that stretch. And you
have different ways you could do it. You could do
it Saturday, you can do it active, you could do
it dynamic, you could do ballistic, you could do I'll
give this. I'm a little gonna like beat on this

(38:23):
methodology because it's kind of an easy target, but it
is very good. Is like FRC, right, and so FRC
their main thing is locking down every other joint and
then you're going to do like circles in different types
through the full range of motion of whatever joint you're targeting,

(38:45):
and you're going to do it really actively, it really
really challenge it. Right. So that's really great. It works well,
but it's so when you look at that from an
ecological dynamics perspective, oh my god, that is so so isolated,

(39:09):
such a linear like approach. Right, it's like, okay, we're
gonna we're gonna forget the mobility of like multiple muscle
groups at once, or or like multiple joints at once,
we're gonna target one joint at a time, and then
ideally we're gonna assume that when you go back to
your spore or you go back to your daily life,

(39:29):
that everything's just gonna like work together nicely, right, because
you just built up the individual parts, right, And so
rather than doing that, we can build tasks where you
have to use the whole structure together, every joint. Right. So, okay,

(39:52):
you're standing on one leg, I give you a target. Okay,
don't touch your other leg to the floor. You've got
to touch your hand to this target, and I move
it around. If in directions, every joint is fair game, right,
every joint could be and should be contributing towards you
getting to that target. And hence, rather than locking everything

(40:13):
else down, everything is is not only a lot of
things are developing mobility and being challenged near their underrange emotion,
but other things are learning to like help balance. Right.
There's there's there's so many different aspects that are now
present that we're completely missing when we when we isolate,

(40:35):
you know, to the extreme, and something like ever see
or any sort of traditional stretching mobility program, and yet
and so and then it becomes this thing where it's
hard because we're challenging it, but it's so much more fun.
And I really think that it's it's more fun that like,

(41:00):
and it comes back to what you're saying earlier about
like the the negative like sport experience, you know, Like,
I think the tragedy of the traditional approach is that
the more disciplined you are as a person as an athlete,
the more you stuck to the like if I just

(41:22):
do more reps, I'll get good at the thing, the
more tragic it is because the less that actually helps you.
It was the less disciplined people that were like, ah, yeah,
i'll do some reps here and then i'm gonna go
play this game. Then i'm gonna go play then i'm
gonna go play outside. I'm gonna play tag with my friends.
That okay, And we would say, ah, you're just athletic,

(41:43):
right cause we because we can't explain why those people
are so good at the stuff because they didn't do
the reps. So if they're skilled, then they didn't do
the reps. Oh you must be talented versus oh, actually
the other things you were doing were contributing more towards
skilled development than the actual reps you were doing. So

(42:03):
actually what you did made more sense than what we
were telling you to do. And now with this approach,
it's like, now what we're saying actually actually makes sense,
actually works. Right, It works for like true skill development, right,
not just like doing the motor program this way, but

(42:24):
like can you score the goal against the goalie with
other players like rushing you? Right, this actually works for
developing that, right, This actually works for develops. Someone's trying
to strangle you, how do you get out? Right? Like
teaching a certain movement is only going to get you

(42:46):
so far, and working with the tasks and the function
takes you so much farther, And then it's so great
that it's also more fun. And I really think that
that funeness, that engagement, Like we instinctively think and feel
that drilling is boring, repetitively is boring, and ah, we

(43:07):
don't want to do it. I think that's because we
have an intuitive sense that it doesn't work. I don't
think it's just that we're not disciplined. I think it's
that we feel that that isn't helpful.

Speaker 1 (43:19):
Yes, And I also think one of the reasons why
movement repetition, movement, repetition that isn't necessarily enjoyable, inherently enjoyable
and fun has more worth. That has to be value

(43:41):
in the thing that's hard. If it's enjoyable, if it's
enjoyable and fun and frivolous, it can't have worth. Like
only we sort of like, there's this narrative, isn't there
in Western societies that you've got to put the work in,
And so actually, if it's joyful, it's like, well it
can't it can't have value. No, no, no, it has

(44:03):
to be something that it isn't enjoyable for it to
really be valuable. And then that's then speak to the
narrative we love to tell ourselves about grit and determination
and all those sorts of things. Like you know, if
I came to one of your mobility sessions and you
and me have got big smiles on our faces and

(44:23):
we're having a whale of a time, and I'm doing
these crazy tasks hading on one leg, Everyone's just going
to think that that's like, that's not got any worth.
They're having too much fun. He needs to be sweating
and miserable and handing over hundreds of dollars because actually
there's value in that. I do think it's a perverse
sort of like thing there.

Speaker 2 (44:45):
Totally. And then and that's a great point too, that
you know, people are as in the grappling community, there's
this phrase like drillers are killers. You know, I'm not
sure that that comes up so much in other sports,
but drillers are killers. And and they always they tend
to point out like it's, oh, these champion athletes, they
always stay after practice and they drill for another hour, right,

(45:09):
and so that they must be the drilling that's creating
the success. And I really think like, you know, okay,
that's not fun, right, And there's there the people that
are winning have a tendency to be the people that
are staying after like doing extra work, and they're doing
everything they can that could contribute, and they're doing the

(45:30):
things that aren't fun as well as the things that
are more fun. And there's a psychological advantage that comes
with that that potentially is more valuable than the repetitions
themselves of oh yeah, you know when it comes time
for the game and you're like, oh, yeah, those guys
went home after practice. I stayed an extra hour to

(45:52):
work hard, right, Like, you know that that gives you
some confidence. You know, there's an edge that can come
to that, you know.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
I think I think with elite or more advanced performers,
I think there is some value in in movement repetition
as a maintenance thing and as a confidence thing, you know,
and also because they have a more attuned sense of
the movement problem that may they may have discovered within

(46:22):
their more live experience previously in the session. They they
then can then take that and they'll keep it very
live in there. You know, it's obviously going to be
a relatively isolated repetition opportunity, so they're not going to
necessarily have the other information factors, but they will have

(46:43):
a liveness to it, so they will be doing it
for a purpose. You know, a golfer, for example, World
I was up late last night watching the Masters, watching
my man Rory get his get his Master's. But a golfer,
for example, like Famously might hit one hundred shots and
it looks like it's like mindless repetition, but it's not,
because what they've done is they're creating conditions that they've

(47:06):
discovered a problem with Famously, somebody like orig Harrington, for example,
would hit shots off a very very very hard piece
of wood because he knew he was going to be
playing on a golf course that was going to have
very very hard ground and he wanted to learn to
play off that. So he's repented, but that wouldn't be
the bulk of his practice time. That would be more

(47:27):
the add on that he's you know, so that's not
his main course. That's his I wouldn't say it's his dessert,
but it's kind of his additional It's like his protein shape,
if you like, something along those lines, that he adds
to his diet, but not to the exclusion of the
reps he would get in a more dynamic environment. This

(47:48):
idea of drillers and killers are like that, that's a
good notion. What I like about it is what they're right.
They just don't realize that they're killing themselves.

Speaker 2 (48:05):
Nice. That's interesting though, what you're bringing up, because I
I will say, I intuitively felt that for a while
that I was suspected if drilling okay. So there's the

(48:27):
clear aspect of like and again the research access to
a significant degree that if you're trying to learn to
do something a specific way, you want repetitions of trying
to do it that specific way, and having feedback that
helps guide you towards doing it that specific way is helpful. Right,
traditional approach beats using constraints to a degree.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
But then okay, so if you want to develop, if
you want to develop a technique, great crackle the.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
Right right right right, and most sports, that's not what
we're trying to do, right, yes, yes, so but then yeah,
after that, I always felt like if there's a point
of drilling for all the other stuff, it's it's probably
got to be for the experts, right, because it really
doesn't make sense. Yeah, there there is. I can add

(49:24):
a felt sense to that, and like some coaching experience
with that as well, Like, for instance, okay, so so
I did a a sumo tournament, uh last October with

(49:48):
a few YouTuber friends, and we did it with with
no experience. We just went in the night before. We
had our friend coaches. He was like, here's here's a circle.
This is what you do. You know, there's the opening ceremony,
and then we we ran some tasks. We're like, okay,
we're gonna we're gonna just like spar and tell us

(50:09):
what we should try to do and what we should
try not to do. And then we went and did
the competition the next morning, right and so, and then
we did quite well, and I really think and it
was very interesting. I came back and this is not
to brag again, this is not like a really about

(50:30):
me so much as like the practice design I went
to another came back, went to another sumo club and
I trained with them, and I beat all of them,
having never practiced sumo before. And yet I think few

(50:50):
of any of the guys that the practice I had
been to had competed at all. And they were practicing
in these like very decomposed, very passive way of like
here's how we walk through the circle. They weren't even
doing things with a partner, right, It's just here's how
you do the walk. Right. So, having already competed and

(51:15):
having the context of this is what it's going to
be like when we're running at each other one hundred
percent and we collide, and then these are the things
that are going to happen. I think then to then
drill and repeat something, I would have some sort of
context to bring that back into right, rather than rather

(51:38):
than just doing the reps never having done the competition
or even like the live sparring, you just you really
don't have a context to like put that in, right,
So it really it's probably really even more limited. But
you know, there's a few studies on experts where the
CLA is is doing better and it's not doing better

(52:01):
than the traditional approach. So it's not clear right now
from the research if the CLA is like really better
for like experts or beginners. But then yeah, I'm curious
to hear you expand more on where you feel the
role of repetition for experts is because then I always think,

(52:22):
to me, if it's a function oriented sport, I think,
if there's a way we could design a task to
do this thing, it would be better.

Speaker 1 (52:31):
But by the way, it would still be task led, sure,
so it would it wouldn't just it wouldn't just be
movement repetition. Like I would never suggest or even accept
that somebody going out there doing like, you know, a
tennis player going out there doing like air swings was
going to bring them some benefit. Right, And some people
do want to say, particularly the traditionalists who want to

(52:53):
hold on to their method and they argue for methodological pluralism,
you know a bit of both, mixed diet. You know,
it's a sensible way to go and paint the ecological
practitioner as being an evangelical purist, is you know, dogmatic
about their approach. Guilty has charged. I always feel that

(53:18):
when you're looking through the ecological lens, then what you're
going to do is even if you're going as an individual,
you're still being task led. You're still going to be
challenged by the task in some way. Now, what I'm
talking about, you see, is for the expert who might say,
for example, I know, and the issue with the cla

(53:39):
is is that you well, ideally to have something that's
representative you would want you need in a team game,
for example, other people because they're important. They're important informationally
to the environment, as to your movement action, it's defined

(53:59):
by the others. But when you so, but if you
haven't got others, so you're on your own, so it's
an after the session type activity, then you're then you're
then naturally you're constrained. So that's the activities impoverished from
a purely ecological perspective.

Speaker 4 (54:18):
But there's still value in if you've got the time
of utilizing the time to put time into developing your
effectivities or your action capacities, but you would do it
in a very task led way. So for me, I
would always say, for example, even when there's a video

(54:44):
of me actually done by the same videographer that did
the one with Cal Jones we were talking about before
we jumped on, of me working one to one with
my son and we've you know, I'm being the.

Speaker 1 (54:57):
Really passive defender, protect that I'm doing it passively but
actually working really quite hard, and actually he's just going
past me like fun because he's seventeen ridiculously fast. But anyway,
but we create task, right, so he's essentially doing isolated
practice pretty much. Right. It's isolated in a sense that
it has no there's not really a defender to tack

(55:19):
to deal with apart from a human that you've got
to think about going past. So there's some element of that,
But really we're in exploration mode around striking the ball
towards the goal and trying to get it in the goal.
But we're always having tasks. So the task might be

(55:42):
exploring different ways of approaching the shots low to the ground,
stretch more stretched out away from you, closer to the body.
We're doing a lot of exploration of those ideas, creating
a search spase, or it might be our task is
we've got to hit the sideboard of the goal so

(56:02):
that it goes in. You're hitting the corners of the goal,
and we're going to try and aim for that and
see how many of those that we can get and
task ourselves in that way. It all depends on the
information I'm getting from the athlete as to the response
that I'm going to put in place and the constraint.
Now that's me being his coach working in a one
one v zero, one v one, one v half type approach.
But if you're one purely one v zero, it's just you.

(56:25):
You can still derive enormous amounts of value from you know,
just going and hitting and hitting lots of goes and
having lots of goes, hitting and exploring if if you've
got the contextual understanding of the task you're trying to
perform in relation to its game reality. And the problem

(56:47):
is for me is that I see so many athletes
just mindlessly performing movement rituals. And it's the mindlessness and
the fact that it bears very little resemblance in their
movement actions to what would actually happen in the game.
That actually is where the problem lies. So yeah, so

(57:10):
I'm not suggesting for a second that mindless repetition or
just even doing artificial movements brings you any value. Really,
I think the jewelry, well, I personally think that gives
you absolutely zero value, And right, you'd be better off
going home and resting, to be honest. But you know
somebody might say it might give you like one percent,

(57:31):
and well, if you want to kill yourself, a one percent,
crack on. But actually, with very very little additional design
parameters added to that activity, all of a sudden, you've
just enriched it enormously. So when I talk about ditching
the drills, and people think that me advocating someone doing
that is drilling, it's not. It's something entirely different because

(57:51):
of everything we've put into it. All the variability that's
really important we've added in. It's baked into the activity,
so it's no longer isolated movement pattern. You know, run
to this cone, run to that cone, run to this cone,
run to that cone. Do it completely mindlessly, be a
complete automaton, and think that that's going to magically transform
its transform into skilled performance. It's not, but we're not

(58:14):
doing that.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
Yeah, Yeah, and I think that I think that's where
like some nuance of like I think it'd be hard
for a coach to do stuff like that effectively without
having a pretty nuanced understanding of ecological dynamics.

Speaker 5 (58:33):
You know.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
It's like if you if you're just like, if you're
like tasks only only representative things, okay, go, like you
can get pretty far. But then to like for someone
with that level of understanding to then design like something
like this where it's not going to be totally useless,
like you said, like there's always I think there's some
level of skill that comes out of any sort of practice,

(58:56):
but there's also a value that comes out of resting,
out of sleep, out of just meditation after practice. And
it's a contextual world, right, there's a point where the
returns you're getting out of like just kicking the soccer
ball the same way over and over is less than
her urns of going home and sleeping, right, So that

(59:18):
one percent may actually in context be a negative return.

Speaker 1 (59:22):
Yeah, I agree, definitely, there's lower diminishing returns one hundred percent,
But some people are just so wedded to the idea
of doing something is better than doing nothing that they
would just always go and do something. And personally, I
would say, I think there's lot, like you say, there's
lots of other things that you could do that would
add an enormous value to your sporting experience and your
life as well, Like if you're starting to do that

(59:44):
kind of thing to the exclusion of, you know, other
really important parts of your life, to the point where
actually you think you've got to get to the grind
so hard all the time that eventually you either break
physically break or you mentally break, you know, you burn
out or whatever it be.

Speaker 4 (01:00:01):
That's the bigger fear, isn't it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:03):
Right, So let's make it enriched as much as we
possibly can so that we should and as coaches as well,
I believe that unless you've got a really good reason
for something to do, somebody to do something, and you
can clearly articulate the value in it, you shouldn't prescribe it.

Speaker 4 (01:00:22):
It's kind of.

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
An ethical really, and I think too many coaches haven't
got the rationale. That's also I think where some of
the negativity towards ecological dynamics comes from because ecological dynamicis
have a very very strong rationale. We're super passionate about it,
we're knowledgeable, we've got a deep understanding. We wouldn't be
doing it if we didn't. We've got a very very
strong why behind what we're doing. And it exposes the

(01:00:46):
fact that some of the coaches haven't got that. They
haven't necessarily got that depth. That what they've got is
folk pedagogy that they've always used because it's always been
done that way, but they've never really considered why. I
must have asked four thousand coaches in my time travel
in the world doing workshops, must as four thousand coaches,
why do you coach the way you coach? Why do
you do what you do the way that you do it?

(01:01:07):
And the answer is I had this experience and I
liked it, so I want more people to have it.
This experience, I didn't like it. I don't want anybody
else to have it.

Speaker 4 (01:01:15):
There are the two answers I get.

Speaker 1 (01:01:17):
Never, this is my education, this is what I read.
You know, it's I saw that somebody do that. It's
folk pedagogy, right, but it's uncritical. You don't find many
ecological practitioners like that. You don't find ecological practitioners going,
oh I work ecologically because the bloke.

Speaker 4 (01:01:32):
Next to me does.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
Doesn't work like that. Really, they're much much more intentional,
it seems. I mean, I might be overegging the pudding
a bit about ecological community, but the conversations I have
they're not like this. Generally speaking. When I work with
normal coaches, it's massively surface level. We ever start to
ask these questions and they start to get quite defensive
and negative. We speak to ecological practition are they're only
too willing to talk to you about it ad nauseum

(01:01:54):
forever go into the weed.

Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
And to be fair, probably a lot of that is
because ecological tenics is still newer and less popular, you know,
and hopefully in fifty years, you know, when there's the
next the next paradigm comes along, maybe sooner, but maybe
ecological DNS now is the folk pedagogy. Now we've got
to Now the new guys are having to like start

(01:02:22):
the conversation and bring that up.

Speaker 4 (01:02:23):
You know, I think it'll evolve.

Speaker 1 (01:02:27):
I you see, I don't necessary I used to think
that ecological psychology, ecological dynamics was a was juxtaposed against
cognitive information processing, and I have advocated that actually, and
probably in some respects maybe not necessarily helped the debates
because I needlessly created this sort of, you know, kind

(01:02:49):
of puss against them type model. Some of that just
goes through the territory. When you articulate something differently and
people are arguing with you, you end up doing that.
But I might have been guilty of that. I actually
don't see it like that anymore. I actually think it's
more of an evolution. So it's like, you know, we
used we used to think that putting leeches on people

(01:03:10):
was a good form of medicine.

Speaker 4 (01:03:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:03:12):
I'm not saying that cognition approxies like drills like leeches.
Maybe they are, but anyway, it's an equivalent. Like, you know,
at one stage we thought that was valuable. We've actually
we know more now and actually there's time to move on.
You can hold onto that stuff if you want to.

Speaker 4 (01:03:29):
You can't.

Speaker 1 (01:03:29):
You can prescribe somebody really advanced medications that's going to
be really healthy for them and still do the leaches
if you want. But my argument would be you might
want to let go of some of that stuff. I'd
better stop it with the leaches.

Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
That's good. I might I might use that. Actually, but
when you mentioned something about like the effectivities and the
action capacities, that I think is important to talk about that,
Like I think when we're using repetition to like you're saying,

(01:04:06):
like it's develop the maximum capacity of what you're doing,
Like that can be helpful, right, Like, uh, if if
you have a good rationale, yes, right, So, Like one
of the things Rob Gray was talking about in his
new book was the bat speed. Right, so there was

(01:04:28):
some sort of like a vision tracking error when the
when the bat when the ball makes contact with the bat,
And so the more you reduce that error of essentially
like what information are they tracking, the better they do.
But if their maximum bat speed is only so high
like that, that gives you a ceiling of how much

(01:04:48):
they're going to improve because they can only hit the
ball that hard. And so especially when you have players
that like they can only that that you you've tracked,
that you've isolated it, you're sure that is a limited thing.
Now you can say, okay for this guy, yeah, maybe
we want him to do some reps. It's like, just
swing that bad as hard as you can so that

(01:05:09):
you can swing the bat faster with some idea that
like and I guess the the idea is, we're not
developing skill when we're doing that. We're developing something different, right,
We're developing action capacity. That's when using a repetition could
be more helpful.

Speaker 1 (01:05:26):
Yeah, and also we would probably argue. So go back
to the start of this. You were telling me the
story about how you know, you was small, not very strong,
not very athletic, so you worked really hard on having
on building the musculature that was going to give you

(01:05:49):
the ability to be stronger and to withstand the challenges.

Speaker 4 (01:05:54):
Didn't I say about your better player?

Speaker 2 (01:05:55):
Though not at all. I would I would argue, not
at all, and and my coaches would agree.

Speaker 1 (01:06:08):
Whereas had, for example, you developed functional movements, developed strength
through functional movements that were equated to the demands of
the positions that you were playing, then there's an argument
that you would have had a better I'm not saying guaranteed,

(01:06:29):
but you'd have had a better chance of improving your
So I do feel like you can approve you would
want to as an ecological practitioner, always be looking to
develop action capacities and effectivities with some accordance to the
realities of the dimension of the activity that you're involved in,
because I don't.

Speaker 4 (01:06:49):
And this is one of the reasons.

Speaker 1 (01:06:50):
This is one of the things that Tyler for emergence
talks about when he talks about like you know, ecological
ecological dynamics for the weight room, it's about developing functional
movement capacities because to speak to what you were talking
about earlier on when you're talking about, like, you know,
when you isolate movement, like people don't realize do they

(01:07:12):
that you know, when when you were doing that one
legged task, your toes are involved in that. You don't
know that because you're not aware of it consciously, but
they are because it's what's keeping you up right, massively
dynamically involved in that. Well, if you were to do
that action without the one leggedness that didn't involve the toes,

(01:07:36):
that where you were either sat or immobilized, then you
were just doing the target thing. The minute you tried
to do the target thing with the one leggedness, you're
not going to be able to do it because the
toes haven't been engaged in the activity. So it's like
a very simplistic example though of how like the body
is moving in functional ways that we are not aware of.

(01:07:58):
We're not hunt acually making these things happen. They are
responses to demands being presented by tasks, by things in
the environment asking us questions, and the body's responding to
that synergistically, not because you've been given this general motor
program that you've plugged in and has gone into your

(01:08:19):
toes to say, when we do the one legged target activity.

Speaker 4 (01:08:23):
You're going to need to activate. I mean, like.

Speaker 1 (01:08:26):
That's one of the things. By the way, I love
about the audio book from Julia and Jet's book is
there's times when she's explaining some of these ideas and
she actually laughs because they seem so ridiculous when you're
talking about them. She almost can't help herself. I've round it.
I've been walking along walking my dog in the morn
and listening to the audiobook just laughing and smiling listening

(01:08:46):
to Julia actually narrate that book. It's amazing anyway, But
I'm saying it to you now with a smile on
my face, going like, who grafts onto that as an idea?
Who actually thought that was good? That was a good
concept and best way of explaining how humans move because
it's not like anybody's real world experiences. I don't know

(01:09:07):
where I've gone to that. I want a whole different
channel down there and the whole different alleyway. But but
I guess just to circle back what it comes back
to this point of when we are developing action capacities
and effectivities. I've heard people you see here Rob talk
about that and they go, aha, chink in the armor.

Speaker 4 (01:09:30):
Ha ha ha. Dolling's good, see because.

Speaker 1 (01:09:34):
You're going to develop the action capacities and effectivities.

Speaker 4 (01:09:36):
And I go, not so fast, not so fast.

Speaker 1 (01:09:41):
You if you think that's the way, because you're still
thinking that way, aren't you.

Speaker 4 (01:09:45):
Yeah, no, no, no, no, we're coming at it from a
totally different lens.

Speaker 1 (01:09:48):
Remember it's a totally different way of thinking about movement. Anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:09:51):
Sorry, but this is this is a really great point,
and this is an area that I want to I
want to. I think they have that little man, this
is quite a good plug for them. But I think
they've got a little course on their website of ecological
dynamics for the weight room, and I haven't I want
to buy that. Actually, I want to look into it.

(01:10:11):
I really am interested to hear what people are saying
about that, because I'll tell you, like, from a movement perspective,
one of the things that has been very obvious to
me from a pretty early time was you we're trying.
We were always trying to develop everything, right, Okay, we

(01:10:34):
need to do every sport, so we need to develop
every capacity. And it becomes so obvious so quickly, Like you,
it's just so hard to do that. You know, you
every sport, you do it, every different sport. It has
these unique demands on certain body parts in certain ranges

(01:10:55):
of motion that it's just like you couldn't you can't develop.
It almost feels like you can't develop all of those
in these these isolated ways like it has to be
in the.

Speaker 1 (01:11:11):
You.

Speaker 2 (01:11:13):
It feels like you couldn't do it without doing the sport.
And and then it it does bring us to this
really interesting point of like, hmmm, how much value does
it have to use the CLA for physicality development right
where we're saying actually, for instance, uh, you know, it'd

(01:11:35):
be pretty Oh, like there's a there's a game for
grappling that I've i haven't run yet, but I've been
thinking about it of like Okay, okay, two people grappling, right,
and let's say so, so normally traditional approach you never
work on stuff like this, But with the CLA, we

(01:11:55):
have the power that we can start to address things like,
for instance, you can only stay in each position for
five seconds and you have to you have to go
somewhere else, Go somewhere else, go somewhere else, five seconds max. Right,
And so now it's you should be developing people's ability
to move right, and that should be forcing them to
move around a lot more rather than just immobilizing the partner.

Speaker 1 (01:12:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:12:18):
Yeah, And you can play that in a way. You
could set it up with like times constraints and whatnot,
where you're really challenging people's cardio and you're really developing
their cardiovascular the capabilities in a grappling context. Right. You
can set it up where your focus, the focus of
the task is not actually to develop grappling skill. You

(01:12:40):
would still develop some great side benefit, but now you
can really target the cardio in this really specific way
that like always is going to be different when you're
grappling versus when you're playing soccer, versus when you're running
on a track, versus when you're doing the assault bike
versus when you're doing, you know, a CrossFit workout, Like
there are functional physiological differences in those things, and we're

(01:13:06):
we are going to get more out of it when
we target it to the sport. I think the question
then becomes like what's the injury risk profile? Like you know,
what's our like what's our risk reward? You know? So,
for instance, for grappling, my thought right now is to
do all your cardio in these high you could design

(01:13:28):
tasks that like, for instance, you could you could we
call it like shark tank people, so you have someone
stays in and then you switch, so they get a
new partner every three five minutes or whatever, and they
have to keep working right with the fresh partner so
that they develop their cardio great. My more mostly intuitive

(01:13:50):
thought right now is that if you try to develop
all your cardio with tasks like that, that it's going
to be probably a little too high injury for what
we want, yes, right, and that like, man, when we
do the assault bike and the CrossFit stuff, it's like
it really is so different, but man, the injury risk

(01:14:11):
is so much lower than trying to redline cardio, right,
especially if you want to do, for instance, if you
wanted to do like high intensity intervals on an assault
bike great, sprinting great, but like you try to do
that in a grappling task, like it's hard to imagine
that's not going to have a really high like not

(01:14:33):
just injury race, not just of like catastrophic injuries, but
also like just getting beat up, you know, Like I noticed,
for instance, with dance, when I try to like dance
hard and like try to like get my cardio up
and get my heart rate up and challenge the cardiovascual
capacity while dancing, it is so hard like this it's

(01:14:54):
so weird, Like it's there's something so weird about it
where it's so hard to get my heart rate above
like I don't know one twenty one fifty versus like
you know, you go for run or saltbike or you're
more traditional cardio methods, it's so easy to do that.
And so when I when I try to do a
cardio sort of workouts with dense locomotion movement sort of

(01:15:18):
things without a partner, I'm a lot more beat up
after Versus when I do some cardio like in traditional ways, Okay,
like body feels I can push hard body feels fine,
relatively no injury risk. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:15:36):
So this is the only thing I would say though,
is that I'm not Again, I'm probably not as verse
in the literature as you are in terms of things
like energy systems and physiological side of things.

Speaker 4 (01:15:48):
But it seems to me that so.

Speaker 1 (01:15:52):
If I totally agree that if you were to be
there would be if you could guarantee that you wouldn't
get injured and you wouldn't get beat up, but you
could find a way of doing essentially sparring based cardio
full out without with no with no chance of injury.
You'd do it, wouldn't you. It would be the idea

(01:16:12):
thing to do, but because of the safety aspects, you
just can't. But then the next thing can't just be
cardio bike, right, So because for me that's to like sure,
what you would do is be at the very least
throwing a heavy back like from one side to the
other to the other. You know, you'd be manipulating some

(01:16:34):
kind of an object. Yes, it might not be an
object that's going to fight back at you, but it's
at least you would be on the ground, you would
be moving, you would be so you'd be almost creating
that sort of edo portal style fully dynamic cardio activity
that isn't dynamic in the sense of somebody else is

(01:16:55):
trying to rip your head off, you know, but it's
got the element of there is a physical thing that
you must try and move, which would be more it
would equate that kind of cardio, but it would obviously
be safer, and I just don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:17:12):
So I sometimes wonder whether.

Speaker 1 (01:17:16):
The reason we go to the bike is because it's
readily available, or we go running, or we go sprinting,
or we go and do jumps and jump in jacks
or whatever it might be, is because they're readily available.
They're cheap and easy and relatively low intensity. But I'm
still not convinced of their transferability, you know. So I
again sometimes wonder, like, are you just like massively taxing

(01:17:37):
your energy systems for something that's not gonna give you
that greater benefit. Now you might say to me, actually, physiologically,
there's loads of evidence that actually just taxing your energy
system has actually got huge levels of transfer in which
case fair enough, because we're not talking about skill, we're
talking about pure physiological capability. But it strikes me that
if you could do something that was developing not just

(01:18:01):
the energy system but the strength element as well, so
that it was it was more of a it had
more fidelity to the kind of activities that you would
be doing, then that would have a greater potential benefit
to that person physiologically. That said, no, sorry, I'm not

(01:18:23):
going to say that said because I sometimes wonder whether
it's practitioners and I feel like this sometimes I just
haven't got enough imagination, Like I need to just give
it a bit more time, and in the moment you can't.

Speaker 4 (01:18:36):
Think it through.

Speaker 1 (01:18:37):
But that's why I think if you put a lot
and this is what I'm looking to do. By the
way we did, we have plugged emergence a lot. But
we both said before we started that we're both going
to be at the Sport Movement Skill Conference. I'm looking
forward to running a session at Sport Movement Skill Conference.
First time I've actually been at the Sport Movement Skill
Conference live, So very excited about.

Speaker 4 (01:18:55):
That and it's going to be great to get together.

Speaker 1 (01:18:59):
But one of the things I'm going to be doing
is exactly what we've just been talked of talking about,
which is we're not going to go to drilling we
know that we're constraining ourselves away from it. We're putting
a dollar in the jar every time we even use
the word right, I'm going to make a fortune, And
but we're not going to be doing that.

Speaker 4 (01:19:19):
What we're going to do is we're going to.

Speaker 1 (01:19:21):
Find the most ecologically advantageous. Want to look through an
ecological lens to find other activities that we can do
that don't when we don't necessarily when we've got everybody,
we need to do everything we want in the most
enriched environment possible. But what can we do? So let's

(01:19:44):
use our imagination, explore the landscape of constraints, think through
the lens of affordances to create activity forms together co
create them that we may not have thought about before.
And what I've always found is been really pad when
you work with coaches from a range of different sports,
is they always come up with something you never would

(01:20:05):
have thought of because you're too constrained by your own
sport actions.

Speaker 4 (01:20:09):
Well, couldn't you just do this?

Speaker 1 (01:20:11):
Yeah? What if you took your shoes off?

Speaker 4 (01:20:13):
What?

Speaker 1 (01:20:14):
It's a good idea, that kind of thing, you know
what I mean. So that's what I'm looking forward to
explore it's a big plug for SMSC. But I don't
mind doing that on this show because they're friends. But
that's that's what I mean, like the creativity, the co
creation when you get together with other coaches from different
areas and you think about it ecologically and you begin
to start to experiment with ideas, even with athletes, co

(01:20:35):
creating with the athletes. I would just wonder where we
could go actually to develop like the physiological capabilities within
athletes don't.

Speaker 2 (01:20:43):
Yeah, my thinking is the same as yours, like as
man like I want to find those paths that can
do that. It's I guess it's it's I haven't found
them yet. No, so and that's probably the main thing.
And hopefully I'll look back on this conversation in two

(01:21:05):
years and be like, oh dude, what a what an idiot?
You know, there's all this stuff, you know, but I
guess what's holding what's holding me back right now is
I guess like the it's a traditional strength and conditioning
stuff as far as like it's really nice to target

(01:21:26):
the variables, you know, it's nice to say, boom, we're
gonna stay at two hundred watts for five minutes and
it's nice to have the progressive overload right when we're
thinking about developing the physiological capacities, right, the action capacities.

(01:21:47):
It's nice to have that control on those variables. And
it feels like most of these tasks we give up
a lot of that control, right if we're doing it again,
and and that really might just be I just we
got to think of some better ways to do it.
You know, hopefully there's got to be better ways to

(01:22:07):
do it. But the question is are there ways that
are better enough that Like there's the injury aspect, yeah,
and there's also like you know, it's nice to work
at the we want to work at the lactate threshold.
We want to work at via two max like rather
than like vaguely kind of working around some of these

(01:22:30):
things like.

Speaker 4 (01:22:32):
In a in a ten minute.

Speaker 1 (01:22:34):
So like when you when I whenever I watch like
Submission Grappling, which by the way, I just endlessly fascinated by,
you know, and you watch Muzamechi and Matolo and these guys, like,
what do you know, is there any research about what

(01:22:54):
heart rate level they're working at?

Speaker 2 (01:22:57):
I'm not sure of any. Uh, it's pretty high.

Speaker 1 (01:23:04):
Yeah, but I would argue their ability isn't necessarily because
they can operate at say two hundred for say three
four minutes. It's because they can go from two hundred
to pretty well recovered well no sorry, not recovered, but
more like recovered really quickly. That's a I'm speculating massively.

Speaker 2 (01:23:35):
I mean, well, like the reality is like at the
actual practical functional level, it's skill in grappling. Skill as
far as where you use those watts is like by
far trumps everything right or or is certainly the most
important factor. There's just there's a question of like, okay,

(01:23:58):
skill equated like having so called a bigger gas tank
is quite helpful. It opens up. For instance, there was
an athlete that I talked to you that has been
quite successful in grappling, and I was talking to him about,
like man like from a strength, strength and conditioning perspective,

(01:24:20):
like what would be the most useful function for you
to develop as far as grappling, Like what would help
you the most? And my thought was like strength. I
was like, what what strength function would be the most
useful to you? And I've actually been asking like black
belts this for the last i don't know, five six years,
like everyone I talked to you, I asked, and but

(01:24:42):
his answer was quite interesting. He was like, you know,
actually I don't think like the strength is so useful
for him, Like he he was like, I I don't
really like to use the maxim like I want the
strength endurance to wear these guys down. His game is

(01:25:03):
centered around again, he's very skilled, very explosive, very strong,
but his game is centered around wearing the other guy
down and having still having more, right, still having more
at every point. And when you're more skilled, it's easy
to do that or easier. But that's where it's like, yeah,

(01:25:28):
like probably these I think that's probably to me. I
think right now this is probably another area. I just
my thoughts, Like I could be completely wrong on this.
I would love to be completely wrong on this, but
my thought is that for developing the physiological action capacities,

(01:25:50):
that like these more constrained things might be more helpful,
like because I think there's just an innate part of
this where if you're running tasks where people have the
freedom to self organize an effective movement solution, they're going
to find effective movement solutions and there's going to be
a lot of emphasis on how affective. The solution is

(01:26:16):
the skill of doing it rather than the I'm developing
the actual like biceps and the spinal erectors and the glutes,
like their maximum tension and the you know how quickly
they can produce force, right, Like, I think again, But

(01:26:38):
then there's a degree to which representativeness may override that
in a sports specific way.

Speaker 1 (01:26:44):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:26:44):
It's like, because it's what's very clear is like you're
grappling is not a competition of who can deadlife the
most weight. It's like a completely different thing, right, because
we're not just applying that. It's because it's not just
a question of how much strength you have, it's how

(01:27:04):
you apply the strength That is a totally different thing.

Speaker 1 (01:27:09):
Yeah, I think I again, I'm totally agreeing with you.
I think the interesting area and this is the beauty
of it, right, which is what we're both touching on
here is and this is something that Keith Davis talks
about quite a lot. He says, the best thing about
working as a researcher in the ecological space is the

(01:27:30):
practitioners are leading the research questions. They're the ones now
saying what do we know about this? What do we
know about that?

Speaker 4 (01:27:39):
And he says.

Speaker 1 (01:27:40):
And that's when it's genuinely interesting, because not only are
the practitioners coming back to the researchers saying, I'm finding
this in my practice. Has anybody else Is there any
research out there where anyone else has had a similar experience.
I don't know, let's find out. Or they're saying, I've
got this question I can't solve, you know, what, is

(01:28:00):
there a way we could design an experiment so that
we could actually just study this in more detail? And
so actually, and this is the beauty of it, is
that what you've got is theoretical foundation that's still got,
you know, a whole load of ocean of more empirical
stuff to be done and practical stuff. You know. So
I like to think that as a practitioner, very often,

(01:28:21):
you know, a lot of what I'm doing is untested.
It's kind of semi experimental. I'm using the theoretical underpinnings
to shape ideas, and then I'm adapting based on you know,
I go with a experimental design and quite quickly realize
that experimental design isn't quite right, and so I have
to adapt the experimental design in order to then sort

(01:28:42):
of and by by responding and a tuning. That's how
I get to where I want to get to with
the athlete. So it's this constant, dynamic interplat and I
think it's the same with the design practice designs that
we're working with, you know, and the training modalities that
we're developing. They need to be tuned, they need to
be fine tuned, they need to be aligned. And actually
it's going to be practice. That's a practitioner. This is
something I've tried. What do you think about? Ah, it's interesting, right, yeah,

(01:29:04):
what if we did it this way? Oh yeah, that's
even better. That's a really rich way of doing things.
The interesting thing about that grappling context as well as
is that and one of the things I think that
is really I personally see and again this is me
with confirmation bias looking at sport through this lens, but
one things I see when you look at people like

(01:29:25):
musumecci Ritola is they're able to work at very very
high levels of physiological stress and very very high levels
of psychological stress, but the absolutely clearheaded in what they're doing.

(01:29:48):
And that's often, I think something that people find difficult
because in the ferociousness of and the overwhelmed that can
come with battle if you haven't experienced it at that
level enough. Everything else shuts down because you're in survival mode,
or everything else shuts down because and you can't move properly.

(01:30:10):
I've been in these experiences before when limbs don't work properly.
Why because the stress, the overload, the stress overload is
too high. Well, I could do this yesterday. I literally
cannot move properly. And that's which, again is one of
the reasons why I think hours and hours and hours
of when you're when you're little of play play based grappling,

(01:30:34):
relatively safe task lead game lead play based grappling has
is you know, if you can do thousands of wrets
of play based grappling akin to what you would see
two puppies doing or two wolves doing in the wild,
you know, but it's that sort of fairly safe, slightly

(01:30:55):
bit of rough and tumble play based grappling, but maybe
slightly more intense using the odd well designed game that's
got some nice constraints built into it. They're the reps
you want to be doing. You know, you got these
kids in these gyms just doing thousands of push ups
and sit ups and this, that, and the other.

Speaker 4 (01:31:13):
Get them out now, get.

Speaker 1 (01:31:15):
Them play in, Get them play in the game of grappling,
so that they develop naturally, develop the physiology, the mentality,
their game understanding, the exploratory nature, the problem solving nature
that is associated with play, and then see what happens,
and you can build upon that afterwards, and you can

(01:31:35):
refine and just and this, that and the other and
develop their movement capacities and their effectivities as they be,
as they need those as they emerge.

Speaker 4 (01:31:43):
But everybody does it the other way around.

Speaker 1 (01:31:45):
They feel like you've got to put the physiological capabilities
in first, because they're the building blots of movements. But
I just think it's a really flawed concept and surprise, surprise,
kids find it boring and stop being physically active. And
that's bloody.

Speaker 2 (01:32:01):
Terrible, totally totally, And there is I think, as you're
mentioning a little bit like there is definitely that point
where it's like, even now I would say, okay, if
maybe we want to develop maskal strength and like VO
two max and lactate threshold on these more isolated things,

(01:32:24):
there is definitely an aspect where it is different to
apply those in a representative scenario, right, and there's for
a sport for a specialized athlete and for a non
specialized athlete, Like learning to compete when you're fatigued or

(01:32:45):
grapple when you're fatigued is something that you don't learn
on the assault bike at all. Right, And so even
if you want to develop, if we say you need
to develop that to get to a super super high
competitive world class level, then you also need to learn
how to apply that in a representative scenario. Right. You

(01:33:08):
can't learn that even with the mildly representative things, right,
you want to Now that's where Yeah, that's where we
would say, Okay, maybe we're not developing the physiological capacities
or our main work to develop action capacities is in
more isolated things, in things that look maybe less like

(01:33:30):
tasks and more like traditional strength and conditioning. But we
need to learn to apply it with tasks, and we
need to learn the skill and develop the skill with
tasks too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:33:44):
Yeah, hey, listen, I've just looked at the time. We've
just been smashed on for like two hours is unbelievable.
I could go on, but I'm going to run out
of time. I've deeply enjoyed the conversation. I've deeply enjoyed
your patience at listening to me rant on when I'm

(01:34:05):
supposed to be a podcast host, I'm the worst ever.
But I really really appreciate your time joining me and
it's been a great conversation and very much looking forward
to meeting you face to face later in the year.

Speaker 2 (01:34:18):
Sounds great, sir Ri too. Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 1 (01:34:21):
Before I before we do depart. If people wanted to
reach out, they're into the they're into your because you're
not just grappling. I know we've talked a lot about grappling,
but you do all that elements of movement, and it's
about movement, exploration, all those sorts of things. If people
want to find you, they want to pick up the
episodes of the documentary that you're producing, which is great,

(01:34:43):
or they want to reach out and maybe you know,
work with you.

Speaker 4 (01:34:46):
What's the best way for them to get in touch.

Speaker 2 (01:34:48):
Our best way to get touches through the website or
I have a link tree actually that you can contact
me through. People can just like schedule a call ACTU.
So yeah, if you want to contact me, go through there.
And if you want to see some of my content
and some of the things I've been putting enormous amounts

(01:35:10):
of work into. And there's a YouTube channel, brend Teachers Movement.

Speaker 1 (01:35:15):
It is a great channel. I highly recommend it. I
derive great enjoyment from it on a regular basis. And
so you know, please like subscribe to all that jazz.
So I'll say that for you, Brent, so that you
don't have to, but it is important for the algorithm
and all that sort of stuff. Hey, listen, thanks a
lot for coming on. Really enjoy the conversation and like

(01:35:35):
I said before, keep up the great work and look
forward to further conversations later on.

Speaker 5 (01:35:41):
Fave great, Thanks Jarrett, Thanks for listening to the Talent
Equation podcast. If you like the show, then please consider
supporting it by leaving a review on your favorite podcast player,
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Can show your appreciation by becoming a patron. Head over
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.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}24/7 News: The Latest

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"Drillers are killers (they just don't realise they are killing themselves!)" a conversation with Bren Veziroglu

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