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.