#48 - Hot Off The Press - The Boys from Emergence talk about their recently published Ecological Approach to MMA Journal Article.
Mar 27, 2024
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SBG's Adam Singer and The Academy's Andy Grahn discuss their recently published Ecological Approach to MMA Journal Article, co-authored by Professor Keith Davids. They delve into applying an ecological dynamics framework in MMA training, emphasizing individual fighter styles, movement problem-solving, decision-making in combat sports, and enhancing perceptual skills. The podcast provides insights into the practical application of ecological approaches in coaching practices.
Implementing aliveness with purposeful constraint manipulation is crucial for balancing training effectiveness and athlete engagement.
Encouraging ownership and autonomy in athletes fosters individual growth and skill refinement, promoting a sense of responsibility and engagement.
Incorporating representative co-design in training enhances skill development by aligning activities with athletes' insights and challenges.
Emphasizing realism in training tasks helps athletes better transfer experiences to competitive situations, promoting adaptive skill development.
Striking a balance in constraint manipulation is essential to prevent training scenarios from becoming overly complex, allowing for athlete exploration and adaptation.
Deep dives
Aliveness with Purposeful Constraint Manipulation
Implementing aliveness with purposeful constraint manipulation involves varying the complexity of training tasks. It is essential to balance the level of aliveness to ensure effectiveness without overwhelming participants. By limiting strikes or specific techniques, coaches can create scenarios that challenge athletes while maintaining autonomy.
Ownership and Autonomy in Training
Encouraging ownership and autonomy in athletes allows them to make mistakes, explore, and find their unique way of solving problems. Coaches can empower athletes by involving them in designing training activities, fostering a sense of responsibility and engagement in their development. This approach promotes individual growth and skill refinement.
Representative Co-Design for Training Activities
Incorporating representative co-design in training involves aligning activities with athletes' insights and challenges to create meaningful learning experiences. By collaborating with athletes to tailor training tasks to their needs and strengths, coaches can enhance skill development and problem-solving abilities. This approach facilitates a more authentic and engaging training environment.
Ensuring Realism in Training Environments
Emphasizing realism in training tasks involves evaluating whether the behaviors and solutions aligned with actual fight scenarios. Coaches should continuously assess if the training environment mirrors the demands of real competition, promoting adaptive and effective skill development. By prioritizing realism, athletes can better transfer their training experiences to competitive situations.
Balancing Constraints in Training Tasks
When designing training tasks, coaches should strike a balance in constraint manipulation to prevent scenarios from becoming overly complex or confusing. Adjusting constraints to reflect realistic fight conditions while allowing for athlete exploration and adaptation is crucial for effective skill acquisition. Maintaining sensitivity to the training environment and athlete responses helps optimize learning outcomes.
Integrating Perception, Cognition, and Action in Coaching
Integrating perception, cognition, and action within coaching emphasizes the interconnected nature of these components in skill development. By viewing movement behavior as a problem-solving activity, coaches can promote holistic skill acquisition. Aligning cognition with perception and action in coaching enhances athletes' adaptability and decision-making processes, fostering more comprehensive development.
Reframing the Degrees of Freedom Problem Holistically
The traditional view of cognition and action as separate processes controlled by the brain is challenged in the podcast, advocating for a more integrated understanding where cognition is embedded in our movements. This holistic approach emphasizes that behavior is an ecological event, constantly unfolding and adapting to the environment. Unlike the linear processing model, this perspective sees cognition as embodied in everything we do, influencing how we perceive, think, and act in a continuous problem-solving process.
Decision Making as a Part of Problem Solving
The podcast discusses decision making within an ecological framework, highlighting its close connection to problem solving. Decision making is viewed as an embodied process, not separated from perception and action. In contrast to traditional models, decisions are guided by perception, intentions, and contextual information, focusing on functionality rather than predetermined responses. The emphasis is on adapting to affordances in the environment and making decisions that align with the evolving problem at hand.
Sensitive Information Pickup and Contextual Adaptability in Sports
The importance of becoming sensitive to specifying information in sports like MMA and baseball is underscored in the podcast. Athletes are encouraged to perceive rather than simply read cues, utilizing rich informational sources for effective decision-making. Examples such as picking up arm slot changes in baseball or interpreting subtle movements in MMA highlight the value of contextual sensitivity and adaptability. The discussion extends to the ethical consideration of creating representative training environments that challenge athletes to perceive relevant information and make decisions in real-time scenarios.
The boys from emergence are back to discuss their recently accepted and published paper on "Applying an ecological dynamics framework to mixed martial arts training".
This paper followed their previous publication from 2023 "(Re)conceptualizing movement behavior in sport as a problem-solving activity".
Both of these papers were supported and co-authored by Professor Keith Davids himself a titan in the skill acquisition community and a pioneer of ecological dynamic.
SBG's Adam Singer, The Academy's Andy Grahn and myself were also able to provide modest contributions by way of case studies that were included in the paper as practical examples of the application of an ecological approach at our prospective gyms.
Tyler Yearby and Shawn Myszka plan on further investigation and future studies in the space of MMA from an ecological perspective. Until then, check out the papers linked above and to access an absolute treasure trove of all things ecological, check out their website at Emergence.
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