The Perception & Action Podcast

How do practice constraints reshape soccer goalkeeping? This discussion explores nonlinear changes in performance, coordination, and decision-making across a long-term study with elite female goalkeepers. Topics include threshold effects, interacting task and environmental demands, representative practice, and why isolated shooting drills may miss the information goalkeepers need.

A lively discussion of Gibson’s ideas on active looking, ecological information, and the perception-action relationship. Topics include occlusion and continuity, affordances and abilities, skilled perception, eye movements, binocular and compound vision, and why eye tracking may miss how information is actually gathered. The conversation also explores lessons for self-driving cars and ecological coaching.

How can sports analytics shape better practice? This discussion explores using performance data to uncover rate limiters, movement attractors, and adaptability gaps. It examines how constraint manipulation can target individual and team needs, how to compare practice with game demands, and why functional variability and carefully chosen unrepresentative drills matter in ecological dynamics-based training.

A revisit of why we use constraints to shape movement and skill learning. Short takes on whether constraints afford information or potentiate new dynamics. Discussion of removing bad options first, then promoting better ones. Examples span pitching grips, batting, small-sided games, and how rules and instruction act as constraints.

Steve Whelan, tennis coach and coach educator behind MyTennisCoaching.com, shares his journey into ecological dynamics and constraint-led coaching. He explains why technique can emerge from representative practice. He warns constraints are not a quick fix and coaches must guide exploration. He discusses coaching youngsters, handling parents, and avoiding mixed conflicting approaches.

Will Stubbs, Head of Education at Zen Golf who builds practice tools like the Green Stage and Swing Stage, discusses applying ecological dynamics to golf training. He explains representative practice, using moving floors and environmental constraints to shape movement. He also covers variability versus a repeatable swing and previews a practical webinar with demos and resources.

Ted Kroeten, founder of Joy of the People and youth soccer coach, champions play-based development. He discusses whether structured, industrialized training is stealing talent. Short takes cover underloading versus overload, movement as a language, using varied constraints, and how relaxed play builds deceptive, adaptable players.

A tour of Dynamical Systems Theory applied to coaching, from time-series data collection to nonlinear tools. Announcement of a practical course teaching sport-specific application. Discussion of movement variability as structured coordination and a pitching study showing coordination changes before injury. A dynamical perspective on sprint coaching, constraint manipulation, and individualized phase transitions.

They dig into the discovery of the occluding edge and how it overturns the idea that perception is just retinal input plus memory. A classic progressive-deletion demonstration shows objects perceived as occluded, not vanished. Conversation covers movement and changing viewpoints, limits of occlusion over time, implications for tracking and navigation, and how action and environmental knowledge stay perceptually available.

A preview of a new book that rethinks how thinking and memory operate in sports and skill. The traditional perception–cognition–action model is critiqued and neuroscience methods are questioned. An emergent view of cognition from coupled perception and action is proposed. Practical teaching, resonance in the brain, memory reframing, team coordination, and tech for training are explored.