SHOULD WE BE MOVING AWAY FROM THE FUNDAMENTALS?

                                             

One of my major finds in Twitter-world 2022 has been basketball coach Alex Sarama and this post is based off some of his current content on the fundamentals of basketball and in sport in general, why coaches all over glue themselves to the fundamentals of their and why they should embrace the complete opposite of what they currently do.

In my research on how people learn, a lot of which I have posted about in the last 12 months or so, I have found myself agreeing with a lot of what he says but which would be much to the chagrin of 99% of other football coaches.

It's lucky I'd rather be in the other 1% personally.

Here are notes taken from a mix of Alex's take on a few different studies and how adopting a constraints-led approach to training would lead him in his coaching future.

This might be a real eye opener of a lot of reader's but enter with an open mind, a growth mindset and  see what you can do with this going forward.

As always, happy to discuss if you want or need to.

• Players have been stifled of creativity due to fundamental/reductionist coaching.
• Survivorship bias is saying that Dustin Martin did this so it must work while also ignoring all the others it didn’t work for
• The initial aim should to teach the basic fundamentals 1^st to get confidence/rhythm then put players in game situations where they need to figure out how to make good passes against opposition as functional solutions should build upon solid fundamentals
• The biggest issues with the basic fundamentals is that they are often coupled with explicit instruction which is a huge coaching issue as it suggests that there’s only 1 way to do 1 skill and that you can’t perform that skill in a game until you’ve mastered it to your coach's liking, and that is not how learning works (non-linear)
• Every player has different action capabilities based on their interaction between task, environment and task constraints, which are ever-changing which means it’s actually impossible to teach a fundamental and expect all players to use it the same way in a game + you’ll never perform this exact skill in the exact environment with the exact constraints again
• 1 of the biggest barriers to adopting modern approaches is that coaches are afraid to swap something they are comfortable with for an unknown better alternative
• Every solution in a game is different yet coaches remain married to fundamentals that no longer have relevance in the modern game. For example, straight at the kicker leads such as full forwards of the 80's and 90's are no longer a relevant kick to focus on in the modern game at higher levels of football, with more angled kicks to lateral space being easier to execute and are also of a greater demand because of shifts and improvements in defensive structures.
• Adhering to learning fundamentals before anything else simply holds players back and you don’t need to learn how to do a perfect drop punt before kicking to a player in a game situation, seen in many junior football games, but amazingly we ignore that fact when it comes to football training.
• Instead of telling them what to do, coaches need to create an environment where they learn implicitly with little/no instructions, the opposite of how coaches teach.
• 1 reason for coaches being married to fundamentals is because they mislabel biomechanical techniques for skill but performing a sport action without defensive is not a show of skill, it’s a show technique.
• Karl Newell’s Constraints-Led Approach model is the foundation to breaking these outdated and not even sub-optimal coaching practices.
• As mentioned earlier, different player action capabilities means there will be different affordances for every player but that doesn’t mean 1 player is more skilled than the other as it’s hugely situational.
• The Constraints-Led Approach refers to altering aspects around the number of players involved, the rules of the sport, the rules of the small sided game, your points system and the role of coach feedback.
• You are able to constrain to afford/nudge players towards certain solutions and small sided games allow for more exposures per player to different situations.
• This can be kicked into gear largely in part by designing a representative learning environment where movement-perception coupling is be maintained and the use an external focus of attention allows for self-organisation of movement.
• Within this you can manipulate constraints, specifically task constraints,which shape self organisation and the emergence of new solutions by infusing movement perturbations within the learning process.
• From a training perspective the use of Taylorism coaching, a system of scientific management used in factories and popularised by Henry Ford to mass produce cars, focused on increasing efficiency by breaking down the job into individual motions while workers were timed with a stopwatch with all unnecessary motion eliminated and the worker, like a machine, became far more productive and somehow these principles carried over into coaching with coaches relying on a lot of traditional, decomposed drills which look totally different from their sport.
• This leaves players going through a conveyor belt inundated with a bunch of techniques, set play patterns and explicit instructions and then expected to piece it all together in the game when they get to the end of the "belt".
• Players are also to make their way through the entire conveyor belt before being able to play (fundamentals) with most of the drills barely, if at all, aligning with the most basic motor learning findings (blocked v random etc).
• We can’t understand skill without a deep understanding of environment.
• Don't bother adding constraints to non-rep drills like the 3-man weave as it is still not task-representative design as it will still lack affordances, coupling, self organisation and repetition without repetition in the weave.
• Constraints certainly remove certain possibilities/options for action but they are not just limiting things (you must do this in "x" secs/only use your left hand etc) but they are also informative boundaries.
• Constraints go hand in hand with small sided games.
• Game representative activities all involve a ball,an opposition, a direction and a consequence.
• If you were to sit down and map out your usual activities, it won't take a good coach very long to find a way to reconfigured most, if not all of them, into an effective small sided game.
• There's no need to ditch set plays completely but embrace the role that individual task constraints have within an offensive/defensive structure meaning you can’t control every part of the possession so run a play but also be open to affordances that present themselves along the way.
• To go into the stratosphere with this, design set plays that will open up affordances so you have multiple options.