Authors: Sam Hydes, Martyn Rothwell, David Farrokh & Keith Davids.

Decades ago, the psychologist Kurt Lewin shared the insight that: “There is nothing so practical as a good theory” (1943, p. 69). In a paper published in 2024, Phil Kearney and colleagues referred to a lovely quote from Jerome Bruner, the cognitive development psychologist, which highlighted the challenges in applying knowledge to resolve practical issues: ‘Thoughtful people have forever been troubled by the enigma of applying theoretical knowledge to practical problems’. (Bruner, 1996, p. 44).

Most practitioners in sport and education would recognise these sentiments, especially those who place great emphasis on the importance of using a scientific, evidence-based approach in their work. Scientific knowledge from research on performance, learning and development remains a significant source of information that underpins pedagogical practice in training and education. As noted by Kearney and co-authors in their 2024 article: It’s difficult to apply scientific ideas of human behaviour in practice! It is especially challenging to understand and control what is going on during the complicated learning process in sport, work and other performance contexts.

Why practitioners need a useful theory to guide their professional practice

Jia Yi Chow and colleagues remind us that, to make sense of practical activities, implement effective organisation and make efficient use of time, coaches, teachers and sport practitioners need to rely on a model of the learner and the learning process.

Many practitioners already work with a theoretical model of the learner and the learning process. And while they may be broadly happy with their work, they may have some nagging questions at the back of their mind, such as:

How do I know whether the coaching practices I use are as effective as they could be?

What information can I use to make decisions on improving and refining my practice?

These are fundamental issues to be considered by practitioners who are reflective, science-oriented and evidence-based in their practice, seeking to use the most contemporary theoretical ideas and up-to-date pedagogical ideas for their practice.

Of course, scientific knowledge is not the only useful source of evidence and information that practitioners may use in their work. Useful ideas come from different sources. For example, another source may emerge from the experiential knowledge gained from practitioners’ everyday experiences of working with athletes and teams, when designing learning activities. For example, experiential knowledge can arise from observing other coaches and sports scientists at work, listening to podcasts or reading about the ideas of experienced practitioners in sport, as Alex Lascu and co-workers and Matt Wood and colleagues noted in their articles on coach education from an ecological perspective.

Figure 1 shows how a confluence of empirical knowledge from science and experiential knowledge from everyday practice provides a rich body of information and ideas to guide the practice of those in education and training.

The insights of Lewin and Bruner remind us about the value of applying theoretically sound ideas in practice, and the questions arise, then:

How do we distinguish between a useful and less useful theory?

What if the choice of theory is not so clear and we happen to like the idea of applying some ideas from different theories in our pedagogical methods?

Are all theories compatible with each other?

This post is about whether coaches, educators and trainers can selectively choose different bits and pieces from different scientific theories and integrate them together, regardless of their origin, to underpin professional practice when developing athletes and preparing individuals and teams for competitive performance in sport.

In fact, in a Delphi survey conducted by one of the authors of this blog (SH) participants responded to the following comments:

Factors relating to training and performance methodology

Common principles may be hard to develop due to different philosophical and theoretical positions. Agreement

Common principles may be easier to develop once there is an understanding and appreciation of different philosophical and theoretical perspectives. Agreement

Collaborative practice design would mean that disciplines have to “step outside” of their philosophical, theoretical, and applied beliefs. No consensus reached (66% agreement)

Collaborative practice design should be aligned to a single methodology of athlete development. Disagreement

Disciplinary perspectives may not always agree on the best course of action for athlete preparation. Agreement

The Delphi survey findings highlighted a fascinating paradox: high-performance coaches and support staff expressed reservations about being aligned to a single theory and methodology for athlete development.

The issue raised for comment in the Delphi study was: “Collaborative practice should not be aligned to a single methodology of athlete development”.

However, respondents also acknowledged the difficulty of establishing common principles of practice due to diverse philosophies, theoretical perspectives, and disagreements within sub-disciplines regarding what may be an ‘optimal’ approach in athlete preparation and performance.

This is what we try to unravel in this blog post.

In professional practice, this logical train of thinking leads us to ponder:

Do practitioners have to compare and contrast theories to work out which ones to use in supporting our practical work? Can they simply pick the ‘best’ bits from different theories and mix them up together in our work? Can they just adopt what has been called a ‘complementary’ approach which is based on the idea of picking specific bits (ideas, concepts, models) from different theories and creating a new integrated whole?

In fact, it’s very rare that complementarity between two philosophically and scientifically distinct positions ever emerges as we outline in this blog. This is not just philosophical contemplation on our part.

Academic Perspective: Why we can’t just ‘pick & mix’ between some theories

We start by acknowledging that there may be some practitioners who only rely on their experiential knowledge in designing athlete support programmes for performance, learning and development (e.g., those methods which they have gained through experience, which they trust and have seen to work in practice). Here, we discuss the challenge of creating a principled approach to coaching and providing professional support which is claimed to be driven by scientific evidence and ideas on performance, learning and development.

Different schools of thought in psychology

There are two main schools of thought in psychology regarding motor learning and skill acquisition: Cognitive Psychology and Ecological Dynamics. These schools are composed of families of closely-related theories.

(i) For example, cognitive psychology has several strands, such as cognitive neuroscience, enactivism, embedded cognition and embodied cognition;

(ii) Ecological Dynamics is influenced by ecological psychology, dynamical systems theory, complex systems theory, evolutionary sciences and neurobiology.

In this post, we don’t intend to get into deep details regarding the variants of these families of theories. Rather, we focus on differences in their foundational beliefs which challenge the integration of theoretical ideas from the two different schools of thought in psychology. In simpler terms: Why a ‘pick & mix’ approach is not a good idea.

It is worth starting with a brief look at the history of the different philosophical and scientific lineages of cognitive psychology and ecological dynamics theory. This distinction is used as an example to show why a deeper understanding of the philosophical foundations that underpin all scientific approaches to performance, learning and development, could improve practical applications of coaches and teachers. Diving deeper to understand the background to the different theories of performance, learning and development could prevent misconceptions, misunderstanding and misapplication by coaches.

Some sport practitioners may be dismayed at the complications of having two schools of thought to choose from, providing different theoretical explanations for the same outcomes. A good example of this can be seen in a commentary by Carl Woods and colleagues in the journal Psychological Research, pointing out a different way to interpret data from an experiment outlining the role of cognitive maps in finding our way around the environment.

But another way of looking at the range of different theoretical perspectives is that it’s actually a sign of a vibrant and healthy scientific sub-discipline (motor learning) in a rich scientific discipline (psychology). The rapid growth in scientific knowledge, theoretical explanations of behaviour and methodologies has led to more specialised research to enhance our understanding in motor learning, skill acquisition, performance analysis and psychology of performance.

The different schools of thought in psychology have distinct metatheoretical foundations

We start by recognising that every theory in science has some important assumptions and commitments that we buy into, if we are intent on following its principles. The ecological psychologist, Harry Heft (2012, p12), clarified it for us: "A theoretical approach in a science can be viewed as belonging to a family of theories that share common meta-theoretical assumptions."

So, what we have called here a ‘school of thought’ in psychology is essentially a framework of interconnected principles, concepts and ideas for explaining human behaviours (like performance, learning and development).

Alert: Cognitive psychology and Ecological Dynamics have different metatheoretical foundations.

Meta-theoretical assumptions make up the philosophical beliefs and ideas about human existence and experience that underpin a theory of behaviour. Meta-theories support a way of viewing the world (or paradigm) that shapes our understanding of behaviours like performance, learning and development. Different scientific paradigms (ways of viewing the world) come with different conceptual frameworks, beliefs, underlying assumptions and sets of principles.

For example, meta-theoretical foundations are different for those theories which consider that our behaviour is significantly shaped by our genetic inheritance or by the environment which we are brought up in. These meta-theories have shaped the ‘nature v nurture’ debate that has haunted psychology for decades. In fact, science has a lot of ‘dualisms’ like these which pit different theories against each other (see Figure 2 showing some of the dualisms that have emerged in psychological science over the decades).

In a nutshell, when it comes to understanding performance, learning and development:

Some theories propose that humans construct internal models of the world in the brain and use mental processes to make sense of (i.e. enrich) the information that surrounds us (Cognitive Psychology).

In contrast, the work of The Constraints Collective is founded on an ecological dynamics rationale for performance, learning and development, based on the deep relationship that is formed between each organism (individual) and the performance environment, continually developed during learning and maturation.

So, different theories of movement, explaining control, coordination and skill acquisition (e.g., cognitive psychology and ecological psychology), have distinct philosophical and scientific underpinnings. As the eminent philosopher scientist, Alicia Juarrero noted, the historical and socio-cultural context in which a theory develops is important. Juarrero referred to the ‘apparent assumptions’ (assumed beliefs and values) that underpin theories. This is because these underlying assumptions are not immediately obvious to readers who are not familiar with the sciences and their meta-theories. For this reason, the developmental psychologist Willis Overton called these metatheoretical underpinnings in science ‘background concepts’, meaning that they may only come under the spotlight in discussions on the philosophy of science, not so much in everyday applications.

A theory is ‘silently’ shaped by influential philosophical ideas (metatheoretical foundations) that have dominated scientific thinking at a particular time in history and social context. In turn, the metatheories to which a theory of motor learning belongs, ‘silently’ shape practice application ideas because they come along with implicit assumptions and commitments to certain beliefs and ideas. These ‘apparent assumptions’ are not always made explicit in every paper on learning. And why they should they be? A published paper is usually focused on specific ideas and data from a research study. Word limits are strict and there is often little space available to repeatedly refer to the philosophical assumptions that underpin the ideas discussed in an article.

Key message: Think of the metatheory of an explanation of behaviour as the ‘small print of conditions’ for a scientific theory. Vitally important, but they lurk in the background and are not typically spotlighted in every publication. When authors write an article on a research study or a practice application to publish in a journal, they do not have the capacity to address the original philosophical foundations of these theories. In the case of cognitive psychology, this would need going back a millennium to the Greek philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, for example) for their musings on learning and practice for example. For ideas providing an ecological foundation, one can go back around 150 years or so.

These assumptions are usually left implicit and unspoken (at conferences, in papers and in podcasts). And, to be fair, some authors may not be fully acquainted with the meta-theoretical foundations of their favoured approach to human behaviours.

But, why do we need to be well acquainted with the ‘apparent assumptions’ of a metatheory? In the post, we are addressing the commitments to different psychological theories to discuss the Delphi findings we mentioned earlier.

Metatheories point to different models of the learner and the learning process

Clearly, this is not simply an ‘academic’ argument of practical irrelevance. As we discussed elsewhere: Those who need to understand how people learn (e.g., parents, educators, teachers, coaches, sport scientists, trainers, managers and performance analysts) need to have a model of the learner and the learning process in mind when it comes to designing practices.

This is needed (along with scientific updates and information on changes in technology, rules, and practice and performance conditions) to make the learning process more effective and efficient (not wasting learners’ time and efforts and making effective use of time spent learning).

The crux of the matter is that the foundational philosophical beliefs of one theoretical approach to skill acquisition, or another, has led to different ways of understanding: (i) how we should view the learner; and (ii), and what the process of learning actually entails.

Summary so far: Scientific ideas behind important human behaviours like performing, learning, developing and practising have specific philosophical foundations which imply assumed beliefs, understandings and values. These meta-theoretical assumptions are implicit and differ between theories. Metatheories have different philosophical foundations and can help us to develop a meaningful model of the learner and the learning process to provide us with a set of concepts and guiding principles for understanding performance, learning and development.

Referring to metatheories can help us to avoid conceptual confusion and time wasted, pursuing less productive and less consequential ideas. They can help us differentiate between meaningful and meaningless scientific activities. Willis Overton suggested that some metatheories may be useful as metaphors in modelling our understanding of the world and how things work. For example, there are different metaphors at play when we think about theories conceiving human beings as a mechanistic, inanimate system (an input-output device: ‘the brain is a computer’) or as a biological organism (a dynamical entity, functioning in an eco-system).

The main scientific paradigms of human behaviour

Currently, it is generally agreed that there are 4 main scientific paradigms or worldviews of human behaviour, relevant for psychologists: trait, interactionist, organismic and relational. Trait and interactionist meta-theories are traditionally dominant paradigms in the history of psychology, while the organismic and relational worldviews are more recent additions to this group.

The interactionist and trait meta-theories pay close attention to the internal characteristics, traits and properties of an individual person as the main units of analysis for understanding behaviour. Each person is considered to be an independent, self-contained entity, with specific dispositions and tendencies, independent of the environment. In this sense, each individual has essential traits and characteristics which helps them function as semi-independent, bounded units continually interacting with other entities (e.g., other humans, objects, forms and bodies) which inhabit the environment.

Interactionism views humans as autonomous individuals acting independently in the environment. In this way of thinking, interactions between humans are likened to the collisions between a bunch of snooker or billiard balls whose trajectories in space and time can be calculated, predicted with precision, as they impact on each other, coming together (interacting) in the environment. There are parallels with linear, mechanistic accounts in the physics of clockwork interactions between entities and objects in the universe, originally developed by Sir Isaac Newton after a mythical encounter with an apple falling from a tree under the force of gravity. In physics this interaction has been captured by the concept of ‘action-reaction’. As with other theoretical accounts of human behaviour, these mechanistic ideas became prominent in psychological explanations.

In psychology, Réné Descartes was a main proponent of such an interactionist account of human behaviour. Cartesian psychology is dualist in philosophical foundation, which views the mind and body as separate parts of a human being. Each individual is viewed as autonomous, with behaviour produced from independent traits and mental capacities, such as unique memories and internal representations which help us to develop knowledge about our world. Our behaviour is controlled by this information located within internal mechanisms and processed by the mind. Although each individual has the capacity for autonomous tendencies to regulate their behaviour, they are continually impacted by interactions with other individuals, events and objects in the environment.

Key message: Interactionism views the individual and the environment as semi-autonomous, separate entities which can impact on each other through interactions.

To exemplify, one can see the essentials of interactionist metatheoretical ideas in the psychological theory of behaviourism, captured in the stimulus-response relationship, as well as in information processing accounts of behaviour. Behaviour in these theoretical approaches is somewhat mechanistic and linear. Furthermore, the person or the environment can each provide an explanation for behaviour separately and independently of each other. That is, interactionist accounts of human behaviour may rely on describing what happens in a person (cognitive psychology) or in the environment (behaviourism). Events and outcomes can be explained either by what is going on in the environment or what is going on in an individual.

In such trait and interactionist theories, the standard approach to understanding perception, cognition and action is to start with the senses (vision, touch, hearing, feeling, etc), not by investigating relations of a perceiver and the surrounding context. For example, in trait theories the focus is on a sensory receptor, a mental process or a gene for fast cognition or super visual abilities.

Figure 3: It’s all in your mind!: An example of an interactionist approach to supporting athletes in performance development and preparation focuses on internal properties or characteristics of an individual athlete:

Summary: Interactionism is dualist in philosophical foundation, with the mind leading the physical ‘machinery’ of the body. Learning and development is concerned with enriching the mental capacities of each individual, for making sense of their surrounds and for steering their interactions with the environment. Enrichment processes include the construction of mental maps and internal route finders for guidance, relying on models of movement and the world constructed internally, encoded and stored as universal types, tokens and kinds for knowledge, recognition and awareness of our world (as Plato argued).

In contrast to the above, organismic and relational accounts of human behaviour form the meta-theoretical foundations of ecological approaches to human behaviour. Relational accounts stress the deep interconnections of an organism and its environment: each cannot be understood apart from each other. Attention is focused on the relationships that emerge from the continuous transactions (exchanges) between humans and the environment, forming a highly interconnected, complex adaptive system. Coordination is a fundamentally important process of relational systems to study, as scientists like Scott Kelso have argued for many years.

Why use the specific word transactions in describing the relations between an individual and the surrounding environment in which they are embedded?

Here, its useful to consider a quote from an important book by Peter Kugler and Michael Turvey written a few decades ago. They noted that:

“Ecological Science, in its broadest sense, is a multidisciplinary approach to the study of living systems, their environments and the reciprocity that has evolved between the two....Ecological Psychology....[emphasizes] the study of information transactions between living systems and their environments, especially as they pertain to perceiving situations of significance to planning and executing of purposes activated in an environment” (Kugler & Turvey, 1987, p. xii).

We like this quote a lot for several reasons. But here we pick up on just two points:

First, the quote draws the links between ecology as a science explaining phenomena in the natural physical world and ecological psychology as a theory for framing the study of human behaviour.

Second, it is useful for understanding analyses of transactions between individuals and their surrounds, because it clarifies that these transactions involve information exchanges. These transactions between humans and their environment involve energy exchanges during cognition, perception and actions. The use of the word 'purposes' highlights the importance of intentions in framing what we perceive and how we act.

The idea that transactional exchanges between people and their surroundings form the basis of human behaviours aligns well with James Gibson’s insight on the importance of coupling perception and action in skilled performance: “We perceive in order to act and we act in order to perceive” (p223). In his theory of ecological optics James Gibson focused on how surrounding energy could furnish information to be picked up by an individual using active perception and selecting affordances for action.

This is possible because ecological systems are highly attuned to information, flowing in and around them, emerging over different timescales. In such highly interconnected systems, information and time are key stimulants of the transactional relations that emerge as people engage with their environment. Our actions are solicited by information from the environment. For example, information is available as affordances which invite our actions. Information is also used within such complex systems to communicate between parts, regulating transactions through energy exchanges, supporting self-organisation (continuous adjustments that emerge spontaneously, under constraint). Time is an essential property of ecological systems of all types, which is neglected in cognitive models of human behaviour. This is because the interconnections and relations between ecological system components are changing at many different timescales. For this reason, evolutionary biological and socio-historical and cultural constraints shaping such systems are so important to study because of the history of the relations between system components which support their inter-connectivity.

Many elements of ecological systems provide the capacity to adjust their behaviours, relative to each other, exploiting inherent self-organising tendencies which underpin their transactions (exchanges) with the environment. According to Piaget, in a sophisticated biological process, this is how one’s skill and knowledge gradually can become adapted to a wide variety of behavioural contexts. As Alicia Juarrero noted in her 2023 book, context means everything in the constant process of adaptation. Affordances (behavioural opportunities available in the environment) support functional adaptation to dynamic performance environments. These ideas are diametrically opposed to control and order appearing through automatisation of machine-like behaviours in humans viewed as input-output devices.

Where did relational ideas originate?

The move towards relativistic, relational process thinking, originating in the late 1800s in American pragmatism in philosophy, facilitated a transition from elemental and reductive, structural philosophical positions (focusing on breaking things down into parts rather than study them as systems). The next step was the growth of a systems orientation in science, for viewing how things are deeply interconnected, exchanging energy and information between each other. Science became less focused on producing established truths that are fixed, settling on understanding the relations within natural physical systems that emerge through an organism’s transactions with the dynamic environment over time.

From the 1800s onwards, ‘complexity’ and relational thinking became more popular in physics, chemistry and biology, but remained less influential in psychology. This was when the influence of time in scientific theories started to raise questions over the powerful influence of Greek philosophical ideals. The dominant mechanistic, interactionist view of the clockwork universe and world started to concede ground to ecological and evolutionary ideas with time-based ideas on how systems become more and more interconnected. For example, these ideas framed the broad conceptualisation of evolution in science by Charles Darwin and others. Eventually, this movement if you want to call it that, leaked into psychology due to the integrated influence of ecological psychology, dynamical systems theory, complexity sciences, and ecological dynamics. Ecological psychology emerged due to the influence of James Gibson, starting in the 1950s onwards. He initiated the drive for understanding the within-level and between-level connectivity processes which characterise ecological systems. Over the decades, this has been hard work for ecological psychology due to the dominance of trait-based and interactionist meta theories which propose mechanistic and mentalistic perspectives of behaviour.

So, there you have a brief description of the historical foundations of distinct meta-theories underpinning cognitive psychology (interactionism) and ecological dynamics (transactionalism).

By now some threads should be emerging, taking us back to our original question:

Can sport practitioners ‘pick & mix’ (cherry pick ideas) in developing a scientifically-supported approach to understanding performance, learning and development?

Following the main arguments in the discussion, it should be clearer why using a ‘pick & mix’ approach to coaching methodology is not coherent and logical, if a scientific approach is being followed. The philosophical foundations of the main psychological approaches come from different start points in the history of scientific ideas and their trajectories have run along parallel lines ever since. Next, we outline what these ideas might mean for coaches and sport scientists.

Coaches’ Perspective

Referring to the nagging questions posed at the start of this blog:

What are the key principles I am using to design my practice and why am I using them?

How do I know whether the coaching practices I use are as effective as they could be?

What information can I use to make decisions on improving and refining my practice?

To highlight some of the challenges inherent in a pick and mix approach, we present two examples: an invasion game and an individual sport.

Example 1: The challenge of using a pick and mix approach to developing attacking play in an invasion sport

To demonstrate the challenge of using a pick and mix approach from an applied perspective, we present a recent experience of observing an invasion sport team trying to develop attacking play through a shared mental model (interactionism) and game scenarios (transactionalism). The observed team was trying to develop a new approach to executing attacking phases of play during preseason. The coaching support staff prioritised methods to develop knowledge about the environment (information to detail competitive plays and actions) through video analysis, team tactics boards, and discussions about how players should collectively behave in certain attacking scenarios. Through this approach, the coaching team held the assumption that labelling and categorising actions to carry out in the game, in certain positions, and at certain time points, was the basis of sport performance. The aim of this approach was to develop shared mental models to inform players’ knowledge about the environment.

In one such example, during a 90-minute coaching session, the team spent 50 minutes developing knowledge about the environment through a video analysis session, using verbal instructions and feedback. Following the transition to the training pitch, they had approximately 30 minutes remaining to rehearse attacking scenarios, based on the previously discussed information. This training approach became the standard method for developing collective attacking team play. Observations of this approach highlighted several challenges which affected advances in learning and performance. For example:

1. Even after several weeks of adopting this approach, players’ interpretations of what, when, and how they should be acting in specific situations were quite different. These confusions resulted in arguments between the players, coaches becoming increasingly frustrated, and ineffective attacking playing.

2. Practice became focused on past performance (what went wrong) in training and preseason games, rather than guiding players’ attention to present challenges for refining future performance. In other words, the performance programme overemphasised past issues and problems, rather than focusing on immediate challenges facing the players.

3. Players became over reliant on the coaches’ instructions, and knowledge about the environment, to guide their performance.

4. Overtime this increasing reliance led to players ignoring key specifying information sources that emerged during play as knowledge of the environment (e.g., individual and team defensive actions) that would ultimately guide their behaviour during competitive performance. In competition, information specifies actions and actions create further information, making affordances (invitations for action) available in the surrounding context.

This example demonstrates that when coaches and the wider multidisciplinary team unknowingly move between models of the learner and the learning process. Here, a cognitive approach preferencing verbal and visual information to guide players in accruing knowledge about the environment impeded their transactions with the performance environment, founded on knowledge of the competitive context. This clash between methods of preparation and what arose from players due to challenges of competition led to issues in learning and performance. Whatever a coach’s theoretical persuasion is, a clear model of the learning process should be communicated to guide learning designs within team environments. As already discussed, this is an important step to take in order not to confuse the learning process, and to enhance performance more effectively and efficiently.

Example 2: Differences in approaches within Springboard Diving

The images in Figure 4 below show a diver performing a forward one and a half somersault addressing a performance challenge of landing too far away from the springboard. We have captured some critical time points (e.g., last point of contact with the springboard) to show how the diver is positioned and how they perform the dive.

Figures 5 and 6 below, discuss a cognitive approach to practice and an ecological approach, (manipulating task constraints to help the diver search for a functional performance solution). The aim of practice is to resolve the performance problem of entering the water too far away from the diving board (resulting in trailing legs and too much splash).

A cognitive approach

Figure 5 shows a diver performing a forward jump with pike. Typically, in springboard diving, coaches would seek to explicitly instruct the diver how to solve the performance problem by breaking the skill down (task decomposition) into component parts. This approach often relies heavily on the coaches’ knowledge about the performance environment, which defines the verbal instructions, visual demonstrations, descriptions and feedback used to oversee the diver’s learning. The diver will be challenged to demonstrate improved balance and distance jumped from the diving board by isolating the take-off component for practice. The aim is to develop technical proficiency in one sub-component of the movement at a time (to ‘polish’ each sub-routine separately, in a reductive approach. The aim is to manage the information load for the athlete and help them to acquire substantive mental representations of the dive through learning. The decomposition approach helps them to refine optimal techniques until the performer can execute the motor skill efficiently and reliably. With this newly acquired template, the diver will be challenged to integrate it into the original dive, a forward one and a half somersault piked. By decomposing the dive into smaller parts, the information load on the diver is reduced, but this causes the diver to address the environment in practice in a different way (e.g., orienting the body in space in a different way to comply with the coach’s instructions). Figure 5 illustrates the diver’s body positioning at various key moments within the dive action. As you can see, the jump requires the diver to coordinate their movement differently compared to a rotating dive. The diver’s arm swing timing, while depressing the board is altered, and the legs, hips, and torso remain rather too vertically upright to prevent rotation. The issue with this approach is that the dives that the diver is performing require the adaptation to variability which may emerge from each technique sub-component to resolve the overall performance problem of improving distance jumped from the diving board.

An ecological dynamics approach

In contrast, Figure 6 below, shows the outcome of adopting an ecological approach to facilitate improved balance on the diving board and postural orientation in space while diving. Using a constraints-led approach, the unobtrusive placement of a chamois in the pool encourages the diver to explore and discover different ways to address the environment seeking an individualised performance solution. A task constraint (a boundary or limitation, or design feature that influences how a performer can achieve a desired task goal) is introduced on the water surface (in the form of a chamois cloth) to guide the diver’s intentions and provide a performance goal of “land on or before the chamois”. The diver is also guided to attend to the chamois and find a relevant, individualised movement solution to achieve the performance goal. Specifically, the added information made available in the environment helps guide the diver (using ‘repetition without repetition’; Bernstein, 1967) to search for a better alignment of the body vertically, and to seek improved timing of the arm swing to facilitate effective body rotation in the air. By satisfying this task constraint (landing on the spot in the pool highlighted by the chamois), divers will learn to attune to specifying properties of the relevant affordance within their environment through engaging with the practice task constraints. Gradually, the chamois can be removed from the practice environment, and the diver will learn to use a spot on the surface of the pool to target instead.

Summary

It could be useful for coaches to ‘dive deeper’ and start to frame their coaching around a theoretical framework of learning from science. This will provide understanding of a coherent set of scientific principles for their work and help them resolve any questions that may arise, avoiding misunderstandings. It will help them make sense of the evidence they come across in an applied scientific paper they may read and help them locate the ‘apparent assumptions’ of the researchers behind a particular application of performance, learning, and development.

There is a lack of deep understanding of different theories of performance, learning and development for coaching. To address this limitation, coaches, researchers, practitioners, academics, and coach education need to work together to facilitate effective knowledge transfer.

Of course, a coach or teacher is entitled to use an atheoretical approach to coaching, based on knowledge of a non-scientific kind. This type of knowledge may be based on observing and imitating what other coaches do in practice or may be based on their own experiences on how they were coached themselves (as ex-athletes for example). This type of understanding is explicitly founded on their ‘experiential knowledge’, gained from personal insights and experiences.

Regardless of how a coach approaches their professional practice, it is important for them to have a model of the learner and the learning process to guide them, especially as the framework for coaching and teaching a sport or physical activity is constantly changing (due to technological and equipment advances, changes in format, new rules and new ideas, for example).

If you want to dive deeper into some further reading, see:

Altman, I., & Rogoff, B. (1987). World views in psychology: Trait, interactional, organismic, and transactional perspective. In D. Stokols, & I. Altman (Eds.), Handbook of Environmental Psychology, Vol. 1 (pp. 7-40). New York: John Wiley.

Davids, K., Rothwell, M., Hydes, S., Robinson, T., & Davids, C. (2023). Enriching Athlete—Environment Interactions in Youth Sport: The Role of a Department of Methodology. Children, 10(4), 752.

Heft, H. (2012). Foundations of an ecological approach to Psychology. In S. D. Clayton (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Conservation Psychology (pp. 11-40). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kugler, P.N., & Turvey, M.T. (1987). Information, natural law and the self-assembly of rhythmic movement. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Juarrero, A. (2023). Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. MIT Press: Cambridge, Ma.

Overton, W. (2013). Relationism and Relational Developmental Systems: A Paradigm for Developmental Science in the Post-Cartesian Era. Advances in Child Development and Behaviour 44, 21-64.

Woods, C., Araújo, D & Davids, K. (2024) On finding one’s way: A comment on “The structure of cognitive strategies for wayfinding decisions” – Bock, O., Huang, J.-Y., Onur, O & Memmert, D. (2024). Psychological Research: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-024-02011-1