How Adesanya Should Train To Beat Strickland & Why Lights Don't Work w/ Shawn Myszka (SSOF Ep 87)

Shawn Myszka2:29

I'll send that your way for sure. It is entitled "Being Water," which shouldn't come as a shock or surprise. But really what we wanted to do with the paper—myself and then my colleague at Emergence, which is a movement skill education company that I own and operate as well, where we produce educational materials around skill acquisition for sport—his name is Tyler Yearby. He's currently doing a doctorate at the moment also. And then Keith Davids, who is a legend in the skill acquisition space and community. He was a person who first coined ecological dynamics along with Duarte Araujo.

So we took the ideas of ecological dynamics and put them through the lens of Bruce Lee and Jeet Kune Do back in the day, and vice versa, in a mutual reciprocal way, showing where maybe some of the ideas that Bruce Lee was adopting, or really ruminating about more than anything, really presenting to kill some of those sacred cows, change some of the traditional dogmatic ways of thinking in combat sports or mixed martial arts or martial arts, however it is that we want to define it.

What we find there is that many of his ideas—whether it was to use no way as the way, whether it was the highest technique is to have no technique, maybe it was something like these ideas of chasing one's own style—all of these types of things and ideas were things that we now hold near and dear to our hearts within ecological dynamics.

And we really wanted to make that tie-in, not only in combat sports—and we used a lot of combat sport illustrative examples—however, what we also wanted to do is show how it can transcend into other sports. Because that's actually how I came on to—believe it or not—came on to ecological dynamics, was through my adoration for Bruce Lee and his ideas.

I was still working and operating as a movement skill acquisition coach or specialist working with NFL players, and we were chasing rote repetition, perfect execution, perfect practice makes perfect. We were doing a lot of drilling in the traditional sense, and I was working with a lot of high-level NFL players—in fact, NFL MVPs, Pro Bowl MVPs, and the like—but I started to find, James, that when I asked myself the question, when I watch them perform and behave on a football field, are they performing because of me and the work that we're doing, or are they performing in spite of me or despite the activities that we're utilizing?

And then of course I started to get down to some of these Bruce Lee rabbit holes, and I started to put it through the lens for American football, and I started to find that there might be a new or better way. And so I believe that Bruce Lee was sort of like the first ecological dynamics oriented practitioner, to a certain degree, at least one who was talking about it very openly and really trying to kill some of those sacred cows that I talked about.

James de Lacey5:35

Dude, I love that so much. I took a lot from Vern Gambetta on that whole perfect practice makes perfect and really flipping it on its head, and perfect practice. Actually, I wrote a Simply Fast article—I should actually send it to you—breaking down the whole kind of creating robots as athletes instead of athletes.

And I spent my career working in rugby, and we had one of the years with a great coach, and I kind of laid it back to a podcast I'd listened to. And it's around: you provide the framework for the team or athletes, and then essentially they're the artists on the canvas that you give them, right? So they get to express what they see in front of them, which is what they play.

You might have a canvas for them to be in, but they create the art, versus, okay, when you get the ball here you must do this and this person must be here. And that's when you run into all those issues and drills and perfect practice and all those things that you're talking about now.

Shawn Myszka6:29

Well, you end up stripping the athlete from the contextual problem that they're expected to solve. And as Bruce Lee would put it, the what is—what is really there—this connection between an ever-changing environment that is presenting highly alive, vibrant movement problems for that player or athlete or mixed martial artist to solve, and they have the opportunity then to honestly and authentically express themselves in their own unique, adaptable way, as long as it's functionally fit to meet the needs, the challenges, the opportunities within that respective problem.

And it's a reason why you'll hear me speak a lot about repetition without repetition—this idea of repeating the process of solving a problem as opposed to repeating this means of the solution or the execution itself. It's about this holistic, integrated movement problem-solving process, as opposed to just something that is stored in the brain that we're going to recall and then help to implement at the right time or right place. It makes no sense, even though I was there for years and years and years, and so many coaches are still existing there.

James de Lacey7:33

Do you maybe just define this kind of ecological approach or ecological dynamics just for the listeners so they can get an idea of where this may hit?

Shawn Myszka7:33

Absolutely. So at a base level, what the ecological dynamics rationale or framework would say is that our relevant scope or scale of analysis—so the way that we view the behavior that emerges anywhere, it doesn't just have to be on a football field or in an octagon—the analysis that we take is on the performer-environment relationship. It's always the connection, the mutual reciprocal connection or relationship that exists between an environment and a performer or athlete, right?

And the two become one with one another to a certain degree. There's these mutual reciprocal exchanges between them. They have constant changing states of organization, and it's up to us, if we're going to analyze from a performance standpoint, to keep that coupled. As my friend Rob Gray from the Perception Action podcast would say, we keep them coupled. And so therefore, the processes of solving this problem must also remain coupled, because it's the relevance of the relationship that drives or defines the level of the skill.

And I think that's the biggest thing that we find: skill isn't in technical proficiency the way that it's typically defined, where we're thinking about competence or this sort of execution that someone has repeated over time. Again, it's them being able to interact with that problem and to find a functional fit with that problem, because no two problems are ever the same, and neither are any two solutions.

And if that is true—which most people would say it is—we can use the quote Bruce Lee often did, which was we never step in the same river twice. We're not the same man, and the river is not the same either. So when we think about combat interactions or interactions, problem-solving interactions on an American football field, those problems at some level are going to have different opportunities to act.

And there we find that it's the information that becomes highly relevant. It's the information in the world that we must connect to as a performer in our own unique way.

authentic way and that's why context shapes the content. The context being here's our movement problem to solve, and the content being the movement solution that is coordinated, controlled, and organized to fit it. They come together again and they're linked by the information.

So I know that can seem somewhat jargon-filled to a certain degree because that's the main critique or criticism that we often get, particularly with ecological dynamics. But again, James, words have meaning and those words allow us to look through this scale of analysis a little bit more accurately and keep things coupled together.

We can watch two high-level performers strike a bag and we don't necessarily know who's going to be better in a fight. Again, to hate to drop Bruce Lee and his quotes so often here, but boards don't hit back, right? It's about what is that the person is interacting with and maintaining that relationship there. That's really what ecological dynamics is around and about.

James de Lacey10:54

Awesome. And we'll dive into some of your, I guess, practical MMA stuff, but before that, does that mean that you don't believe there is a perfect technique for, for example, throwing a certain punch or kick?

Shawn Myszka11:27

Yeah, that is exactly what I believe. I believe that what we are trying to chase or coach to, what we are trying to find or let's just call it attain, is the performer's authentic and honest model for behaving or solving problems. Not one that could pertain to both James and Shawn, not one that could pertain to both Israel Adesanya and Alex Pereira. The two aren't the same, right?

We all are operating under our own constraints and because of those constraints at a human athlete organismic level, those things will flow into the problem that we're being presented with, the task in the nature of the environment, to then determine what movement solution or what technique is going to be most optimal.

And I think this is something that Bruce Lee talked about again—I'm probably going to use a lot of Bruce Lee quotes here—but this idea that of using no way is the way, absorbing what is useful, discarding what is not, and adding what is uniquely your own, comes through one's own frame of reference. It's what's best for James or it's what's best for Shawn. And it's finding that in what I don't want to use the words make sense, but I guess to a certain degree it really is. It's what makes sense for us based on our individual constraints and the way that we see the world.

In ecological dynamics we refer to this idea as one's form of life, one's way of being and thinking and acting. We all think, behave, and act very differently from one another in the real world just going about our natural everyday activities. Why would it be any different in combat interactions?

You used the examples of Israel Adesanya and Alex Pereira. Obviously rivals, both fairly similar in their anthropometric features at least on the surface from afar. Obviously we can get in the specifics and realize that Alex Pereira is a giant of a man, but, you know, Israel is obviously a skinny little dude who happens to be 6'4.

But we can think about their form of life. Both high-level kickboxers, right, who then entered the UFC. But they see the world very differently from one another. You watch their mannerisms, you watch their behavior. Both equally as effective in finding movement solutions that are going to be functional in the moment.

They could both be behaving in similar—and I say similar, they're not same, similar—movement problems to solve, alive ones, but they're going to behave very differently. And it's not even just in their techniques that we see them utilize, it's in the way that we see them perceiving. We see Adesanya kind of doing one of these things, right, as he's perceiving the information in the world, he's perceiving these opportunities. And Alex Pereira is just coming forward at you, in your face, and yet will throw that low kick out of nowhere.

These are different nuances for very similar problems and they stem from the perception of the information they're picking up in the world, but also their aims to act in a given way based on that form of life. Israel Adesanya is very expressive, very stylistic, and obviously his moniker, his name, is oriented around that—the Last Stylebender. And then you look at Alex Pereira, Poatan, the—you're looking at this warrior type of character who's just trying to come and assassinate your ass. These are very distinct, different forms of life that then channel the movement technique or skill we find.

James de Lacey15:12

And I think one, maybe UFC fighter that almost embodies the ecological approach probably without even knowing it, just based on what people are saying, would be someone like Sean Strickland who apparently spars every single day, which is technically a—for I guess you could say an ecological approach to training since he's having to solve problems all the damn time. Probably not, he probably smashes his brain all day, but that would be, I guess you could class that under that kind of approach technically, right? Obviously there are more nuances involved, but that would be one person that's almost implementing it without even knowing.

Shawn Myszka15:43

Yeah, I think you're on to something here, James. In fact, my friend Scott Siewright from Primal MK—who I think you had on the podcast a number of months back or a bit ago—so he and I always connect around this idea and we have an ongoing back because he knows that I'm an Israel Adesanya fanboy in this way. And mostly I'm a fanboy of the skill execution and in his way of being and doing that we just highlighted, that I'm a fan of.

But when he faced Sean Strickland, Scott and I literally, I think it was two days after that, as I was trying to absorb what happened and I had watched and analyzed the fight five or six times after that point, and Scott and I connected on his podcast around this very topic and idea about why or how Sean Strickland and his style was able to present such unique perturbations to Israel Adesanya's style.

And I believe that the training was that which was resulting of both the positive effects on one side and the negative consequences on another. The positive effects for Sean Strickland was he is so accustomed to solving these problems just inherently, it's how he lives, it's how he breathes when he steps into an octagon. It's about him. It doesn't matter if it's a high-level kickboxer turned mixed martial artist, but really for him all he sees is the problem in front of him.

So whether that problem happens to be 6'4" and 185 pounds or depending on what he is on fight night, with a certain reach and a certain length as well as certain tools or strategies that he knows that he uses, Sean Strickland, because of the way he trains—in an ecological approach we would term this representative learning design or representative task design—and really that representativeness is just around the information that one is going to pick up and if it has fidelity, meaning is it the same if someone's going to find in the fight.

So we see Israel Adesanya maybe preparing for the Sean Strickland fight. Now there's a whole another bunch of other nuances that we probably don't know the picture of, but let's just take a 30,000 foot view of it. Sean Strickland stepping in the octagon every single day fighting a different person or even round to round. Or you and I might have seen similar footage of him with Eric Nicksick at Xtreme Couture where he's fighting two guys, he's fighting three guys in the octagon. So it's like, where the hell did the guys go? Well, they're all on top of me.

So we think about how that might channel his movement behavior. And then I look at the videos and I was very critical of Israel Adesanya both preparing for the Sean Strickland fight as well as even the Alex Pereira fights, both of them number three and number four in the UFC, or number one and number two in the UFC, but number three and number four total, because we saw Israel Adesanya going to some of the gimmicks, some of the flashing agility lights and thinking this is going to transfer.

And I said even going up into the first Poatan fight, which would have been last November now, that this is going to be very different when you have stone hands coming at you than if you have a flashing light or a tennis ball that you have to dodge. Very, very different information sources.

And so I say all that to say this: that to me becomes the very embodiment or the illustration, a fantastic illustrative case study as to how training methods kind of channel how someone is accustomed to behaving and interacting with the common problems.

Now it doesn't mean someone, to your point, should just get in and take a bunch of head damage. We have to be very strategic about that. And that's something that Scott Siewright and I talk about frequently too, because he's very passionate about this topic. In fact, he's in on the applying ecological approach to MMA paper that I'm currently writing.

James de Lacey19:50

Oh, nice.

Shawn Myszka19:50

That should be released, I said, in early of 2024. It's currently in review, so hopefully, knock on wood, it'll be early 2024 when it is published. And it will be open access, so I'll get that your way when it is and your listeners as well.

But it's something that we talk about in there too. Somebody doesn't always have to be going hard sparring for it to be representative. It's allowing them to solve those problems. And what we can do and should do is create slices and snippets of the fight that then represent the problems where the person might have the most

Issues, so say for an Israel Adesanya who we found had major issues solving the problems of Sean Strickland. Ironically enough, even before the Strickland fight when we wrote the initial draft of the paper, I'll let the little cat out of the bag here, I wrote a section using Israel Adesanya as an illustrative case study from afar, talking about some of the things that I knew he had his gaps or weaknesses within his skill set and some potential things that we might be able to do as combat sports practitioners looking at this issue or challenge or problem.

What we could do in our learning and training environment to potentially facilitate a new way of acting. Again, we're not trying to just let them be put in the cage and it's a free-for-all, let's go. That's not necessarily what we're suggesting. But what we want to do is create these slices or snippets of how the fight might potentially unfold.

And it's there that we kind of maintain this performer-environment relationship or the fighter-cage relationship. What's in the cage? What do they typically have issues with? And what information must they be sensitive to that could channel or guide these opportunities for them to act? And so there's a lot of different layers or threads there I think that we can pull upon with that respective case study that you brought up about Sean Strickland.

James de Lacey21:46

I hope you're enjoying the chat so far. Before we get back to that, I just want to let you know that Sweet Science of Fighting is more than just a podcast. We have a full training app with strength conditioning programs for strikers, grapplers, and MMA athletes, so you don't have to think about what you're doing and you're getting access to the latest scientific methods to improve combat sports performance.

We have programs specifically for judo, for jiu-jitsu, for wrestling, MMA, boxing. Muay Thai is coming soon. All these things are going to be in the training app. We also have a private community where some of the coaches that have been on the podcast are in there to help you with any training questions and any performance questions you have. For example, Andrew Azar and Casper Durandt.

We also have some online courses within the training app. They cover strength conditioning, mental skills, and weight cutting. And finally, we now have Ryan Vukobo in the community, a second-degree jiu-jitsu black belt who is there to break down any of your grappling matches that you want seen to by a second eye. He's currently breaking down videos on a separate Sweet Science of Fighting YouTube channel and he will break down your video within the community.

So if you have a match or a roll that you just recorded, you can upload that in there and Ryan will break that down for you. So what are you waiting for? Jump down in the description, you can check out the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground. Otherwise, enjoy the podcast.

There's a lot of questions I have written down here now just from you talking, but before we go down that road as well, the flashing lights and tennis ball. I've talked about this a lot on, I guess, YouTube, podcast, email. I'm sure a lot of listeners may have heard me go on about that.

It's funny because we had, I think, Warren Young's paper out of Australia on agility, is probably the best paper illustrating why that doesn't work. But people will be like, oh, but reaction time this and that. But again, as it shows, when you compare sub-elite and elite practitioners, sub-elite practitioners, some of them can beat elite practitioners when it's a general stimulus like flashing lights and stuff. But when you introduce the sport-specific stimulus, you see that big gap.

And that big gap is why they are elite at their sport and someone else isn't. And it's such a funny one that people still go to this idea of, oh, if I can dodge—like Dodgeball: If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball, right? That should be the title of your next paper.

Shawn Myszka23:58

If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball. You might be onto something there. I'll give you a hat tip, buddy, if I do, author on me or something.

James de Lacey23:58

But yeah, it's funny because you still see it now. It's all over the place, all the flashing lights and stuff. But as you mentioned, you have to see the problem in front of you and exactly what's going to happen to develop the right reaction time to those things, right?

Shawn Myszka24:45

Well, then it's not even a reaction time per se, because I think even the idea of reacting kind of puts us behind the problem to begin with, right? It kind of disrespects the problem, isolates oneself from what the what-is is. And the what-is here, James, is the interaction. It's the relationship that caused that this hook is going to be coming on this side, but I must be able to take in information. It's not about reacting per se. It's about coupling my movement behaviors in close relation to how the person might be orienting themselves, right?

So the reaction time becomes a moot point. It's not about reacting to an end point. It's about recognizing, perceiving, detecting information about their posture, their kinematics, interpersonal distance and spacing, what weapons they might have available to them based on that distance relationship, based on that management that I have an agency with where I'm trying to maintain brinkmanship potentially, where I'm operating on a place or an edge where I know I can act but I'm at less threat or risk.

See how nuanced this is? It isn't about making sure I don't get hit with the ball if the balls are being thrown at me, as we saw with Israel Adesanya. And it made my heart hurt every single time it happened, scratch my eyes out. Oh my god. And I see it, of course, in the sport of American football where people are doing reaction lights and they're cutting in relation to it. Like, what the hell are you doing?

Like, this is going to be a very layered, complex movement problem that that performer is going to have to coordinate, control, and organize movement skill around. And it doesn't look, feel, act, and behave remotely close. It isn't about who can react the quickest. It's about who's going to perceive and act most functionally.

And sometimes, even though time is of an essence in some sport movement problems, as we both well know, there are other times where maybe just delaying time—think about the feinting and faking and disguise and deceptive games that many mixed martial artists now are playing, right? It's not about reacting to that. It's about figuring out when the shot is coming and what shot is coming. It's totally different than reaction time per se.

And that movement problem is highly nuanced. Somebody starts throwing a hip feint and then they throw a jab feint and then they're doing some sort of wacky creative action—you got to determine, are any of these threats real and which ones are real and which ones aren't? What might be coming, when it might be coming, and how do I interact to draw that out of them potentially? Like, this becomes a highly nuanced relationship, and it's a relationship that we have to maintain the integrity of. Dude, I'm deep on this, man. I love this stuff.

James de Lacey27:25

This is, I've been thinking about this for a long time. I've been trying to—I was trying to write an article a little while ago. I haven't been able to get the words on paper, but around the idea of momentum, or at least, I guess, within fight. You still have a momentum component, like the fighters that kind of look to dominate that fight, for example, Sean Strickland and that fight.

And I see it as almost like winning sport is being able to disrupt your opponent's rhythm through imposing your own rhythm. And I think that's where a lot of this fits into that, being able to throw those feints, give show something that the other person hasn't—I'm not going to say hasn't seen, but doesn't have answers to, or is doing something that is to disrupt their own rhythm. And then you can play your rhythm and you end up kind of having the momentum.

And that's, I mean, I can say that, but I haven't figured out what the rest of the article would even be. But that's kind of where I've been thinking around sport and stuff.

And I really like that, the whole idea of just you need to problem-solve and you need to figure out a way to get whatever it is, the job done, regardless of what's in front of you. And it can't be coming from someone trying to tell you what to do the entire time, because at some point you need to figure it out yourself.

Shawn Myszka28:42

Well, and that's something—so I go quite often to a place called The Academy here in Minneapolis-St. Paul. They trained Sean Sherk, they had Brock Lesnar, they currently have Roseanne Manz, a number of their fighters. I will just come and just be a fly on the wall around with Greg Nelson and Andy Garon at The Academy. And Andy happens to be one of the co-authors on the paper also.

But this is a topic that comes up when we're talking about movement problems and solutions or ways to solving them that would transcend from a mixed martial arts facility or dojo to the American football field. We're finding that the higher-level performers or behaviors are doing it often through surprising their opponents through deception, right, in some way, shape, or form, whatever that means for that respective situation.

That deceptiveness can create this huge plethora of opportunities to act. But that deceptiveness often unfolds through what we would refer to as misleading affordances. These misleading affordances—or affordances, when ecological dynamics people say it, it just means opportunities to

Act. Well, opportunities to act also can be invitations or solicitations, if you will, that can be misleading. Or they could be coming – and anytime you start to scramble the perception and cognition of an opponent, you sort of begin to control that dance. Now, I use control very loosely there, because it's always these changing states of organization. No one is really ever fully in control in a fight, right? You're always dancing on the edge of being out of control, and that can lead to very grave circumstances.

We go back to – we're using the Sean Strickland and Israel Adesanya examples here. Think at the end of round two, the round that Izzy won after getting knocked down and hit with like 26 unanswered shots at the end of first round, right? I think Eric Nicksick says to Sean Strickland, "Dude, we don't want to be snake-charmed by this guy. You're snake-charmed by him." All he really meant there is you're biting on things you shouldn't be because you don't know what's coming.

And when he's presenting these misleading affordances, and he's now in control of the dance or the interactions – octagon control, James, or ring control or ring generalship, or even if we're talking about American football – these things, this brinkmanship, this craft, is often oriented around deceptive actions or being able to perceive and pick up what's deceptive versus what's real of your opponent.

James de Lacey31:26

Not perfect. And let's see if we can take this a little practical for the listeners as well within MMA. But I guess one of the arguments against the ecological designers, for example, around beginners or intermediate maybe fighters who don't know, who haven't learned how to throw a punch, how to do an arm bar, et cetera – the fundamentals, the basics. Yeah, so how – where does this fit in for someone like that?

Shawn Myszka32:07

Yeah, I love the question here, and the reason why I said the fundamentals and the basics is for a very specific reason. And this will be an article I'll send your way as soon as we hang up as well, and you can feel free to pass it on along with this episode when you put it out to your people. But when we really look at the fundamentals or the basics, the fundamentals and the basics emerged from the real fundamental issue, which is the problem that was there to be solved.

One can't solve a problem with whatever technique until they are presented with a problem to solve. It's like if I throw out to you "four," and you're like "four" – like, I didn't tell you that it was 2 plus 2 was the equation or the problem. You didn't know what answer I was even throwing out there. Four means nothing to you, right? Like, the answer or the execution of a technique means nothing without the problem.

And so when we're talking about beginners or we're talking about intermediates that might need to acquire the basics or be able to attain some sort of technical execution for a way of acting, this is a very misguided way of approaching the problem, because it's disrespecting the problem that's asking the performer or the fighter to solve it in said way.

A jab didn't emerge just because the person has agency and they want to throw the jab. It emerged because you were at a certain relationship from me, and your behaviors – whether it was your chin was exposed, or I wanted to touch you to move your head so I would open up for a more power-oriented shot – it's the problem that asks for me to throw the jab.

So when you had my friend Scott on – Scott Seay, right? Again, if for those of you who haven't listened to that episode, cheap plug for my buddy there – he probably talked a little bit about this, that he throws his beginners right into the problem. He throws them right into the pool, right into combat, right? And he talks about this as a case study in our paper that will be coming out. So again, cheap plug for us now and me.

But what we talk about here is we can use it in beginners, because it's the problems. And as long as we scale it down in complexity or information – not saying that you're going to have Alex Pereira in front of you and you have to learn how to throw a jab or hook or whatever, fill in the blank, right, with that type of problem – it doesn't mean that we'll throw any problem at them with any level of complexity, intensity, or amount of information. But it can and should be scaled to meet their needs.

So I know one thing that Scott does is he doesn't allow for the beginners any strikes above the neck, right? So above the chin, they're not actually striking, but they're learning how to jab by maybe playing a game where they're tagging a shoulder, right, or they're maybe tagging to the body. And these actions naturally, inherently emerge, but they're in close relation and connection to some of the similar information sources, right?

So now, again, another argument that we hear is: what if we taught them the techniques first, and now put them in there? Would it actually be an accelerated way of acting when they do have the opponent in front of them? We often see these moments where people who've done rep after rep after rep of some sort of motor action or technique, now try to apply it in context, and they have to completely recalibrate.

Yeah, right? They don't know when it's not a bag there, and it's an actual human – what am I trying to strike? And how far away am I from that? And is this inviting, or is that actually a threat?

Like, they learn that more naturally when there's an alive person in front of them. It's the reason why Bruce Lee said boards don't hit back. Stop worrying about hitting the board and worry when it's a combat artist in front of you, right? The highest technique is they have no technique. My technique is a result of their technique. My movement is a result of their movement. Bruce Lee again said it back in the '60s, but we have to think about what that means.

Our technique that will be deemed effective is based on functionality. And functionality is how practical, useful, and relevant it is to fit the freaking problem. So it's why it comes back to both of them maintaining and maintaining the integrity of this relationship. It has to be this mutual, reciprocal exchange, and that for me is why it becomes highly relevant for beginners, as long as we're scaling it and we're scaling the level of threat most often.

But we're scaling it in a way that brings that performer to their challenge point. So it's likely another lower-level or beginning-level performer, and then we just start to add some bandwidth to that. And when I say bandwidth, we just make it a little more complex, we add a little bit of information, we might use a just a little higher-level skilled person and then come back down, and then have this constant dance.

And Nikolai Bernstein said this back in skill acquisition and motor learning ideas long ago: repetition without repetition. Again, no two problems are the same, and what we're trying to repeat is the process of solving the problem. And that process isn't just technique or motor action driven. No.

James de Lacey38:03

Does that mean then you would say pad work, bag work has no real use in skill development, but is more maybe towards power development, conditioning?

Shawn Myszka38:03

Love where you're going with that. Love where you're going with that. So people will often use this argument. In fact, two years ago I did a presentation on the idea of adaptability within adaptability using Bruce Lee's ideas in American football, and a high-level track coach reached out to me with videos and pictures of Bruce Lee doing pad work or hitting the Wing Chun dummy and going through certain forms and kata from a Wing Chun standpoint, right, to sort of throw it in my face.

"Well, Bruce Lee did this, and you're using his ideas here in American football that said that it's about the technique emerging in relation to the problem. So now what is your argument?"

The argument is is that there could or should be still a use for it, as long as we know the intentional aim that we're trying to get from said activity. Too often people will think that that repetition is going to be for skill development. It's going to be for the former that you mentioned there. But instead, what it actually is for is that which – what you might have mentioned, which is more so oriented around general motor abilities that we're trying to put to use in maybe more specific ways.

But yet they're trying to adapt or calibrate those motor actions to understand what it is that they have accessible to them, or maybe enhance what it is that they have accessible to them – their effectivities, was that which would it be called in ecological dynamics terms.

But also, it's more so about the motor potential. It could be strength, it could be power, it could be speed, it could be conditioning – these types of things – where a performer, an artist, a mixed martial artist is removed from context. It could have some level of efficacy, but let's not pretend as though they are being utilized to actually chase, acquire, or adapt one's skill. Those activities I don't believe actually make anyone more skillful, because skillful is about this relationship that's functional – relationship between performer and environment, or problems and solutions.

And so, again, for me, I think we just have to be very deliberate and intentional about what we're using it for. And people use it as a crutch. They often use it as a crutch to give the fighter confidence, and there's something to be said about that, right? They might use it as a crutch for motivation. But I think far too often they don't understand the why, and James, they don't actually ask themselves the why. Why am I doing this? What am I getting from it? And more importantly, how might I do it differently? I...

I feel like so many are still stuck in that way because they're trying to either repeat a certain execution or they're trying to attain or chase some sort of putative idealistic way of executing because some other high-level performer, this black belt, does it in this way. But we're not that black belt, so why don't we chase our way?

Typically our way is going to be an authentic one, and usually those activities that you mentioned—hitting a bag or hitting a dummy or whatever it might be, or just doing forms and katas and the like—those are about chasing the way, not our way or any way, if that makes sense.

James de Lacey41:52

So when would you, or would you ever intervene as a coach to provide feedback or technical feedback? For example, that beginner doing that jab drill—would there be any coach intervention, or would it be you got to figure it out yourself?

Shawn Myszka41:52

I love the question here because we within ecological dynamics often get accused of not coaching, not teaching, because we don't instruct in the same way. Now we're probably not, at least in most cases, going to be overly explicit about how to carry out the motor action itself—the technique as a whole, the joint angles, the actual placement. Those types of things are not things that you typically are going to see someone who adopts an ecological framework kind of circling their wagons around.

What we often do, or what we should do at least from my perspective, is educate the attention and intentions of the performer. And what I mean by that is: the attention is what are they looking at, when are they looking at it, what information might they be picking up from it, and how might that channel in a tight circular, perpetual way into their intended ways to act?

So their intentions would just be their aims to act in a given way or the decisions that they make or the strategy that they're coming up with. So all of a sudden we connect them to the what is—we connect them to the problem and the opportunities within the problem a whole heck of a lot more.

The actions we have found—now granted, we all have biases, myself included—I work with elite level National Football League players. Each one of them is one of 1,696 walking the face of the planet, so let's not get it twisted. I understand that my performers—I use that loosely, those that I lock arms with and they look to me to facilitate their skill to be more functional on a field—they're already at the very highest levels.

I get that, and that's a credible argument that one could bring to me and say, "Well, your ideas are obviously going to work this way, like you don't got to tell that NFL running back how to execute their action per se in the same way we might with a beginner."

But James, we have sparring partners in our learning environment, and they will range everywhere from other NFL players from other trainers' camps to NFL players obviously in our own group, in our own unit, but then college players—college players at the D1, D2, D3 level. And I understand they're not beginners either, but we had everybody down to high schoolers.

Because it scales information, it presents repetition without repetition. Sometimes these beginners act in very unorthodox ways, as you probably know through your combat sport experience. Sometimes those people can actually present the most difficult or challenging problem to solve because you haven't seen that information in a bit—like you haven't seen the way that those interactions unfold.

But what we find is that when you are stretched to your challenge point and it's an optimal challenge point, or you're finding an optimal grip over the affordances present, your technique naturally begins to emerge. But I have found with even those lower level performers or behaviors that if we can guide and channel their attention and intention so they have a better connection to the problem, their movement actions or the behaviors that they couple in relation to the problem ultimately start to fit that problem much more functionally in that which what we see aesthetically. So maybe as a technical model from the outside looking in, we can see it emerging.

But what we often find is one that's timed to meet the problem, one that's calibrated to meet the problem—meaning optimal force expression—or it's going to meet its target a little bit differently than it would if we were just repeating rep after rep after rep of said jab or hook kick or whatever it might be. And so I think it's often this argument that we have to step in and coach, but instead what I do when I speak, whether it's to an NFL player or to a lower level behavior, is attempt to add value in how they're connecting and coupling their movement behaviors to the problem. So it often is about the problem or it's about in relationship to it.

So we talked earlier about deceptiveness. I might ask the fighter, "How could you vary your actions or behaviors to trick your opponent here?" Notice I didn't say anything about their exact ways that I want them to act. I'm going to allow them to interact. All I did was ask a question for discovery learning: "How could you vary your actions or your behaviors to trick or deceive your opponent?" And then I would walk back away.

What you're going to find in that next round is probably a little different exploration. What are they exploring? They're exploring their ways of acting, but their actions are connected to "What am I tricking or deceiving the opponent?" So it's here then that they will start acting the way that I could have told them to act, which is, "What happens if you just feint that jab out there? What happens then?" I could tell them exactly how to act or "I want you to act in this way" and show it to them a few times.

Now there might be some efficacy in that for some performers and the right time, but I think too often we rely on it and we go to explicitly instructing and telling, and then of course we become the bearer of all truth and knowledge. So now we can walk around with our chest up or chin up and a smile on our face because we are the Yoda of the dojo. Oh great, but that performer, that mixed martial artist, can't get in a damn fight and figure out how to carry out these behaviors for themselves.

James de Lacey47:59

Yeah, that's a good point. And to continue this down the practical road, you mentioned before about analyzing Adesanya's training and that case study about filling his gaps in terms of training-wise, for his technical work. I think this would be interesting to maybe go down—what kind of things you would have him do to improve technical-tactical? And then maybe the listener can potentially pick something up from that. We can go down further down that road of changing the environment or task, etc.

Shawn Myszka48:24

Yeah, for sure, James. Notice I mentioned earlier about this idea of slices or snippets of the game, or of the fight, and obviously which will be more applicable for those that might be listening here. So what we would find from Israel Adesanya is typically when we look at one's strengths, it will give us more insight in regards to one's weaknesses oftentimes. And of course people will look at Israel Adesanya being a longtime kickboxer and think, "Well yeah, we know what some of his weaknesses are, especially on the ground and especially within mixed martial arts it being a mixed game."

But we even look at his striking prowess, and where does this striking prowess often come from? It comes from mid-range or longer range, with keeping kicks as this measuring stick, this interpersonal distance. It comes with a lot of hand fighting here when he can keep a guy at bay, or he's switching stances to do it, moving in and out of range where that opponent can't figure out what's coming next or where it's coming.

But I actually—again, this was well before even the Sean Strickland fight was booked—I found that when a guy bullies him, when a guy gets up in his face and kind of gets in this space, think about back to Robert Whittaker and kind of this double-triple jab enter that he would utilize to get up in there, and all of a sudden he was exchanging to the body and finding Israel's chin.

Kelvin Gastelum way back in 2018 in the middleweight championship—like these things, these behaviors, these weaknesses, these gaps are there for someone who's willing to enter those tighter spaces where the threat is much higher to a skilled performer.

Obviously it worked against Robert Whittaker in the first fight where Israel won the middleweight championship of the world. But what we found is that when a guy gets up in those spaces, he becomes a little bit more constrained and his freedom becomes fixed or frozen a little bit. He can't pick up what information is there because he's not controlling this dance as much.

So a guy like Sean Strickland, who's going to march forward, Philly shell, and move right into that space and just start trading to the body or the chin, are going to present issues or problems. So I use this as a case study again from afar—I don't have any experience personally working with Israel Adesanya. But I think they often let him maybe play a little bit too much.

Now that playing gets us that expressive, honest style that we see from his breakdancing background, that way of acting where he's just gonna—when he's in his flow, there's no one that's more creative and novel than he when he's in there.

But when you make him uncomfortable and you get up in those tight spaces, all hell can break loose. And it does for most, but everyone has these gaps. So now I'm not suggesting that City Kickboxing and Eugene—

Bareman didn't know or aren't aware of this gap, but I think that what they have done is not bring in or make sure that styles are going to be mimicked or represented adequately and accurately enough in their own learning environment. Now granted, they're in New Zealand which is a small area and small region, and they've been able to get a whole lot of high-level fighters that have come out of their gym. Kudos to them.

But with Israel in particular, they could create slices or snippets where he becomes uncomfortable and isn't able to perceive and read and recognize maybe the way that some of these behaviors are unfolding. What I mean by that is we could set up these slices or snippets where maybe we put him and place him right at the warning track. The actual sparring interaction is going to start at the warning track and it doesn't start at two guys meeting from the warning track, but it's somebody already up in his grill, already up in his face.

And you put that person on and around him so they have an easier time hitting him. It has now become scaled, or there's a snippet here which he's uncomfortable in right from the start. Maybe we put him in the corner of the octagon where he can't do this. He can't do the fade back, the lean back to move and sway around strikes in the same way that he would where he's knocked other guys out or that he typically gets guys pulling in to those places or spaces.

Now maybe he can't move and use the lateral movement left or right because the interpersonal distance isn't the same. And we look at how he got caught versus Alex Pereira again in the first fight is when he didn't have access to that lateral movement in the same way, or somebody that was a bigger bully could close those angles in that space and just circle with him. Now all of a sudden he doesn't have the same creativity, he doesn't have the same elusiveness.

And so I personally would like to see them always existing there or existing there more frequently. Make him comfortable being uncomfortable. And it sounds intuitively obvious there and I'm sure they've done a little bit of that, but they've done it a lot from what I've seen from afar. Now again, what you see from afar isn't always everything that you can see, but from afar they often do it in their harder, more intense days where a guy might be under fatigue.

They're going to be maybe sore, it's late camp. So those things can have usefulness because obviously in rounds three and four and five when a fighter might be fatigued, they're going to fix or freeze their degrees of freedom inherently if they're not exposed to these situations. So it can have ease there. But when I watch what they do in those situations, it's often these wrestling and grappling exchanges where they know that Israel is weak back up against the cage with somebody maybe trying to go to his hips or get a single leg or whatever it might be.

And he's really exceptional there. We saw it against Marvin Vettori, we saw it against Derek Brunson way back in the day. We've seen it on a number of instances. But think about the scenarios and situations that we've seen him get caught in as of late, and the signs would have still been there even through success that I'm not sure they ever really fully addressed.

Now, no one can ever be fully dextrous. What I mean by that is Nikolai Bernstein's idea of the highest expression of skill: the ability to solve any emerging problem in any situation, in any condition. There's not a fighter in the world that doesn't have unsolvable problems. So it just could be that the styles made the fight in this case, that maybe they did rep it and Israel just can't get comfortable there because that's not his way of form, of being, his form of being.

But I believe that they might not have made him as uncomfortable in the actual interactions on the feet as what Sean Strickland was going to present. So using different size performers rep to rep, or even every 30 seconds with somebody up in your grill, and he now has to recognize the different striking attacks and threats that that performer might have when they're already starting in his space which he was already proving to be uncomfortable with.

Or maybe we have a constrained activity where he doesn't actually get to throw anything offensively and you're starting under those same constraints. Maybe he's starting with his back at the cage and the individual's at the warning track. He doesn't know how that opponent is going to behave, but he can't throw anything offensively in relation to it. Now all of a sudden he has to look to elude that individual in their strikes, but by being really sensitive, really attuned to the information about how they might be behaving.

And then we just work through high variability. It doesn't even have to be a high-level performer and I think they would start being able to tag Israel because he's just got to be that much more aware of really what affordances or opportunities to act for him to escape in some of those ways, but also what they are doing in relation to him.

He seemed to obviously have no answer and that became obvious. That was the thing that hurt my heart as I told Scott when we hooked up right after the fight to have our call, because the test of style bending was right there in front of him. The style bending test was failed because a different style that he was not really overly comfortable or accustomed with, he didn't have a way to solve it obviously.

So I don't know if that makes any sense, it might not even be all that novel. But I think what we need to use here is we need to take the movement behavior that we analyze in context, what we see from a fighter, and then use it to inform our practice design. And not just do it, not just throw them to the wolves and think it's going to self-organize. We are always self-organizing, that's one of the concepts, the ideas here: it's interacting component parts coming together.

We're not just going to throw them to the wolves, but we're very strategic about constraining to afford, meaning we set up opportunities for them to act by the way that we set up the problems.

James de Lacey58:45

Hey guys, it's me again. I just want to let you know that I also have Sweet Science of Fighting rash guards and shorts so you can represent Sweet Science of Fighting on the mat and within competition. We have the classic, just like the shirt I'm wearing, rash guard Sweet Science of Fighting on the front, and we have the logos on the sleeves and then XM on the back. We also have that in a shorts variation, same thing with the Sweet Science of Fighting writing on one leg and we have the logo on the other.

But my personal favorite, this is my personal favorite by far, we have this in black and white and it is the Taniwha, protector, guardian version of the Sweet Science of Fighting with the logo on the back. This was designed by a Maori designer back in New Zealand, so a bit of my heritage on this jersey. It represents the acknowledgement of battle and war, it also represents strength and stability, and also has the New Zealand silver fern.

But even if you're not a Kiwi, cop this. This is an awesome design, it is a custom-made design, you will not find it anywhere else. So check that, that'll also be down in the description with a discount code. But back to the podcast.

So if someone had maybe that issue and was going to say implement some of these drills, it could for example be 5-minute round, 30 seconds a new person comes in, or maybe it's the same person but each 30 seconds or maybe every after every two blocks of 30 seconds, a different constraint as that is. So for example, as you mentioned, first one might be you can't throw any offensive shots.

Second one might be the person attacking can only throw strikes. Maybe the third one could be okay, now they can throw strikes but they can also wall wrestle and take you down. Fourth, or maybe okay, you can throw strikes back as well.

So just to give a variation within the same scenario over and over again and start them close, so you're always having to... I mean, similar to I guess positional sparring which jiu-jitsu I think does well, where you're always starting on the back or starting in spider web or starting in these positions where you have to escape. Same concept but with MMA striking, correct?

Shawn Myszka1:00:26

Yes, absolutely spot on. And I think one of the reasons why ecological dynamics has taken hold in jiu-jitsu and grappling is because it's inherent to the way that they might have been taught or the environments that they might have learned within when they get to positional sparring.

But yet when we look at sparring for striking or striking within combat sports, it often isn't done that way. Most of the time the sparring is just let's fight. And that, now all of a sudden, we can't set up the same types of problems.

I use an example from American football. This is what I try to do. I constrain to afford. I don't just have them go out and play the game. First off, that would be really exhausting for all parties. Second of all, I don't have 11 v 11. And third of all, if we were to try to make this transcend to your sport, you can't have a fight every damn night. You can't replicate that stressor and the demands of it and then expect to learn or grow. It's not sustainable.

You can create slices or snippets that present alive movement problems that require that fighter to actually solve them, to interact in a problem-solving way where they have to organize perceptions into cognitions and intentions and decisions that they might make, and then flowing into the actions and the adaptability of these actions, the authenticity, the adjustability. We start to get abundance so that performer, that fighter, might find new ways of interacting with that problem that we as the coach or the outside observer never would have seen because we weren't in that slice. We never would have told them to behave in that way.

How often do those types of things actually unfold? And especially as MMA at the highest level continue to evolve, we see new ideas, new techniques. Even the sheer emergence of the lead leg calf kick kind of came from this, four or five years ago. Some guys were doing it, but guys weren't very adept at it when they started to see that it was there as an opportunity. Now everybody and their brother is obviously calf kicking, and it's ending fights or at least changing the outcome of the fights quite significantly in some of these cases.

It's things like this that those types of integrated movement solutions emerge only in context. And that's why it's so important for us as coaches to set up some of these positional sparring opportunities, no matter if it's on the ground or on the feet or somewhere in between.

James de Lacey1:02:58

Awesome. And I want to finish this podcast out maybe if you can almost brain dump some constraint, or I don't know to say, we'll call them drill ideas or positional sparring ideas within MMA. For example, you mentioned obviously close quarters against the corner, but there's obviously a lot of other things you can do: smaller or bigger cages and octagons, it could be only throwing certain strikes, certain techniques, et cetera. Maybe just brain dump some of those and maybe people listening gets them thinking about how they could potentially implement it.

Shawn Myszka1:03:27

Yeah, I would say one of the things that we didn't really highlight as well as I probably could have or should have would be the idea of these constraint categories: organismic, environmental, and task. And these constraint categories, also known as the constraints-led approach, kind of unfolded from Karl Newell in the constraints-led model. He was doing work in infants, ironically enough, in '85 and '86, and it's what stemmed into the practical application of a contemporary approach to skill acquisition or constraints-led approach, right, the purposeful manipulation of constraints.

Basically, James, or to the listeners out there, these constraints will coalesce, they will come together at varying levels that will then channel the potential opportunities to act and ultimately these movement behaviors. I'm saying all that because these constraint categories are also things that we can manipulate in the learning and practice activities. Notice I said activity as opposed to drill. I think we need to get out of this connotation or this terminology or this verbiage.

And I know that based on the way that you've been talking already, you don't really believe in the idea of drill in this traditional sense. Drill has a very military perspective, right? We're going to repeat something this way every single time no matter what. But these activities now should be more alive.

And so what I always ask people, so I unpacked it in that way, James, for a specific reason. We always want to ask people, professionals, practitioners, coaches, how could we make this more alive? That's I guess the first question for me when I see someone doing an activity that looks rather static or dead.

And now nothing is ever fully dead because it still has a performer within it. And even if there's a bunch of cones on the ground and they're executing cutting actions around them, or if they're hitting a dummy or a bag, it's still moving a little bit, but it's more dead. And all I would ask, first and foremost, my start of my brain dump, would be around that: how can we manipulate the constraints of the organism, the environment, and the task to become more alive?

When we start to ask that question, as long as we're being truthful with our answers, even the very dead activities can start to have aliveness within them. Think about something like hitting a bag. Obviously people will automatically just let somebody create, you know, maybe they're at a certain distance. And we can constrain the organism behaviors, and we often do that, right? Throw this many jabs.

But what we might ask as a coach or practitioner is, how many different combinations can you come up with based on your strategies and arsenal or your toolbox for throwing strikes to the bag? All of a sudden, what naturally and inherently happens there when they're trying to explore as many different ways of throwing these strikes in combination, we start to see them have natural variability. Natural variability not only in the combination or the order and sequence of striking, but the way they go and flow together.

You're going to see them automatically moving between different interpersonal distances between them and the bag. You might ask them, and people probably already do this to a certain degree, how can you mix up your execution to the target? So all of a sudden they start to explore different tempos, different speeds, different angles of strike. You just have them vary so it has natural repetition without repetition that is inherent in the activity.

Now of course, I don't want to use something as dead or as redundant as a bag as our example here because it's not what I would propose that anybody should really be doing to begin with to attain or acquire skill. But there are ways, I only say that to indicate, there are ways to change up the way the organism, the task, and the environment interact with one another in a very dead activity even if we just ask, how do we make it more alive?

But if we take something like we did earlier, which is an activity that people might be doing already, some of these tight quarters initial condition sparring, and we think about how do we change aspects of the way these constraints coalesce together, we already kind of talked about some of the organism constraints. Their intentions really matter. How they aim to act or interact in that same drill or in that activity will have a tremendous influence on what behavior unfolds or emerges.

But too often as coaches or teachers, we instruct them to behave in that one way, or we behave in the same way. Simply think about bringing more aliveness by changing the intentions right off the bat of the behavior. And if you do that, you start to change the information they're picking up. You automatically then start to change the way they act. Again, we perceive to act and we act to perceive, and those are scaffolded by our intentions. So if you gradually nudge them to interacting in a different way, it'll change.

We can also then bring certain organism constraints through pressure and anxiety. Maybe they are sparring against somebody they don't really like, that's obviously going to change the constraints that they have. Maybe it's somebody they really do like, that obviously is a very vast difference. What about things that we might be able to change with the pressure and anxiety they feel? Well, we can change the pressure and anxiety they feel by changing the consequences in some way.

Maybe if they don't explore the solving of this movement problem in this respective way or find the opportunity to act in this way, they now have to sing a song at the end of class in front of the whole group. Pressure and anxiety. Seems silly, right? But pressure and anxiety goes up tremendously. I've done this with NFL players, and trust me, some of them don't want to sing in front of their peers who might be on opposing teams. They don't know these guys from anyone else.

We also start to see this influence to the environment. Think about the people that we have watching the interactions, the practice environment. Think about how that might change the behaviors and what we might be able to do if all of a sudden we have a group of young men and they just happen to be attracted to the opposite sex, and we bring four or five relatively attractive girls to the training facility on that respective day that they didn't know were going to be there. Guess what has changed? Pressure and anxiety.

And you fixed and frozen degrees of freedom of some, and you're going to open and unfreeze degrees of freedom of others. You can kind of just paint the picture, if you will, and think about some of these things. Again, I've done this with NFL players. I've had their families attend without them knowing that they were going to come, particularly as we get closer and closer to the season.

Again, all I'm trying to do, I don't need to replicate 72,000 screaming fans in an NFL stadium. I just have to replicate or represent the eight that mean the most to that player, and all of a sudden it changes the behaviors. And then of course the task itself. And the task itself should never be removed from the individual athlete or the environment either. They can't be separated from one another, just like the problem and solver can't be.

So I think we have to continue to think about how we might manipulate aspects of the task. You talked about interpersonal space or workspace size. We might start in the 30-foot octagon, and if we have that tight quarters, we might only allow them to utilize a 6 by 8 chunk of it. They can't move or execute out of it, and all of a sudden they're always up in those spaces and operating at those interpersonal distances in a way that was abnormal to them. That type of thing would have been perfect for the Israel Adesanya example that we utilized earlier.

Right, like don't let them get back to the center of the cage because the center of the cage isn't available to him. It's things like this that we can do, even changing things like the surface or where that cage is, or one day on a cage, one day on a mat, one day in a ring. Like these things have different affordances available to them.

It's something that I've talked about with the City Kickboxing crew again, like they're often doing their sparring in a way where Israel has a wide space to move and he can do this lean back any other time that he wants. But yet when he gets in the Octagon and he gets his back against the cage, say against an Alex Pereira or Sean Strickland, he can't do that.

So again, it's just finding ways to make it more alive. It might sound as though we're just trying to make them more uncomfortable. It really isn't that. It's incorporating the idea of repetition without repetition, which means that no two problems are the same in neither or any two solutions. And the closer you can get your learning activities to represent this aliveness through manipulating those constraints in those various ways, the closer we are to that highest expression of one skill.

James de Lacey1:13:39

No, I love that. And I love that that's a perfect way to actually end the podcast too, Sean. But if people want to find you and follow you and learn more about what you're doing, where can they do that?

Shawn Myszka1:13:39

Yeah, they can do it at Emergence, my brand Emergence, which is a movement skill education company. The website is actually emergentmovement as in MVMT dot com. So the world's hardest URL, website URL there. The reason is is because a national broadcaster here in the United States, for those who are overseas, right when we founded Emergence, it just so happens that either ABC or NBC also had a show that came out and was released like a month or two later called Emergence. And we didn't know it, and they already had emergence.com. So it's emergentmovement.com.

They can also find me on Twitter. I do tweet quite frequently and I am at Movement Miyagi, so Movement Miyagi. And you'll hear me talk a lot about American football, but you also hear me break down and get into a lot with MMA. I've done breakdowns on Conor McGregor, I've done it on Israel Adesanya. I've been on obviously a number of combat sport podcasts such as yourself, James, that I really love the topic because I think so much transcends from what is happening in mixed martial arts skill acquisition that can and should apply in very similar ways across all sporting activities.

James de Lacey1:15:11

Yeah, no, for sure. And I'll link those up in the description for everyone listening in the future. But thanks for coming on, Sean. I appreciate it.

Shawn Myszka1:15:11

Yeah, you got it, my friend. I appreciate you.