Ecological Training Games To Perform Like A Pro Fighter w/ Scott Sievewright (SSOF Ep 89)

James de Lacey1:49

A very general way to start, but is there anything that you maybe want to dive into first regarding any of those topics in terms of how can we go about developing some of these games for learning?

Scott Sievewright2:45

Yeah, so the first word I pick up on there is you said structure. I'm not sure how that fits in. Of course, every practice we design has a structure of some sort.

But if I could put in a nutshell what we try to do, our gym at least, is we try and take play, a whole, a part of the game every day. Like play the whole game every day. You might have heard some of the other coaches talk about that. So in MMA, we're doing a little bit of striking, we're doing a little bit of closing distance, wrestling, takedowns, pinning, passing, ground fighting, submissions, all that stuff. And we try and stay in that space every day.

So no structured curriculum as such, but we're always exploring different aspects of the game itself and the sport itself. And I think most people that are listening might be aware of what the ecological approach advocates for, but it's for the most part 100% live and unscripted.

James de Lacey3:37

Perfect. So I guess that kind of makes it difficult then. So it's not structured. It's making something that is, as you mentioned, unscripted. It's almost like play. You're developing your training essentially based on what's presented in front of you, but you can create these games for certain goals.

And one of the examples I gave you in the chat was, for example, someone preparing for someone like Dominick Cruz, who was very unorthodox in the way he fights. And you mentioned about it might not be trying to replicate whatever's happening there because fighters already doing that, but you mentioned about what the fighter might be picking up or perceiving from someone like that to be able to react to. Do you want to maybe just dive into a little bit of what you're talking about there?

Scott Sievewright4:44

Yeah, so again, I pick up on some of the things you're telling me. I think all coaches intuitively, there seems to be, it feels like there's this kind of dichotomy here, or there's a very traditionalist coach on one side and the more ecological coach on the other. I think there's a lot of parallels. I do believe we can go into that a little later, the kind of concepts and what the underpinning assumptions that we make on the ecological approach that I think all coaches kind of share, whether they believe that or not.

We believe in perception-action, which just means we're reacting and coupled within our environment. They believe in self-organization, which means you give the body a task or a goal, or even if it's a demonstration or a drill, the body is going to figure out a way to do that. And we also, for years, all coaches, they'll try and maybe emulate fighters or emulate situations. That's generally what happens in either technical sparring or sparring as a certain strategy or tactic put towards it. So there's a great overlap between again, the more traditional sides and the ecological side.

Dominick Cruz is a good example, right? Because you're a very kind of unorthodox way of fighting this, and the movement was, could we say it wasn't typical. And so that posed a challenge, right? And he obviously had tremendous speed and tremendous reactivity and movement and whatnot. So I would imagine if you're getting ready to get ready for a fighter like Dominick, there's a couple of ways you could do that. You could bring someone in to try to emulate Dominick's style and get used to that.

But I think therein lies the kind of, the clue is kind of there, in lies that we have to become adaptable and be experienced, all these different kind of styles, so that when we're faced with them in competition, we're able to adjust and adapt on the fly. And I think Dominick Cruz is a really good example of that because, again, he was pretty unorthodox.

But what we're trying to do in this approach, especially my gym, is, because we don't have one particular style that we advocate for necessarily. I'm a little biased towards counter-striking, I would say. However, each of my athletes pose different problems in terms of size, experience, styles, stance, height, range, all that kind of stuff. So I really use that as a, that is a very advantageous to us.

We do a lot of sparring with different styles and we don't advocate for one. So what we're trying to do over time is become adaptable to all kinds of styles and all kinds of problems, all kinds of stances, all kinds of movements, all kinds of, again, mixed martial arts, wrestling, stronger strikers, stronger grapplers. We're trying to get that done in the training room over time.

I'm not sure what can be done in a short camp. We can kind of calibrate towards certain styles, but in a long-winded way of saying this, I think preparing for any kind of style, any kind of fighter, is a long-term process.

But zoning what you're talking about specifically on Dominick Cruz, I think about that. So you can obviously study the tendencies of Dominick, what he is, kind of the style, the problems he's posing. But I think additionally, you have to see, when we look at the fighting, the fighting is like an interpersonal system. That it's also worth watching what Dominick's opponents were doing.

So what was Dominick picking up on there? And I think there's a lot of value in that that might not be exploited or valued typically in the scouting process. So what is Dominick able to, how is Dominick able to kind of perform at his best, and what is he picking up on? And so that's a layer even deeper that in the scouting process that you could be looking at. His opponents might be giving you just as much information to work with and prepare for than Dominick himself, if that makes any sense.

James de Lacey9:07

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting.

Scott Sievewright9:07

The takeaway theme for me here, James, is we can never really separate it and look at one fighter individually. I think you have to look at it as a system, and that's what the ecological approach really advocates for.

James de Lacey9:07

No, I love that what you're there about, essentially long-term preparation and just again, being exposed to all the different potential scenarios.

That you may encounter within your Combat Sports career, being able to train against guys who are bigger, smaller, different movement styles, different fighting styles, all of that. So at some point when something like that does get presented to you, you've at least seen that already or seen something similar where you may have an answer to it just from training. And as you mentioned, it blends quite well I guess with the traditional approach, people are kind of doing that already I guess, maybe as you mentioned in shorter term bursts within fight camps where they're trying to emulate other fighters.

But it sounds like obviously you're talking more, this should be ongoing. It's not just in eight weeks before a fight that you start preparing specifically for the style. You should have already seen a lot of these different styles in training. And I think maybe that's where more of the value lies for maybe the listener listening to this in terms of how they can essentially enhance some of their training.

Scott Sievewright10:32

Maybe focus on trying to prepare for a style in a short camp. Of course there's value in that, we would do that too. And you hear the word skill acquisition thrown around a lot. I like the words and I think prefer the words adaptability and attunement. So we're constantly, it's a skill attunement we're looking for. We're always looking to be able to solve all kinds of problems. And again, I think that's a long-term endeavor.

James de Lacey10:59

Exactly, exactly. I want to bring this as well to, I think you listened to the previous podcast I did with Sean Mishka, which I know you guys have talked a lot as well, especially around that Israel Adesanya-Sean Strickland fight. We kind of went into some of those details there. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that in terms of maybe, I don't want to say what Adesanya can do because obviously it's hard to really, it's more of a generalization because we don't know exactly what's going on.

But just maybe just from your point of view, are there things that you think that someone like that could do in training to help fill some of those holes or help solve that problem of someone like Sean Strickland?

Scott Sievewright11:29

So I'm not privy to what Adesanya's full training camps are like, and I'm open to say that maybe he had an off night and I'm open to say that maybe that punch that caught him in the first round, perhaps concussed him and put off his performance. But I don't want to take anything away from Sean Strickland either. I get some gloating rights here because I put some money on Sean Strickland. I didn't really expect him to win, but I did think he might cause Izzy some problems.

James de Lacey11:53

What was that paying?

Scott Sievewright11:53

It was just bets with my buddies and Sean too. It wasn't like an official bet. But I was betting with my buddies and I thought he's going to cause Sean problems. Sean had been on my radar for a while and I spoke about his training because all he does is spar, right? And I think he spars probably harder than I would advocate for, but there's nothing more ecological than that. You see Sean at all different gyms, all different kind of opponents. He's just sparring all the time, so that's really what we advocate for.

And it's, I was widely ridiculed for that. Similarly, I thought Tyson Fury might have some problems with Francis Ngannou just because stylistically, you could make the argument that Fury just hadn't been quite as attuned or adapted to that kind of style, the kind of reads that Ngannou was giving him. He was more of a pure boxer. So neither of these two fights surprised me that much.

But again, I'm willing to say that probably if Izzy and Strickland fight again or they run it back, I'm not sure it would be the same.

James de Lacey13:06

Did you lose me again? I got you. No, I got you.

Scott Sievewright13:06

Tell me, refresh page. So I'm willing to acknowledge, if they fight a few times, that might not be the same outcome. But I think what happened was Sean has a relatively unusual kind of unorthodox style. It's not particularly aesthetically pleasing but it's wholly effective. If you watch that fight, it seemed like Sean saw everything coming right.

And I think probably what the biggest observation for me towards Adesanya was, Adesanya kind of felt, it looked like he was a little bewildered. The stuff he was normally able to do and take control of the pace of the fight and score as a sniper, he just wasn't able to pull that off. And I think you could see as the fight went on, and again it might have been because he got clocked hard in the first round, that was probably a part of it.

But I think as the fight went on, he was just puzzled. And that was a good example, I think, and that's what we spoke with Sean about, is that he just wasn't able to adapt during that fight to the problems that Sean was giving him.

And it was pretty basic what Sean was doing, but he has this kind of short guard. It's this kind of Philly kind of shell thing that he does. And I think he's just extremely effective at it, and I don't think that's mysterious. I just think he's done it so often against so many different types of fighters that he was more adaptable and more attuned to the information that was in that fight on that night.

James de Lacey14:59

I think that the best example of what we're talking about here in terms of this ecological approach and going against different opponents, and what you mentioned about Tyson Fury and Ngannou and stuff, is, I don't know how true the story is, I'm pretty sure it was a while ago, but around a professional baseball player. I think he was challenged by a woman softball player basically that he wouldn't be able to hit a home run off this woman softball player's pitch.

And obviously the difference between baseball and softball, baseball's overhand pitch, softball's underhand pitch. And obviously underhand pitch from a female softball player is much slower than an overhand pitch from a professional baseball player.

But he was not able to hit a home run from her pitches. And I think that's exactly what you're talking about, I guess, in a really easy layman's way to really look at it. It's the information that he's getting or he's used to from pitchers throwing overhand, and she's got a completely different look and a completely different ball coming in. Even though the ball's bigger, still didn't make a difference.

And that's, I guess that's just an easy way to look at it. And obviously, mentioned about Sean Strickland sparring every day there, and I'm in your camp on that as well and how important that can be. But obviously, you mentioned that he probably does it a lot harder than you would typically recommend. Do you want to go into how someone could implement that kind of training into their training week or just training in general?

Scott Sievewright16:25

A couple of things I'll pull apart. I've used that example too. I think the, I don't know nothing about baseball, but I think the guy was called Pujols. I think he was a high level baseball batter, is it batter, is that a slugger? Anyway, dude, we're embarrassing both of us.

James de Lacey16:25

Whatever.

Scott Sievewright16:55

So that for me was a very, very great and clear example of Pujols, the batter, being exceptionally perceptually tuned to his sport, the specificity of his sport of a baseball player, the kinematics. Now when we talk about movement, they're picking up, it's not always necessarily conscious. Over time, as he builds his experience over time, he was able to pick up, become sensitive to and detect the information which made him able to perform at these high levels.

And I don't know the actual speed of the ball and how long it takes from the ball typically from baseball. I think they can get up to 100 miles an hour or whatever. But there's a good case to be made that they're not seeing the ball so much as they're seeing all the precursor, the information before that, the angle, the movement of the kinematics, the movement information from the pitcher itself.

And so when the softball pitcher came on and all that information had changed, I think that serves as a real good example. So to go back to the Strickland thing and to keep this analogy kind of going, Strickland's playing, we'll stay with the ball thing, he's playing baseball every day, he's playing softball every day. He's seen all these different styles and whatnot. And I think what manifested there in that fight with Strickland is he's been able to adapt and adjust and see everything coming from these different styles.

I don't know if, I'm sure Strickland, I know Strickland was probably preparing and having people trying to emulate Adesanya. But again, I think in this long-term process that we're talking about, not just that camp, the preceding weeks and months and years, Strickland was preparing for that fight.

Adesanya fight in the way Dricus prepared for years and years, you know, by becoming adaptable and attuned.

James de Lacey18:50

Remind me of your question again, because there was a couple of things there.

Scott Sievewright18:50

No, that was perfect. And then just around how someone could set up this idea of sparring most days. So going back to the sparring, I'm kind of—we spar every day at my gym, and I make no secret about it.

The central problem for me in this sport is the problem of cumulative brain damage, right? And so I have to be very, very careful with my messaging because I'm an advocate for sparring every day. I'm advocate for always being live, but I don't want to say—I don't want to be an advocate for giving kids and hobbyists and amateurs repetitive brain trauma over time. So where that line is on sparring intensity changes for everyone.

There's a cost-benefit analysis to be made on what the aspirations of the fighter is, what stage of the career there is. But for the most part, we keep it extremely, extremely light. Now that is a constant puzzle and problem that I have to deal with, because in the ecological approach we are always advocating for the performance and environment fidelity or representativeness, which means we want our training to be as much like the actual performance outcome that we want.

And I'm kind of contradicting myself there somewhat by bringing the forces right down. But to go back to the point of the reads and the information, I think we can get a ton out of light playful sparring just from the kinematics and the reads. And I don't—I think once we put these kids in the cage to compete or whatever, whether they're able to deal with these higher forces and the higher aggression, the higher intensity, that could be a problem from the way we're training. But I hope you're enjoying the chat so far.

James de Lacey20:23

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.

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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 Vos 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 the description. You can check out the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground. Otherwise, enjoy the podcast.

Scott Sievewright21:50

I was talking about the central problem for me in the spar culture is in the repetitive and cumulative head trauma. And so I'm very, very careful about what I share and what I advocate for, because I do advocate for keeping alive and sparring every day. But also know that I want to be careful with my messaging, because this is a central problem.

And it somewhat contradicts—I somewhat contradict myself, because we want in the ecological approach, you know, we're always advocating for this performance environment symmetry or this representativeness, which means we're trying—our training is closely resemble what we're actually trying to achieve, which would be fighting at the end of the day. But I can't do that every day. It's unethical to do that with my athletes.

So we stay on the light side. Now again, this might be redundant. You might have heard me say this before. But if we go back to the baseball, softball analogy, I think the real value in the sparring that we do is in the reads and the picking up on the kinematics and openings and affordances. And I think—I believe that can be done through light playful sparring, and I think it's shown that it can be done.

The puzzle and the problem that I might be having is when it comes to fight day, and I'm getting mixed data on that. Some of my fighters are kind of thriving there, and they're able to see everything coming, and they're not that easily perturbed or shut down or overwhelmed. But some aren't. And that begs a question for me then: is it a preparation thing?

Can I make these fighters who are maybe a bit overwhelmed—can I make them tougher in the gym by increased intensity? Or is that perhaps more of a psychological trait that's just going to take longer time and competition experience to develop? And I'm hedging my bets there that I'm going to kind of wait.

So we don't spar hard here at all. It's very, very playful, and we build a sparring culture from day one, like literally from day one where I have people spar on day one. So we're building that slowly through the whole culture here, so we don't have any tolerance for hard sparring. But again, the data is mixed. We can go to fights now, and some of the guys are thriving and some of them they do feel a bit overwhelmed. So I don't have a definitive answer for that yet. But I'm still reluctant, and I'm not ready to say spar hard frequently in the gym.

James de Lacey24:01

No, for sure. What about if it was sparring harder but just to the body? Does that change for you?

Scott Sievewright24:24

Of course. And I don't—when I say playful and light, I never want that to be conflated with slow. I'm trying to get the speeds as authentic as possible, and then just the force expression, that force production, to be brought down a bit.

Now, I think there's two valid pushbacks on that. One is that you're not getting these authentic perturbations. And just to what I mean about perturbations, that's just kind of noise to the system that you're—the anxiety and the forces that are not quite there. So there's a case to be made for that, that that doesn't appear, or we're not attuning and getting used to that in sparring. I grant that.

But another—I think this comes more from trad models. You're saying, well, if you're getting used to pulling your punches, you're not going to be able to express that power in the fight. I don't believe that at all. I don't think that's necessarily linked. I think if you can get the openings and the timing together and the movements, I think adding power in the fights is easy enough to do.

What it is, I think again—I was talking about, I think there's a psychological issue there. And I don't have the answer yet. I think there's probably more of a psychological solution to that. And one of the books I'm reading right now, actually, is quite interesting. It's on the affect, the emotional side of it. And I think what I'm picking up from that—I'm not quite finished yet—that the psychological traits of a fighter, it's less to do about how you've maybe developed and prepared them in the gym. That's historical baggage, right back from their whole upbringing, their traits, their psychological makeup and stuff.

So I don't know. Might be a long rambling kind of story about that, but I'm just not ready to say we need to spar hard frequently. And I know that's a contradiction.

James de Lacey26:13

So I'll add another potential contention that someone may have around that, is the idea of, say, you're sparring every day, light, playful. It's kind of the same, I guess, say quote-unquote rules, as we want to call it. Potentially you could have a fighter that maybe is always then fighting or doing the sparring at the same rhythm, kind of like the same intensity, the same mindset, day after day after day, where that becomes ingrained into how they fight. Are there—is that something that you've thought about, or the changes that you make during sparring because of that?

Scott Sievewright26:45

Well, I think so. But when I use the word sparring, it's never—it's very rarely just open sparring. So we play around with strategies and tactics, goals and tasks: more pressure, more volume, this stuff. So we're always shifting the dials up and down. It's never just sparring.

So I try and—maybe solve that problem, or the solution to that, is the sparring always has some different kind of theme, some different—we play around in that space. So it's never just a case of—and I use the word sparring, for me, sparring just means somewhat unscripted and unpredictable.

And so I'll give you my definition of spar, because I don't use the word drill. Because drill, for me, has that connotation of a rote repetitive action that's kind of rehearsed and prescriptive, like choreographed, right? And I know some coaches will use drills and sparring maybe in a different context they can.

Live drilling to me is kind of sparring if you're not exactly sure what's coming toward you and it might be one of two things. Like for my beginners it might be a roundhouse kick or a switch kick to the body—that to me is still in essence a form of sparring because it's somewhat, there's still an element of unpredictability there.

And the reason I think it's really important here, so we can get onto a little bit of the drilling and the padwork, is that I think what underpins skilled performance is the ability to be able to make decisions in real time and pick up on that information. And I think when we drill or it's rehearsed or prescribed, I think we rob the learning and experience of that perception and action, which is kind of seeing and doing.

I believe, really, when you look at the motor learning literature and research, that that's kind of unequivocal—that perception and action is really inseparable. Now between more traditional approaches, cognitive models and whatnot, what we kind of disagree on here is what's happening in between perception and action. Is there this extra processing going on? Ecological psychology and ecological dynamics says that no, perception action is two sides of the same coin and they're inseparable all the time, and we should always respect that in our training.

So that's why whatever activity we're doing, I want a little bit of decision-making and a little bit of unpredictability. And I think over time as we develop and upscale that, that is what's going to make a more skillful, attuned, and adaptable fighter.

James de Lacey29:43

Nice. And just for the listeners as well to break that down potentially even further, just in case someone needs further understanding: for example, that perception action Scott is saying is always potentially together. An example of just action, as you mentioned, would be hitting the bag or hitting the pads. That would be just the action portion without the perception and that example. So the idea of that perception action together is you're always reacting to something. Am I on the right track there?

Scott Sievewright30:10

Yeah, I think I'd like to be a bit more accurate than that, because I think what we tend to do is we say well, we're uncoupling it or we're not, we're only focusing on action and perception. I do believe, I do mean it when I say they're inseparable. So when you're hitting a bag or pads, they're still inseparable, but you're perceiving and acting to something else. You're perceiving and acting to something—it's not realistic of a fight.

And this is my issue with padwork. I think that even the lightest, most playful sparring still has, use the word infinitely better—I think there's a great deal more value in that than even the best kind of padwork. I think padwork is a different thing. And at the risk of, I'm already pissed off a couple of YouTube demigods in this, because there was, I got in a squabble the other day because, and I won't mention names, but there was a coach saying, "Do you ever notice when someone looks really sharp and good on the bag but they look [bad] in sparring?" I said, "Yeah, yeah, no, they're two different things."

And I think we continually violate this. We continue to violate this principle by thinking this will transfer to that, and I just don't believe that happens. And I think coaches intuitively know that, but they continue to violate it because what do we do? It's not showing up in sparring, we're going to go back to this stuff. It's not turning up here, we're going to go back to this stuff. And what we're advocating is just do this stuff.

James de Lacey31:52

I think it's violated as well just because many coaches just don't have the toolbox to be able to solve the issue outside of bags, pads, et cetera, or they just don't want to explore, and that's kind of what they've known to do, so that's just kind of what they fall back on to develop that skill.

But I want to dive into as well, around obviously you mentioned around the sparring, there's always something different with the sparring, it's not just open sparring. Can you dive into some of these examples? Obviously you talked about pressure and things like that, but just some examples so someone listening can start to get an idea of, "Okay, this is what those sparring games kind of look like," and the outcome that kind of, I guess, the goal-oriented outcome of those?

Scott Sievewright32:17

Sure. So I guess, largely, and we can parse out and explain some of these definitions and words—so in the ecological approach, it makes a kind of radical, I don't think it's that radical, but it kind of makes a radical assumption compared to the more traditional cognitive models, that we perceive the world directly. Okay?

Which means all the information that we're picking up on, and I mean information like our surroundings, our perceptual system, all sensory apparatus, what it's picking up on is, we can, that's enough to act upon. What the more traditional model says: well, that's impoverished, it's not quite right. We're going to take all this stimuli and information, and the brain's going to do all these complex calculations and whatnot, and then we're going to pull out some motor program and respond to that, almost like a stimulus response.

We kind of reject that in the ecological model, and we're saying no, no, everything we were perceiving, and sight's a big thing, vision is a big thing—but maybe in grappling and wrestling it's more kind of tactile, kinematic, this kind of stuff, it's more feel and pressure and forces. What we're saying is that that's enough—that's enough to act on. We don't need anything extra. There's no puppeteer. The brain's not a puppeteer. The environment's facilitating action.

So with regards to the sparring, we're always going to stay in that live, unpredictable place. But again, the ecological approach is advocating for direct perception, and the constraint-led approach or the constraints is the toolbox that coaches can use to narrow that search space and nudge the action, the perception action loops, and the skill development towards certain areas.

An analogy I like is—and we can parse out—so an affordance, sorry I'm all over the place here, James.

James de Lacey34:15

You're good.

Scott Sievewright34:15

But these are words we use a lot in the ecological approach. So an affordance is an opportunity for action or invitation to act, okay? And now affordances are around us everywhere. This cup affords me to pick up with the handle—it's pickable, it's drinkable. So affordances are everywhere.

Let's put that in a fighting scenario. When you're in front of someone fighting, you will see them as hittable, you'll see this punch as blockable. All these affordances will emerge and decay over time, and this is where I think skill resides: in being able to not only perceive and pick up on these opportunities and affordances, but also couple your actions to them. So over time we're going to build these little relationships, and that is where the skillful movement emerges. Did that get too a little bit wordy, or does that make sense?

James de Lacey35:17

No, that makes sense. Hopefully the listeners are caught on to a lot of that, but I think it was explained well enough to the idea that essentially there's opportunities everywhere within a fight that you're going to see, and you're going to basically act on whatever it is that you see in front of you, based on typically the tools that you have. But we talked about constraints as the tools as the coach to be able to influence some of that too.

Scott Sievewright35:45

So if we look at this, I love the idea of like a thinking of a field or a landscape of affordances—affordances are everywhere in a fight, right? But what the constraint-led approach allows us to do as coaches and practice designers is maybe just fence off a little bit of that landscape of affordances, so they're exploring and they're tuning to a smaller area.

Which can do one of two things, right? If you just waited for, if you just sparred every day, I think over time that would probably be pretty effective. But just say you're getting ready for a particular style or whatever, the opportunities to get that repetition, the opportunities to be exposed to these problems might not appear as frequently as you want.

So all the constraints do is they remove some possibilities, and they're kind of removing some possibilities for action, and they're narrowing the landscape of affordances so your athletes can explore and play around in there. And over time we broaden that and we narrow it depending on the level of the athlete, depending on the experience, and depending on what the actual target skill we're looking to develop might be.

MMA is so rich and dynamic, right? We've got all sorts of—it's a huge landscape. So we narrow little areas here and we'll play around. And as I said, as a practice designer, I'm just using the knobs and the levers to kind of nudge my athletes into a certain place, but it's always live, it's always unrehearsed and non-prescriptive.

To that point, we focus very much on the endpoint of the task, okay? So I'm rarely—

I'm rarely ever telling my athletes how to do it and how to move their bodies. That goes into the whole focus of attention internal/external, which is a whole other conversation. But let's talk about a lead hand or a jab. There's a million ways to—well, there's like maybe not a million ways but there's different ways to land a lead hand. But over time, if the task is to land that lead hand and not be scored on, the body will self-organize and find over time these opportunities and become sensitive to these opportunities. And lo and behold, you'll have an effective lead hand over time.

I don't care really what it looks like, and that's a tough thing to say. It's a little controversial. But I tell my athletes all the time: I'm looking for progress over perfection, I'm looking for effectiveness over aesthetics, and lastly I'm always looking for creativity over conformity, if that makes any sense.

James de Lacey38:41

I'm getting bit there, but no, I love that. We'll dive into leas now as well. I mean we had an epic leg lock class just on Tuesday gone, and it was literally these kind of games. And it hasn't been like this before, so obviously the gym's making a shift which is really nice.

Typically we kind of drill some leg lock moves, they maybe do some positional stuff. But from the very beginning, we played a couple of different, you could say, games. And I guess one example of the lever here was we started in double outside Ashi Garami position—so two legs on the outside, one person standing. The goal of the person on the bottom was to get the person standing onto their butt, and the person who was standing just had to remain standing. And obviously you do that for five minutes before you switch.

You start to do different things to get your opponent to do different things and you just start to pick things up and figure it out. It was in that five minutes I learned more than I had in a whole class of just drilling something. Just because I got to see so many different reactions from my opponent based on what I did, and failing that I was able to figure out, okay, if I'm in this position again I kind of have an idea what he's going to do and the reactions that I'm going to see. So obviously that can be applied across the board and combat sports.

So I'd love to hear some of the levers that you pull, not just in grappling but striking, MMA, et cetera.

Scott Sievewright39:53

Yeah. So that's a challenge sometimes in a group class, right? Everyone's—we're getting a lot of buzzwords out the way today, but I think a really important aspect or component of this approach is the challenge point hypothesis, right, or the challenge point theory. Which is the best learning tends to occur when you've got your athlete just stretched at that optimum challenge point, right? It's not too easy so they're kind of checked out and disengaged and they're not really challenged. And again, it could be completely overwhelming.

So that is when I talk about these levers, it's kind of almost like a graphic equalizer. I'm trying to get the balance just right so that I'm pushing my athletes—not too hard, and I don't mean hard physically but not too challenging, not too easy. And that in and of itself is not easy, but that's my endeavor always. And we typically do that in sport, right? We'll have a beginner's class, maybe an intermediate and advanced.

So again, coach, almost every aspect of the ecological approach, even the most traditional diehard coaches, they kind of intuitively get. So I think there's a lot more overlap than we—and I'm guilty of it—we get in our camps and we kind of throw back and forth. But I think there's a lot more common ground than we tend to acknowledge.

James de Lacey40:47

Yeah, for sure. Do you want to go into some examples of sparring constraints that you use?

Scott Sievewright41:19

Yeah, would you like that from a striking perspective or—let's go grappling, striking, grappling, MMA, anything that you typically like to use or that might be useful for listeners.

James de Lacey41:19

Sure. So I can take you through some brief games. Let me pick a game up that—let me ask you a question first, because I think this is a good question and I think this is a bone of contention amongst coaches generally. What are fundamentals to you, James? Fundamentals, the move—

Damn, put him on the spot with definitions now. Let's say movements that are—I can't use the word fundamental in my definition though, can I? Movements that are—I'm going to say essential to the sport. I'll just stop there. Movements that are essential to the sport.

Scott Sievewright41:52

Movements that are essential to the sport. So, yeah. So let me—I didn't mean to put you on the spot here, and at the risk of sounding a little woo here. So I think I take the word fundamental serious, layer it, right? So for me fundamental, the base of fundamentals is really it's space and time. I know that can sound a little bit woo, right? But really it's you're trying to configure your body in such a—you're trying to move your body to a certain configuration, whether resisted or unresisted, in a particular moment in time. Okay?

Whether it be grappling, whether it be striking or whatever, you need to get your body to a certain configuration within that time. How we do that is through—how we develop that and develop skill is through this perception-action, which is for me it's never inseparable. It's never switched off. And then where the constraints-led approach comes in I believe is optimizing skill, movement, and action is through tactics and strategies. So when I use tactics and strategies, that'll be how we design our games.

So let me take you through even a beginner's—one of the games I played last night. We play fencing, right? So if you imagine an old-school fencer with their shield up and their lead arm out. I start them lefty-righty, so beginners, and all they're trying to do is tag each other on the shoulder and the torso. And it's a little game of tag with the front hand, right? Very low complexity.

But what you start to see appearing immediately is effective interpersonal range. So they're interacting with their partner, the information their partner's giving them in the space there, and that starts to develop. They actually develop quite nice footwork pretty rapidly, and then we can start layering on to that. But I tell that story a bunch of times about the shoulder tag and whatnot, but you're probably more interested in how we do it in more advanced classes, right?

So again, we might have a different task. It might be—we might do things like in the cage, jockeying for that center ground. That's going to change the dynamics somewhat with the pressure that we're—we spend a lot of time on, as we call it, serve and return. So we spend a lot of time on that initial strike.

So maybe one side has the task objective—we call it maybe a sniper game—they're trying to get in and get out with one strike. And the other side would be a bit more passive, so they have to pick up on that information and deal with that. They know one strike's coming, so that puts them more in a counterstriking position. And we can just play—there's really unlimited little games we can play there.

I might get them to shrink the size of the field of play, so I might keep them really constrained. Might put one against the fence. We might have a bean bag on the floor and it's your job to hold your ground there, hold your territory there. Playing around with stance switches, lefty-righty. I don't value orthodox over southpaw. I don't value any of that.

We just give our fighters opportunities for a little bit of novelty each and every time they come in. And again, over time, I think it's a long learning process. It's not a linear learning process. It's chaotic. They're better some areas than others. And over time, when you get to know your fighters and you get to know where their deficiencies are, you can then start designing your games around that.

You spoke to me a couple of days ago about how you might identify a deficiency, maybe in a pro fighter, and maybe fix that deficiency. I think if there's—if a fighter's having problems or there's some kind of—and every—no fighter's perfect, right? You can—there's some great fighters that can do everything, but fighters are generally better in some areas than they are in others.

And I think any deficiency—and I just kind of got my thoughts a bit clearer on this, I was speaking to Greg Souders about this yesterday—and I think we agreed: any kind of deficiency, that is generally going to be on the action side or the perception side. Now they're two sides of the same coin.

But to give you an example on the action side. So the action capacities—that's more your wheelhouse, right? Your speed, your strength, your power. If perhaps a fighter is getting fatigued early on, or they don't have that capability through maybe some mobility or—

Flexibility, that would be an area that we would have to fix. Now I think a lot of action capacities can be done in action capacity improvement, can be done in the weight room, in the gym to become faster, more powerful, or quicker.

Then you have the perception side, right? You can have an absolutely peak conditioned athlete, but if they're unable to perceive the environment, they're also going to be able to act skillfully. So they're never separated, but I think you can identify flaws and performance deficiencies in an athlete and say, "Okay, it's probably more on the perception side or the action side." Now the solution is always an integrated solution between both, but does that make sense what I'm saying?

James de Lacey47:47

No, that makes sense. Do would you like me to try and explain that a bit more, or does that make sense to you, right?

Scott Sievewright47:47

No, that makes sense, that makes sense.

James de Lacey47:47

I'd love for you to go into as well, obviously we talk some of those striking games, even maybe some of the grappling games, and maybe some MMA games that would integrate the wrestling and the striking component. Because I think that's maybe not talked about as often, because sometimes MMA can be separated a lot between the grappling and striking in terms of training, but then maybe how that's integrated into a sparring game or the different constraints you would use as a sparring game.

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Scott Sievewright49:40

Okay, so I like that question. And it's again, so I have some people who obviously they prefer to strike or they prefer to grapple. I have some people only want to grapple and only want to strike. But let's speak from the MMA context. Presumably someone wants to be good everywhere.

I don't see a lot of value in kickboxing without the threat of takedowns, because I think that in itself is a constraint on action, and there tends to be maybe maladaptive strategies that you're going to get if you're constantly kickboxing and being able to maybe successfully execute striking techniques without the threat of a takedown. So I think for the most part in MMA, we're trying to keep it as holistic as possible.

We spend a great deal of time in our MMA classes on shoot boxing. Might just be punches, might be kicks too. We occasionally, we frequently remove the kicks because we're doing a lot of shooting and I don't want any kind of car crashes, but we do enough of it just to make sure that the fighters are adapting to that.

So I always want the threat of a takedown, and I do a lot of shooting, a lot of shooting, a lot of shooting, a lot of shooting. And that could be from one side shooting, one side trying to stuff, could be both sides shooting, it could be lefty righty shooting. We play all these games. So again, that theme that's coming over is we try and keep the game together as much as possible.

James de Lacey50:55

Gotcha, gotcha. And then in terms of—

Scott Sievewright50:55

And in terms of what I would build from a novice right through, is we put a lot of stress on hand fighting and grip fighting. And I challenged some of the kids, I had a group of young high level young teenager kids come up to visit us last week. And it occurred to me that they come from environments that it's very much they drill the techniques, they drill the techniques, and then they try and put it into action.

And we were speaking about, and I said to them, "You know, I think there are some, of course there's some, but think of how many takedowns, and specifically how many submissions you can think of that don't involve your opponent getting some kind of grip on you, whether it be the legs or the hands." And there's not that many. If you really think about it, there's really not that many.

So I said, "So an area of us to put our attention to right from day one is a lot of grip fighting, is a lot of taking that ability of your opponent away to get a hold of you." And this is how we build our fighters from day one. And lo and behold, before you know it, they're intuitively fighting grips, repositioning themselves, looking for dominant underhooks and all that.

And that all comes out organically. It doesn't need to be explicitly stated, actually, through the games. And this is what I think the value of the approach is. There's not a lot of explicit instruction. These qualities emerge over time.

James de Lacey52:20

Dude, that hand fighting is key, man. Especially when people start in traditional Jiu-Jitsu schools, you get taught "this is how to double leg, this is how to single leg," et cetera, et cetera, but you never get there because you have the two hands in front of you stopping every time. And it's just like, you feel useless.

But I mean, recently we, as part of one of our wrestling classes here at Valhalla Jiu-Jitsu, I mean we do hand fighting every time. And it's been the best thing that I've done for my standup. Being able to hand fight and understand what's happening, what you're trying to do, to be able to get into positions to actually do the different things, is the game changer.

As you mentioned there with the hand fighting, you can learn all the single leg, double leg, whatever other takedowns you want. But if you can't get into that position where you can get double unders, or get into positions where you can manipulate your opponent from that range, everything else just becomes useless.

Scott Sievewright53:11

And these are things we can work right away. So I'd also like to make a mention, so warm-ups, right? So warm-ups, when we originally came across this, especially for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and stuff, which a warm-up, sir, oh my God. We're going to come in, we're going to run around in circles, we're going to shrimp up and down the floor and that. So that was easy, right? It was easy. That was a low-hanging fruit to mock.

But this warm-up period for each class, whether it be 5, 10, or 15 minutes, there's a tremendous opportunity there that I think it's been missed. Because I think you can get a lot of these little games. I don't think you need to have any kind of specific warm-up. You get the body moving over time, it's going to warm up. That's the effect you're looking for.

But I think I'm always looking for that compound effect, right? So if I'm doing, whether it be grappling in MMA, I usually break my groups into three. And I don't always know who's in class, so I'll get them warming up, like last night, on the wall. We're doing some grip, we're looking for two-on-ones. The whole objective or task was to get your opponent's elbow across the centerline, which would give you some kind of access to the back or a single.

And they just play around in there. So that's their warm-up. It's low impact, it's low intensity, but they're learning. And I think the compound effect of these warm-ups over time, it can't be understated.

That's a 15-minute warm-up of an hour's class, that's 25% of your development time. And I don't think it would be a stretch to say I think a lot of wasted time in practice comes from the warm-ups themselves, which they're just kind of, and there's this, people say, "Well, it's ritualistic, people are getting in the zone." And that, yeah, whatever, that's all, to me, okay. And you can also warm up in front, but I can get my partner, they can come in cold and they can get moving, they can start working on skill development immediately.

And that doesn't mean we're going for it right away, but it means we're starting right away, we're going live right away. And I'll pick a theme over the month, and a lot of our warm-ups actually are grip fighting and framing.

James de Lacey55:16

I like that, I like that. Before we finish, don't let me just touch on a few grappling games that you are typically well fond of, or maybe have used recently.

Scott Sievewright55:41

Okay, so I'm a big, so there's things I really believe in terms of the science approach. But when it comes to tactics and strategies, that's more of a personal thing, a coach-to-coach thing. I'm not a huge fan of the guard in MMA. I think guard should be kind of transient positions. I'm always an advocate for getting inside space.

For the bottom person, getting inside space, getting access to the hips and elevating, right? So we do a lot of from different scenarios. Maybe you're starting the guard, you're trying to get the feet on the inside—that would be a little precursor game. Then we start looking to elevate, then we're looking at starting sweeping, whatnot. So every game, the attacker, or the one side, would generally have their task objective, and the bottom side would have theirs.

What are the main outcomes we're looking for in, say, MMA? You don't want to be on the bottom, because if you're on the bottom you're fighting not only against your opponent, you're fighting against gravity, you're fighting generally against the judges. So we spend a lot of our time being able to escape. So our grappling game might be built around that.

So what I would tend to do in a grappling exchange, or purely grappling class, just for example, we might spend a lot of these little—I call them like precursor games—they're getting into these positions, they're pretty low impact, low intensity. And then we'll gradually build these games up until different configurations of getting to the inside space to elevate. And I'm always looking for lots of creativity in that.

But generally speaking, a lot of my MMA ground work that we develop here we're trying to develop is either staying on top or getting out from the bottom. And over time they are diametrically opposed, right? So you're continually trying to hold someone down who's continually improving their capability and ability to get out from underneath you. So there's this attack teaches defense, and over time both sides are getting better and better and better. And I think that as a group brings the skill level up in the room.

And I think when we talk about these high-level gyms, that's really where the magic happens. It's these high-level, experienced athletes are able to attune and challenge each other to a level that they might not be able to get in lower-level gyms. And that's where we are at the moment. That's what we're trying to get to. So again, it's not mystical to me that some of these great fighters come out of gyms that have got a tremendous amount of talent on the floor.

And so there's a lot of kind of quips and sayings that we have in the sport I think are probably, but I think that the old adage of iron sharpens iron is a really good one.

James de Lacey58:34

I love that. And that's a great way to finish this. This even went longer than I thought it was with some of the technical difficulties, which is awesome. But do want to maybe just plug everything where people can find you, Scott.

Scott Sievewright59:00

Yeah, sure. So thanks for on, James. I have the Primal MMA Coaching Podcast, which I started out—I'm going to get back to that. I started out as my little endeavor to educate myself, but I was speaking to a lot of big hitting academics in the field. I slowly morphed into speaking with other coaches, which was also great because there's a lot of coaches coming into the space.

But I feel that's coming a bit redundant now, and we just end up being a kind of a circle jerk of seeing how great the ecological approach is. So this year I'm looking to go back to more of the eggheads and the academics and the scientists. I do have a special guest that will be dropping here soon, Mr. James de Lacey. He was educating me all about the more physical action capacity side of the sport. So I look forward to that. I learned a lot from that, James.

James de Lacey59:28

So you brushed a few bubbles of my conventional wisdom too. I appreciate that, and I appreciate you having me on there too. But thanks for coming on here again. We'll have to tee this up again, especially as you get your platform going with all your games and stuff later this year. We'll have to continue chatting anyway on that too.

Scott Sievewright59:53

Yeah, that would be awesome. As usual, I wrote a ton of notes whenever we got around to. But if I can finish off with something just to say, this overlap—some of the features that underpin this approach is self-organization, which just means the body itself will self-organize around the task. I know that's kind of buzzy, but if you give someone a task, a movement task, an objective, the body will find a way.

And I think even the most strident technical coaches, they believe in some level of self-organization, because if they didn't, they would have to micromanage each and every single movement and joint angle and position they had. So they believe in that too. And they also believe in the perceptual side. I don't think there's a coach out there worth their salt that thinks you could become skillful just on a pad or a bag. Eventually they need to—they accept that there's a perceptual component that you need to get in there and try it and figure out life.

And so there is a big overlap here. And I think what the advocates of this ecological approach are saying is, okay, we're going to get more of the good stuff. Keep that perception-action coupled at all times. It's never separated. But keep it relevant to the task itself, and maybe just get rid of some of this, these activities and drills and whatnot that have kind of permeated through our sport, largely through social media and whatnot.

But be careful, and that's my only advice to coaches out there, because I think most coaches are serious about getting their athletes better. It's a big responsibility. But have a sense of inquiry. There's a ton of good information out there and resources. Just poke your head down one of the rabbit holes. You never know where it might lead.

James de Lacey1:01:40

100%. I actually reached out to Frans Bosch to bring Frans Bosch on, but he said he couldn't give any practical stuff to combat sports, so he's not going to come there. Someone who against my Meyer syndrome, just, you know, screaming Frans Bosch—he's at a whole other level.

Scott Sievewright1:02:07

But there's a lot of great coaches talking about that. My man, John Mackey, from Ireland here, tremendous. I speak to John a lot, and it's interesting because John and I aren't wholly aligned on the nature of perception. But he is, in my opinion, one of the coaches that I know is the most open-minded. And he has a tremendous amount of integrity, and I really love speaking with John, even though we're not quite aligned on the nature of perception. I get a lot out of him.

So revisit Sweet Science of Fighting podcasts with John Mackey. He's also been on my podcast a couple of times. Give him a follow too. He's a [expletive]-tanker as well, old bastard too, when it comes to the drills and whatnot online.

James de Lacey1:02:35

Aren't we all? I think he's been blocked from a few different accounts too, just from random comments that he makes there.

Like, I started—just as we finished this—I started the kind of a more, I guess, constraints-led approach to coaching, well, I think it was 2017, 2018, after having John Pryor, who learned from Frans Bosch. I learned from John Pryor at a conference a bunch of different stuff there, and man, that just like flipped a switch.

And we'll do things like—I mean, it's related to running, it's not really related to combat sports—but in terms of running, for example, some of the important things in team sports is having the foot come from above. And it's this idea of being in like an options position. So when you're running, you don't like—especially in the States, so we—a really good example to kind of bring this together as well, I talked about the baseball example.

This is another one from personal experience: it's this idea of options position in rugby, where you have two hands on the ball, ball in front, you're able to run at the line but you have options. You can step, you can pass, you can kick, et cetera.

And that position is dictated by a few different, more buzzword, like attractors, or essentially parts of the movement that don't change depending on what's happening in front of you. And one of those attractors is the foot from above when sprinting. So in terms of technique, you'll find that you want the foot to come down and kind of hammer the nail.

And there are a few different things you can do. For example, we do wicket sprints, so you have these mini hurdles, they'll sprint through. Put rubber mats randomly on the ground during the acceleration run, and they have to run over them. So if you [expletive] it up, you trip over and fall on your face. And these are just things that, like, small little constraints you can do to drill that without having to be like, okay, you need to do this. But it's like, hey, you just have to run over these things.

And we had, especially in the States here, obviously a lot of guys come from American football backgrounds. And in American football, once you have the ball, you're not passing at nothing, right? So you have guys that will tuck the ball under their arm and they'll sprint full speed ahead, head down, but they don't have any options.

Scott Sievewright1:05:05

The only option they have in that scenario is to decelerate straight ahead, then look up and look around and play. And that's kind of this idea of, can we create this idea of an options position through using different constraints where it's running with play and throwing them out, the upper body lower body dissociation within different things. And yeah, it's been a really cool little space to kind of dive into and kind of get my feet wet practically in it too. So hence why I have guys like you want to continue talking about the stuff, especially in combat sports.

James de Lacey1:05:35

Well, and these conversations are a bit more general, right? I think it would probably be better taking one aspect and really deep dive into that, which I plan to do on the podcast. But again, I keep saying before I go, it'd be remiss if I didn't mention, if anyone is interested in maybe scratching a bit more down, of course Rob Gray is kind of our chief out there. Rob Gray is the host of the Perception Action podcast. He's a skill acquisition scientist. He's probably the go-to guy. Can be a little bit challenging to maybe keep up with the terminology to start with.

In grappling, there's no one doing it better right now than Coach Greg Souders from Standard Jiu-Jitsu. There's also another couple of big guys in grappling right now: Ed Ingamells from the UK, AK Party Bear. My friend Josh Peacock has a combat—sorry, I'm getting it all out the way here.

Scott Sievewright1:06:32

No, keep going.

James de Lacey1:06:32

My friend Josh Peacock, very very clever guy. He runs a Combat Learning podcast. He also has a tremendous amount of guests. If you want to really get out there, you have your Frans Bosch, and there's also a guy I'd love to give a shout out to—he hasn't been on the podcast, he's a little bit of a recluse—but Zeno Martial Arts or Zeno Jiu-Jitsu. Give him a follow. His name is John Emet. He's playing around with the differential learning approach. So when you look at some of the stuff he's doing, it looks really really wacky, but he knows what he's doing too.

I'm thinking in striking anyway, if I've missed anyone I apologize for that, but there's a ton of really great coaches out there right now talking about this stuff, very very progressive, sharing a lot of their stuff for free. And if there's any part of a coach that's listening to this or a student and says, "Huh, maybe this sounds like...," but there's something there, give these guys a follow. And again, and of course John Mackey from Ireland is probably one of the top guys in the striking department now playing around with these kind of things.

For sure, for sure. And people can go back and listen to that. But thanks for coming on, Scott. Appreciate it.

Scott Sievewright1:07:49

You're welcome. Thank you, James. All the best and keep up the good fight, brother.