Training Structure To Maximize Learning & Why Flashing Lights Don't Work w/ Jon Mackey (SSOF Ep 54)

Jon Mackey2:01

And I think a lot of that stems from the fact that most of the combat sports that have a martial arts background come with, or came to the West with, an Eastern philosophy where it was hierarchical and structured. There was somebody in charge. They had all the information, and athletes or participants were kind of passive receivers of knowledge. And they were brought through a very structured, systematic syllabus in order to get to black belt. And then black belt kind of gave you all of the qualifications that you needed to go and pass on this knowledge to other people.

And I guess along that chain of epistemologies and methods of teaching and learning and pedagogy, lots of bad habits have kept their place. Lots of sessions are designed I guess probably not in the most conducive way in terms of developing performance ability, decision making, agility. And we get to a point where we've got social media now perpetuating a lot of these practices. And novice coaches or coaches coming new to sport and athletes see all these methods of training and then copying them and perpetuating it even more so.

My own kind of philosophy, my own position, is to lean on the available evidence that is, that we know, so research from science in terms of what we know about how people learn, how people learn best, and how people learn within a sport performance environment. And I guess within a performance environment, there's I guess there's two very prominent theories in how people learn or how people develop skill.

Those two prominent theories would be, so one would be like cognitive processing or cognitive psychology, and then the other, which is very popular at the moment and has been for the last 20 years, would lean into kind of ecological psychology or ecological dynamics. And then different methods within those theories then you see at play.

So I think traditionally combat sports with an Eastern kind of origin or a martial arts origin would rely heavily on explicit instruction. And that explicit instruction or forms of explicit instruction would exist within the theory of cognitive processing, for example, or information processing. Where the ecological dynamics approach would probably lean a little bit more into experiential learning or exploratory learning or problem solving.

And I think it's important as coaches is that we see the strengths in both theories and that we don't get caught up in the dogma of each theory. So for example, to I guess to provide some context around where this conversation might go, coaches who are really died in the wool ecological dynamics based will push back heavily on the use of instruction, for example, or they push back on the use of isolated practice or block practice.

They see no room for direct instruction. And that's not all of them, but many of them will push back on some of the cognitive elements in terms of information processing.

And then the other extreme, of course, is just explicit instruction. So I have the information, you don't have it, I'll tell you what to do, we'll block practice it. So we'll do rote learning, we'll isolate the skill, and we'll try and piece it together with an understanding that, well, that's how the brain absorbs information, stores it, recalls it, and whatnot.

So we've got these kind of two theories at play within sports coaching. And I think combat sports at the moment, based on what we see through just through social media, interaction with other coaches, is that we haven't fully thought out where best we sit. Is it a little bit more of ecological dynamics? Should it be a little bit more instructional design?

My theory is that we need the best of both of those worlds. So using an evidence-informed approach in order to assist our athletes with their development of agility and their development of decision making.

James de Lacey6:53

Yeah, it's funny actually because if anyone listened to the John Kiely podcast that just got released yesterday, he took exactly the same thing you just did around the Eastern philosophy coming through periodization. And then that's kind of how it came through, where the body was separate from the mind. They basically modeled predictions based on the data they had, the Olympic cycle, then everyone kind of took it and ran with it for every sport in the current day and age.

Like you mentioned there, the same thing, being told what to do. Obviously having lived in Eastern Bloc countries, yeah, that's a thing. You're just kind of told what to do, that's what you do. You're just another, I don't know, maybe another like athlete in the mix to just churn through. If you're not good enough, you're not good enough. If you respond to the system, you're going to be very good.

And I think another way to explain what you're saying there just for anyone listening now, we're in the future regarding that ecological dynamics, or I can't remember what the first, what you called the first one, but essentially extrinsic versus intrinsic I guess feedback or learning. So, you know, lean thing, it's like having a coach telling you what to do, learning exactly what to do from what your coach tells you, versus maybe trying to learn it for yourself through various tasks and things that kind of force, I guess force you to do some of those movements.

But do you want to maybe dive into a little bit of maybe session design or, I don't want to say drills, but we'll call them drills, they kind of give examples of both and maybe some, yeah, I guess benefits or cons of those approaches.

Jon Mackey8:07

Yeah, absolutely. And the diehard ecological dynamics guys will push back on the use of drills. So you might pick up on this on social media and Twitter in particular about people shouldn't be using drills. I'm quite the opposite. I think drills have a place. I think as a coach we need to know where drills fit and how to use them best.

So we talk about drills, we talk about isolated practice. So we take something, if we talk, if we start with the big picture. So the end in mind is the performance, okay? It's the full spar, it's the full fight, whatever way you want to, whatever way you want to title that or label it. We slice it right back, and we take components out of that, and we can drill them in an isolated fashion.

And you probably see that kind of coaching more prevalent around introducing novices, for example, into the sport, or people who are just learning the sport with an intermediate kind of understanding of what the sport is about. Because if you put two novices into the ring and just say, "Okay guys, off you go, work it out for yourselves," well, there's going to be carnage, right? We've seen that when novices get together and they try and spar it out. They don't understand anything to do with the sport. They

They don't understand footwork, rhythm, distance management, any of these things that make good fights good. And they just go at it. So as a coach, you have to introduce them to the sport, give them some contextual knowledge. They might need to learn how to throw a right hand or a left hook, and so we need to isolate that.

But I guess the lesson in that is that we need to isolate certain movement patterns so they learn how to link them together. It could be head movement and head movement and punching at the same time. But it's important that we scale the task back up again and we give them something a little bit more live to work with.

So you're never going to develop a skill when we talk about skill in its purest sense in terms of being able to perform. You're never going to develop head movement and punching by just doing it statically. You have to get into the ring, and we may scale down the actual session in terms of intensity, power, speed, so the person can develop this kind of motor skill and then develop their decision-making in terms of moving their head from an oncoming punch and being able to counter that punch with their own punch.

So there's lots of great ways in where drills are really useful for introducing certain movement patterns or linking movement patterns together, as long as we don't fall into the trap of, well, that's all you do. Because you can't learn how to perform in the sport without actually performing in the sport. And this is where there's a nice crossover in my opinion, or where there should be a crossover in terms of using an Ecological Dynamics approach.

So within Ecological Dynamics approach, we've got this method called a constraints-based method or constraints-based coaching or constraints-led approach, depending on what book you read.

James de Lacey11:06

And essentially, James, if you want to go into constraints now or would you want to leave that later on?

Jon Mackey11:06

Yeah, okay, let's do it. So I guess that's one end of the spectrum in terms of where we can use isolated practice. The other end of the spectrum then is using slices of the performance in order to encourage decision-making and better decision-making and agility within the performance itself.

So I guess to give constraints a definition first and foremost, we are surrounded by constraints in our everyday lives. Constraints are parameters in which we exist that encourage certain behaviors or movement patterns. So a very simple example would be if I was to move from this room to the next room, there's a door here in the room. The door is closed, so the door now acts as a constraint, so I have to behave in a certain way to get through the door. That behavior has been learned over many years—I put my hand on the handle and I open the door.

So the handle on the door is an invitation to me to action, so I see the handle, I perceive the handle, I know what the handle does, and I place my hand on the handle and open the door. So we call this, within a constraints-led approach to coaching, we call the handle an affordance. So it's an invitation to action. If I go to the door and the door is locked, well then that affordance in terms of just pulling on the handle hasn't worked.

So now I need to work out what I have to do next in order to open the door. So I see there's a keyhole and there's a key hanging on the wall—they're affordances or an invitation to action.

So we are surrounded by constraints in our daily lives. It's what society functions on. But to bring it into a sport-specific context, one of the most obvious constraints, or should be one of the most obvious constraints, is the rule setting in which people perform. So the rules of the sport or the rules of the game are constraints, and the rules of the sport or the rules of the game dictate that I need to behave in a certain way.

So for example, not sure if you're familiar with cricket, James? The bowler must, as part of the rules, the bowler must have a straight arm. So that is a constraint that is imposed on the bowler by the rules. Similarly, in say some of the tatami kind of open ring combat sports like contact kickboxing, you're not allowed to intentionally knock out the opponent. So that shapes my behavior in terms of how I move and how I punch. The same thing with full-contact sports where one of the rules is that you can knock out the opponent—well then that influences my behaviors.

So within the CLA approach, within the constraints-led approach, we talk about the task, the environment, and the individual. So we've got these three components that constraints can be applied to which then affect certain movement patterns. Now, you might be sitting there thinking, what's that got to do with training? How does that work within a training context and skill development?

To give a simplistic example, if I had an athlete who I needed to increase their decision-making or I needed them to be good at operating under a little bit more pressure, I might constrain the environment that they're training in. So I might make the ring really small. So because the ring is really small, let's say it's four meters by four meters, for example, that is automatically going to mean that the intensity of the spar is going to be increased.

Because the distance isn't there for them to step back from each other, gauge each other out, do lots of movement, a little bit of testing and so forth. They're pushed into each other, so the intensity of the spar is going to increase.

Now, because I've constrained the environment, I'm going to get a response in terms of the behavior. As a coach, I need to be really mindful of the session that I'm planning and the constraints that I'm applying to ensure that number one, I'm not overly constraining them where no affordances exist. That's when things start to fall apart. And to use the environmental kind of constraint example, imagine putting two people into a telephone box and then asking them to try and—the Russian clips that come out all over the social media.

It's a great example. You can't perform within a telephone box. There's nothing to be learned from a boxing or a kickboxing perspective in that.

So I need to make sure that whatever task that I'm designing, or whatever task, or whatever constraint I'm applying to it, that affordances exist within that. So invitations to action exist within that. So I apply constraints to offer affordances. What I'm trying my best not to do is to be overly explicit in terms of what I want the athlete to do.

So that's kind of the underlying theory or principle with Ecological Dynamics, is that we allow the athlete to explore and work out certain behaviors that fit best within the constraint that's being applied. And when the athlete discovers these affordances and they manage to link them together, so within that example, you might get an athlete who's now very good at head movement, very good at breaking angles and staying tight, very good at working on the inside.

So they develop what's called an attractor state. So everything that's working for them now is known as an attractor state, and all those attractor states have been influenced by the constraints around the athlete and the affordances that they pick up.

Now, where does information processing fit into all of that? So the Ecological Dynamics diehards will say, leave them at it to work it out. A pragmatic philosophy in terms of coaching might say, well, I might suggest something to them. I might ask them, have they seen this? I might question them a little bit more about why they did certain things. I might just provide a little bit of scaffolding in order for them to work out the problem that they may not be seeing immediately, rather than just stripping it back or adding more constraints or opening it up a little bit.

So they're two really great examples of how you can apply constraints to your coaching in order to get the athlete to kind of come up with their own movement-based solutions to the problems that you are giving them. And it doesn't have to be the size of the ring. Other simplistic examples might be: you can only use your jab hand or your front hand against somebody who can only use their back hand, or they can only use both hands.

So what's that going to do to the athlete that's working on their jab? What's that going to do? They're going to have to think really hard and fast about being super clean because they don't want to get caught with that back hand. So you've constrained them—they can't use their back hand, only their front hand. So now they have to think about getting in and out really fast. They might think about getting their head off center line a little bit more. They may think about setting up traps so they can walk the opponent onto the front hand.

So by giving them those problems to work out, by constraining certain parts of it, the underlying theory is that you're developing self-awareness, problem-solving skills, decision-making by constraining certain parts of the task environment or the person themselves. Does that make sense?

James de Lacey18:49

Before getting back to the podcast, I want to let you know there's a link down in the description for the Sweet Science of Fighting...

Before getting back to the podcast, I want to let you know there's a link down in the description for the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground Community. You can get all the help you need for your combat sports training. You get every single Sweet Science of Fighting training program, online course, and you get access to a range of coaches within the private Discord community. So go check that out, and back to the podcast.

Yeah, that's brought up so many different thoughts as well. I mean, I think jiu-jitsu does it quite well inherently, especially around a lot of class structures where you'll drill a technique and then you'll do it like a live positional round, maybe with a constraint. One person attacks for two minutes, one person defends for two minutes, but the attacker can't, or the defender can't submit the opponent, whatever.

And then that's the constraint. And then you get to do a little live, and you've drilled it. How many times? Now you get to see what happens when they actually resist or do other things. Then you have to problem solve throughout that as well, and that's an example there.

And the other thought that came up was when you mentioned the scaffolding and suggesting things. There was a really good podcast, it was many years ago. Steve Magnus and John Marcus, track coaches, and they talked about how sport is art, and then the coach is basically the canvas, and then you provide the canvas and the athlete creates the art, right? And that's what you mentioned around suggesting different things around, I guess, have you seen this, why did you do that, and then allowing them to express that on whatever your canvas is. So that's another analogy to bring that together.

But I think what might be interesting as well for the listeners is because a lot of them probably won't have the ability to change the structure of their combat classes and things like that, but they might want to do some extras in their own time. Are there simple things that they can do? I guess I'm assuming they probably need a training partner to implement some of the stuff.

And I mean, you mentioned obviously sparring where you can only jab, where the other person has both hands, things like that is probably a good example. But is there anything else that you like to lean towards, maybe to solve certain problems?

Jon Mackey20:56

Yeah, I mean if your sport dictates that you have to perform against another person who also wants to hit you or score points on you, to remove yourself completely from that and work through partial interaction with someone who's holding pads or just complete separation, which is just working the bag, you're going to need to be really creative in terms of what you're doing physically.

I guess if you're on your own, one of the great ways to enhance your own understanding of movement patterns is to watch video. Within performance analysis, you've got a lot of information and you've got a lot of really well educated people within that field who understand the unconscious movement patterns of competitors. And you can find some of their work on YouTube on that. And I guess it's just about maybe observing how people in your sport, how they move.

Whether that's, from a kickboxing perspective, like what I got a lot of my guys to do is to video examine how their opponents are moving in terms of weight distribution, bounce rate. If they're moving from front foot to back foot as part of their organizing themselves within the performance, we can target some of these unconscious movement patterns and we can exploit them. And we've done that to really good effect in the past.

I remember at a World Championship final not too long ago, we had a Hungarian fighter who bounced from front foot to back foot. Spotted this really early on in the first belt, and of course if you attack someone on the front foot when they're bouncing, there's absolutely nothing that they can do. So the timing of our athlete to attack them every time the front foot landed. And I mean front foot to back foot bouncing, it was like front foot, back foot, front foot, back foot, if you can visualize that.

So when they landed on their front foot, all of their weight was on their front foot and they couldn't respond to the attack. So I guess that's just an example of how we were able to exploit certain unconscious movement patterns. And because it was an unconscious movement pattern, they didn't even realize why they were getting caught or what they were doing. And they probably won't realize that until they maybe look back on the video themselves and they spot that we attacked them every time the front foot went down.

So there's little things like that, I guess, if you're training on your own to increase your own perceptual ability. But there's absolutely nothing better in terms of developing your own perception and how you respond to stimulus by having another person in front of you. And that doesn't have to be full-on sparring. That can be scaled down sparring. For example, I like to use the analogy of sparring underwater to give an impression of the speed and the intensity that you should be working at in order to develop better decision-making abilities.

Especially if you're relatively new and you've got lots of stimulus coming at you, you've got this cognitive load theories kicking in and you're trying to make sense of what's going on. You need to just calm everything down, lower the intensity, lower the pace, and then allow them to work through that at a much simpler pace and simpler level. That is better for learning and it's conducive to better decision-making.

And you mentioned Brazilian jiu-jitsu there. And I mean 15 years ago, I went to a Brazilian jiu-jitsu class and the coach had his guys with a mouthful of water. So they called this flow sparring, and essentially you had to keep the water in your mouth until the end of the round. What did that do? It kept the intensity right down. So there was no, it was all nasal breathing, which meant it was at a pace where they could work out stuff.

They weren't going hard at it trying to yank armbars in or neck crank somebody just for the sake of trying to get it on, but they had to work at a much slower pace so they could problem solve and feel what was going on around them before scaling that problem up into much more freer sparring.

James de Lacey24:51

Yeah, those are good points too. And I think a lot of people get caught in some of the fancy contraptions, at least within striking sports. There's obviously different things there where there's pads but you've got machines as well that rotate and you have to duck under them and slip them, whatever else. What's your take on those in terms of maybe transfer towards the sport itself? Do they have a place within training at all?

Jon Mackey25:18

I think most of them are gimmicks, to be honest with you. You see a lot of this in striking sports for sure. And unfortunately you see a lot of it within professional camps, and you've got young athletes and novice coaches looking at what the pros are doing and then thinking, well, because they're pros and there's a lot of money in the game, what they're doing must be right. So you got these swinging bars and you've got the touching lights.

The best one I've seen is within professional kickboxing. One of the top names in Glory was having his coach throw frisbees at him, and as the frisbees were coming at a distance of about 20 feet, he had to move his head to avoid the frisbees. And, you know, he'd be really good at that if the sport involved frisbees getting thrown at you. Same thing with touching lights.

James de Lacey26:08

Funny.

Jon Mackey26:08

No, no, not me, not me. But in relation, you see a lot of these things with, you know, I'm developing reaction time and decision-making by using colorful lights. So when the light lights up, you have to touch it, stuff like this. And of course, none of that translates. That simple reaction time theory, none of it translates into the actual performance because, well, you're not operating against flashing lights. You're operating against another complex organism called a human being who also has thought processes and is working out the best strategy that they can use to beat you.

So you have to work out about front leg kicking, back leg kicking, front hand, back hand, angles, distance management. You get none of that from touching lights. There's not even an ounce of that will benefit any of your training to improve your decision-making or your agility in relation to dealing with someone who wants to punch you or kick you.

And the same can be said for ladder, use of ladder drills or the SAQ ladders as they're called. What an oxymoron and an absolute paradox. I mean, ladders are just simply floor positions. I've used them to great advantage with kids, helping them just understand the difference between left and right. And is there any benefit to using them in terms of developing actual sports-specific agility? Well, no, of course not, because sports-specific agility requires decision-making. So there's no point in having an athlete do fast feet or step overs and not then include any of that into the performance of the training whatsoever.

So my opinion on ladder drills is that they're probably useful for a general warm-up as floor placement markers, but other than that they have absolutely no use whatsoever. And it brings in the concept of representative task design or representative session design. So that concept of coaches developing sessions that are representative of the sport that they're coaching in.

You don't see a lot of this stuff happening in football or basketball where coaches come in and just pull this mad stuff out of the air in order to try and develop better performers within their sports. You see a lot of it in combat sport for some reason. I'm not entirely sure why, but it's there and it needs to be challenged. Right up to the maniacs to hit their guys with tires and stuff, or big medicine balls on the abdomen. This is a traditional thing in boxing clubs where the concept is to condition the torso.

Everyone has seen it. You're either sitting down in a crunched position or you're standing up or you're getting punched and pummeled, or you're getting a medicine ball dropped on you. What's happening there is that number one, you're perceiving that you're going to get hit, so you're reacting to the perception of someone swinging their hand at you or dropping a ball at you. You can see it, you react to it and you brace.

In the ring you don't see it, and that's the whole reason why body shots are so important. They're absolute killers and they're generally thrown at angles where the person receiving the shot doesn't see it. And when you don't see it you don't perceive it. If you don't perceive it, you can't act to resist against it, so you're going to get dropped.

Why can we not walk around the ring constantly braced all the time? Because we have to breathe and we have to move rhythmically around the room, so we can't constantly brace in anticipation that we're going to get hit. So is it useful to bring these kind of training methods into your sessions? Probably not.

If you want to develop perception and action ability to body shot, body spar so you can actually deal with the multiple shots that are coming, the switching angles, the change in levels. Take the shot and return the shot as opposed to being a passive receiver of getting thumped or pummeled in the midsection, which is just again, it's just nonsense that's been passed down over the years. And you'll hear people talk about mental toughness and like, this has nothing to do with that. It's just a lack of critical thinking.

James de Lacey30:26

I might have been a video you shared, I don't know, but I saw someone, a chick had a bar on her back, she was squatting and then she'd get punched in the abs and then she was squat again, get punched.

Jon Mackey30:49

You probably... I mean, you share so much of that stuff, so probably from you. A lot of it gets sent to me. I've got a bit of a, I think I've got a relatively small following online. I'm not an influencer nor do I want to be one, but I get stuff sent to me from all over the world of these training clips. I just share them, share them out. My objective is that young coaches coming through our own system here in Ireland see this trash for what it is.

In that video that you mentioned, I mean they're experienced fighters and they come from a good gym. The coach is standing there with his hands on his hips behind them watching this [expletive] go down. At worst case scenario, it's dangerous. So yeah, she's squatting with a bar on her back and she stands up, she's getting punched in the stomach. Why? What is it meant to do other than...

And it's depressing to watch the comments underneath stuff like this. It's depressing. It's like, oh guys, where are we going in terms of our coaching, our understanding of being coaches and developing athletes, developing people to be good performance? Where are we going? You look at the comments and people comment underneath is saying this is the best thing they've ever seen. All this super... just like, it's absolute just...

Call it out because the more times it's called out, coaches I hope will start to critically engaged with what they're actually doing and stop putting up nonsense just for the sake of a viral video or extra likes or something like that. So yeah, I've got, I guess I've gotten a bit of a name within my own small following of being a bit of a crank calling out.

And look, I have the best of respect for coaches and I know now they're trying to think outside the box in terms of well, how best can I develop the athlete. But sometimes we think so far out the box that it just becomes absurd or doesn't have any theoretical underpinning or experiment experience.

James de Lacey32:29

Independent kind of just doing it for the sake of doing it because it might look cool or you might think it does something.

Jon Mackey32:29

Exactly. So my suggestion is, well, hang on a minute, let's work from an evidence-informed approach. And that's not to say that coaches need to be academics, but I think good coaches need to have an understanding of what's available within the research. You don't need to be a scholar to get that information, you just need to engage with people who are in that space. And there's a lot of them online on Twitter.

I think Twitter's a much better space for actually learning off of scholars and academics and I guess coaches who are academics and academics who are coaches, or to use that term "parademics." They're practical, they're applying their knowledge in the practical sense on a daily basis, and you can learn so much from from these people. As opposed to being on Instagram just watching that maniac in France drop tires on children and then everyone thinks he's off the wall cool.

So yeah, there's a lesson to be learned there I think for all coaches. It's just to be wary of what you're doing, critically engage in your session planning, and try and look at what's available in the evidence in order to to steer your practice.

James de Lacey33:49

It doesn't help when shows, obviously like UFC Countdown and kind of the Showtime All Access and it kind of show... I mean, one of the recent ones was Ciryl Gane pulled up the Jon Jones fight. I don't know if you saw that, him squatting on what do they called, the balance pads or something like that and doing a bunch of stuff. It's like, and then just going through that kind of stuff. Then now that's going to be the new thing for performance or helping him do whatever.

Jon Mackey34:12

Everyone else that's... it's not touching much. It's nonsense. And as I say, a lot of the stuff you see is actually dangerous. Pummeling the torso with a tire or a heavy medicine ball, it can be dangerous. There's a certain risk attached to that. Not held by Tyson Fury. There's a video Tyson Fury that goes around every now and again where he's jumping around the ring, encouraging this other guy to break his ribs as he's getting punched. What does that do? He's a professional fighter.

But as I say, one of my catchphrases is just because the pros do it doesn't mean it's right. It's just 100% nonsense. And we get a lot of that nonsense, and I guess that it boils down to that kind of representative task design or representative practice design, and how best we as coaches, how best we set up and schedule our sessions for our athletes to get the best out of that.

James de Lacey35:02

Maybe dive into a little bit of session design, how you would kind of structure a session to maybe learn a new skill.

Jon Mackey35:30

For sure, absolutely. It's a great avenue to go down I think. Everything starts with a good warm-up. Everything starts with a good warm-up in my opinion. The warm-up is probably the most important part of the session. Traditionally what you might see in in some combat sport clubs is that there's a very prescriptive warm-up that works around the circles, just working on the physical aspects of the warm-up.

And I guess that's kind of underpinned by the RAMP protocol. Raise the heart rate, mobilize the muscle, potentially activate, et cetera. But what's often missed with a good warm-up is the psychosocial components of that. So there's absolutely no reason why within your warm-up, number one, you can have a social aspect to it. I like to have a nice loud warm-up where people are engaging, having a bit of crack, sets the scene for really positive learning later on.

Because what you've essentially said here at the start of your warm-up is that mistakes are welcome, happens, have a laugh, get on with it. This is a safe space for learning. What you can also include in your warm-up is decision-making sessions, decision-making tasks within it. So it doesn't have to be prescriptive: jog on the spot, jumping jacks, squats, run in a circle, shadow boxing, all of these kind of things that you would do as an individual isolated from everybody.

So one of the - and I've got lots of these things in my own coaching toolkit - what I really like, because we're in striking sports, distance management is a really key component of what we do. So without getting them sparring straight away, they can stand in front of each other and move as if they were in sparring. And you've probably seen this, James - I don't claim to have invented this - but tagging the front shoulder with the front hand, which means that you're trying to get the tag on the shoulder, the other person's trying not to get tagged or they might parry. So we've got this full warm-up that's very representative of the sport, except we're not sparring or we're not hitting each other.

There's other things like that that you can develop in terms of encouraging better lateral movement or making angles off center line, such as the zombie drill. Don't know if you're familiar with that one. One person is on - to use that term - you've got two other athletes, then they've got their hands out in front like this and they just walk forward at the person, and all the person does is parry and move off center, parry, move off center, making their way to the back of the person, constantly cutting angles up all of the time.

And what I'm trying to do here is get the athletes away from side-stepping, so where one foot goes to the other and they side-step in an arc.

So if you create an athlete who, if you have an athlete that consistently side-steps when they're under pressure, all the person that's attacking them needs to do is just pivot to the angle that they're at. Really easy. If I side-step around you, you just need to turn them, watch me as I go around you. But if you encourage the athlete to make sharp angles and steps under the armpit, for example, we got this kind of reaction where they disappear from in front of the person and end up on the outside of the shoulder here. So you can develop those skills within your warm-up, for example.

So your warm-up sets the pace for everything else. Now you can build on that. And so as you get into the meat of the session, you can start to look at slices of the performance. So we take certain scenarios out of performances and we just work through them in a semi-compliant way. You take different parts of it.

So you might be working against the kicker or someone who likes predominantly punch, or you might be looking at movement patterns and interception and perception of that. And you're taking slices of it out and then with the ambition to build it back up so you've got full sparring at the end of it.

Rather than, I guess, the opposite to that is everyone does a prescriptive warm-up, everyone jogs on the spot, raises their heart rate, does their stretches, does their mobility work, three rounds of two minutes of shadow sparring against nobody, three rounds on the bag against nobody, a little bit of padwork. Now don't get me wrong, padwork has its place.

From a coach's perspective, the coaching, in terms of positioning and watching what's happening, it's a really great observation tool. It's really useful for allowing athletes to learn how to link shots together. When we spoke earlier about tractor state and metastability, you have to know how shots go together before you can try and encourage them within the real-time performance.

So the limitations to padwork, of course, is that it's partial interaction and the coaches generally telling you what to do. So "James, throw right hand. James, right hand, left hook." So you're not making these decisions for yourself. You're responding to instructions coming at you. So you might do three rounds of that, and then you might do three rounds of conditioning, and then you might spar.

So you've come to the point - the bit that we all need to be good at - but you've done very little in terms of developing your session to encourage athletes to be problem-solving, making decisions, moving within that kind of rhythm of the sport itself that we all expect to see at a reasonably good standard of combat sport.

So I guess to kind of bullet-point that is, number one, the warm-up is most important. Use decision-making drills - to use that term - use decision-making tasks. Allow people to have a bit of fun and a bit of crack in there because it settles on nerves or anxiety and it says it's okay to make mistakes here, it's okay when things don't go wrong or don't go right.

And then start to think about, well, where do the athletes need to develop? What do they need to develop? And as a coach you might have certain philosophies that underpin your practice. Mine is movement-based. I teach people, or I coach people, to move before I teach them or coach them to punch or kick. You see this a lot with children. What's the first thing you get taught in a boxing club? Jab, jab, jab. It's just jab. It's the first thing you learn. You might learn how to stand and then you learn how to put your hand out and back.

What's oftentimes missing from that is that you're not only standing and punching with your front hand, you have to engage with somebody who's also trying to do that. So if you teach the person or coach the person how to move first of all - and there's lots of ways to do this with children and people who are new to sport - where they're not sparring but they're moving as if they were sparring, and they're learning how to hold themselves, they're learning about the distribution of weight across both legs, and then they can actually put it together with some stepping and jabbing, some stepping and jabbing, and then moving their head as they're jabbing and stuff like that.

So there's lots of ways in which you can actually take key components of the actual performance out, dust it off, and allow people to try it out and learn it before piecing it back together. And it goes back into the main chunk of the session. Does that make sense?

James de Lacey42:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm conscious I'm throwing lots of shots here on screen. Did you know you can represent Sweet Science of Fighting while you're training? We're more than just a membership. We also have rash guards and shorts. If you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see that we have the Sweet Science of Fighting 2.0 shorts and we also have the Sweet Science of Fighting short and long rash guard. There's another design coming soon, but you can get those on XMartial.com and you can go down the description and you can find that. And back to the podcast.

Not being too much of a distraction. It's nice because dive into that kind of attractor states as well. Obviously, within that constraints approach, for anyone - I guess to kind of dumb it, try dumb it down as much as possible for anyone listening - it's kind of like tractor states or attractors of movement, things that are always present in a good - for example - in a good punch, right? So things that are always present in a good punch.

Then obviously you have fluctuators, which are essentially like variability within that movement. So if you throw into the head, you throw into the body, you're going to have slightly different, I guess, movement within that. But you're going to have the same attractors throughout both those movements. And same thing as you mentioned there with having people in front, different movements happening, those are things that are going to challenge those attractor states.

And I know Frans Bosch's book is actually - is really good at explaining this and kind of where I learned a lot of it from, too. Obviously deepening - what they say - deepening the wells of the attractors. So I guess you could say ingraining the right movement patterns, right? So having the people in front of you moving all the time and seeing different looks and different scenarios, you're ingraining those movements with different scenarios.

And then obviously we can link that back to agility, right? Decision-making, are we doing the right thing with this? Making the right decision here in this exact scenario. Does this usually happen? My opponent usually does this, so I'm expecting this to happen, so I anticipate this, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, it's a whole swamp sort of stuff that, as you mentioned - and I guess that's why it's called ecological psychology.

Jon Mackey44:19

Yeah, so we got lots of things going on in our environment and over time we become familiar with these certain movement patterns and we know how to engage with them. And we know where the affordances lie at certain times. Sometimes we need to go after certain affordances, so we might feint in order to get our opponent to do something, then we know that we've got an opening.

But I guess the attractor state is that kind of natural flow of things where everything is working in synergy. Yeah, so like you said, working from the body to the head and making the angle at the same time, or body to head to the back leg coming up to make a contact on the trunk. And when you see two world-class athletes compete against each other, oftentimes you hear that being described as poetry in motion, which is lovely to watch. And that, I guess, is a really great example of an attractor state or what's called metastability. Everything is just fitting and there's a respect for...

The rhythm, and it's nearly like they are of one organism kind of working around each other. You ask any top athlete, any really good athlete who's good at their trade, any combat athlete that's good at their trade, what do they hate most, and they'd be saying sparring novices. Because the novice doesn't get it. They don't get the rhythm, they don't get the respect for distance, they can't self-organize, they don't know what to do at the right time at the right place.

It's like being a really good ballroom dancer and then dancing with me, because all I'm going to do is step on your toes. Throw the map right, throw you up. I'm going to be all over the place. So yeah, it's a great example of that kind of flow state or that attractor state, and then someone who might not have that level of experience or that level of performance.

James de Lacey46:23

Yeah. Yeah, I've been trying to piece together—I haven't gone back to an article on rhythm—and I know when I talked to V. G. Bader on this podcast, I kind of defined sport success in sport is disrupting your opponent's rhythm and imposing your own rhythm. And as you mentioned, things with feints again, that's disrupting your opponent's rhythm so you can impose your own and things like that. And I think that it's so important, I guess playing with rhythm as well in sport.

Because people can get into their own rhythm and pace, right? Kind of like your set point, within sparring or maybe you're rolling if you're a grappler. And it's kind of this is the pace you always do, it's kind of your default pace kind of not thinking too much, just kind of just what you do. But then when the pace gets pushed on you, you go, oh, I haven't been here, this is different to my normal rhythm, and things kind of turn a little haywire.

And I think, as you mention, playing with rhythm—I mean, for example, smaller ring, you're playing with rhythm there as well, forcing certain things to happen and that. So do you ever play with—I know you mentioned obviously tempo with sparring, like the sparring under the water as well—does that mean you're also sparring at the end of every session? Because you kind of do it technically.

Jon Mackey47:11

Yeah, absolutely. Every session that we run involves some amount of sparring, whether that's what I call theme-based sparring, which is where we create certain scenarios. So we might constrain the task a little bit. So you're three points down in a world championship final, for example. So adding that constraint in encourages one of the athletes to behave in a certain way. They might become more aggressive, they might become more switched on.

I like that, I guess, because you're increasing the challenge state of the athlete. You may need to provide some contextual information, and this is where a good coach steps in to facilitate, not tell them what to do, but facilitate. So under pressure, three points down, you've got three minutes of the last round to try and rectify this. There's a lot going on in your head, and a good coach knows how to facilitate the right outcomes or the right behaviors and stuff like that.

So yeah, we always kind of play around with different scenarios, different countries have different styles of movement that have been passed down traditionally. So we might incorporate some of that. So moving against a Russian competitor, for example, versus moving against a Hungarian—they all move differently, they all have unconscious movement patterns. And we're always asking the athletes to observe and to perceive what's in front of them, and hopefully they make the right decision. And if they don't make it or if they're struggling, we might need to roll back on the constraint or offer some instruction or some suggestion in relation to facilitating that.

But to answer your question, James, all of our sessions will always end up with some form of live scenarios that are very representative of how we actually perform.

James de Lacey49:02

I like that. Something that doesn't happen often within, I guess, striking sports. Sparring is seen as its own high-intensity activity, not as a skill development. Sparring is a great way to learn.

Jon Mackey49:02

Yeah, as long as it's done the right way. And don't get me wrong, we have sessions where they're test spars. So it's everyone's getting it out, padded up, the full face head guards are on, and you go at it. And because that's what we do in sparring. But what you see a lot of the time in combat sport—and I think this is across all of them in my experience—is that the coach is seen as the giver of information.

So you've got this consistent explicit instruction all of the time, even during performances. You've got the coach on the outside of the cage or the ring, and they're just constantly shouting in instructions for the athlete to do. And this is really confusing. Although athletes might not say it, some of them become reliant on it.

I'll give you an example of an athlete that I've worked with recently who came from an environment where she was told consistently what to do, instructed what to do all of the time. And effectively what we're doing here is that we're reducing the ability of the athlete to make their own decisions. Not only do they have to stand in front of another person who's going to try and beat them, and all of the chaos that comes with that, and working out what works well at different times within the bout, they've got to try and work that out for themselves.

As well as listen to you sitting outside, screaming in from the safety of your coach's chair, about what I should be doing. And it just becomes—for a lot of athletes it just becomes overloading. So we've got this sensory overload and this cognitive load of what's going on in my head, I'm listening to this, I'm seeing this. I don't see what the coach is saying I should be doing, I'm seeing something different, what should I do? And it can fall apart.

And to use an example, so an athlete came to me about three years ago now, looking just for a different direction and maybe a different type of coaching. My philosophy is very much balanced in terms of—I like to coach autonomous performers, so they're able to make their own decisions, but I also understand when I need to step in, provide some scaffolding, provide some suggestion or instruction. So I use the best of both of those theories, because my intention is to make the athlete or the learner better.

She came from an environment that was extremely explicit in terms of instruction. It was always being told what to do. And then they're with a coach that likes to be quiet in the corner. So there was real confusion. And it was like, are you actually coaching or not? You're not telling me what to do. Is this because you don't know what to do, or what is it I need?

So it took me a while to kind of cop onto this, and there was lots of frustration. And I thought, well, this is just the athlete coming into a new environment. Well, in fact, it was the athlete coming into a very different coaching behavior. And I had to eventually scale up my level of instruction to where they were pretty comfortable with it, but my ambition is to keep scaling it down so they become autonomous learners or autonomous performers.

And I was influenced heavily by the late great Cus D'Amato. I grew up during Tyson's reign as heavyweight champion, and for all his faults, he was a phenomenal athlete. But behind him was a phenomenal coach. And unfortunately, he passed away before Tyson became heavyweight champion of the world, and because of that, I guess he's not as well known as what he should be. And that's Cus D'Amato.

And in a lot of the interviews that Cus D'Amato does, he talks about the athlete being the center of his coaching practice. And he said a really great—he had a really great saying that resonates with me even to this day. And he says, I don't succeed when—to use his words—I don't succeed when I make a fellow champion of the world. He says, I succeed when I make that fellow champion of the world and independent of me. And that's powerful, powerful from the time that it was said, where coaching was very much a one-way street in terms of coach has the knowledge, athlete doesn't know anything.

And that resonated with me through all of my coaching career, that our job is about creating and developing autonomous performers, good decision-makers. A lot of that translates into life as well, James. But I understand that there are strengths within the information processing theory and there are strengths within the ecological dynamics theory as well that influence my coaching practice.

James de Lacey54:04

Nice. Yeah, I've got one last question for you before we move to the members-only Q&A. So anyone listening, if you're part of the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground, it's a members live Q&A at the end of this. Also, Jon Mackey is in the Discord of the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground, so you can ask him questions within there.

But to finish, someone is training on their own, for example, maybe doing shadow boxing, bag work or whatever, visualizing your opponent. And kind...

I've got one last question for you before we move to the members only Q&A. So anyone listening, if you're part of the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground, it's a members live Q&A at the end of this. Also, Jon Mackey is in the Discord of the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground, so you can ask him questions within there.

But to finish: someone is training on their own, for example, maybe doing shadow boxing, bag work, or whatever, visualizing your opponent and kind of reacting to a visualization—is that at least going to be better than not doing it, essentially, if you don't have a partner, in terms of maybe skill development?

Jon Mackey54:27

So those firmly rooted within an ecological dynamics theory will say no, will say that there's absolutely no transfer to the performance, and there might be some element of truth to that. But having said that, when we turn the page and we look at cognitive psychology or cognitive learning theory, we come across concepts such as schemas—so mental frameworks. Mental frameworks are, for example, increasing our contextual understanding of something. So you know what a dog looks like, James.

You know what a dog looks like. Why? Because you've seen a dog, you've got a mental framework. So when I say dog, James, you think of a dog. You know what a dog looks like. If somebody dropped out of space and landed on the ground here and a dog came in front of them, they wouldn't know it was a dog because they've got no mental framework of that. Okay? They've got no understanding of it.

So there's no schema to rely on in terms of what's the information that I have from previous experiences. So I have to build these up. So within cognitive processing, there's certainly a theory that would suggest that visualization would reinforce these mental frameworks, especially if you've got prior knowledge. So if you've done a lot of rounds and you understand what it's like to be in front of somebody while they're trying to score and hit you, visualization can said to be a very impactful tool in relation to that.

Whether it directly translates to performance, I'm not sure. I don't think we could create good performers or good athletes just by visualization alone or just by shadow boxing alone. But if you were to shadow box or shadow fight or shadow move, whatever title you want to put on it, to do that without any internal visualization of the sport itself would be a real waste of time, I think. A real waste of time. So you could actually—I think it would be beneficial to use some imagery and some visual cues and kind of visual practice to go alongside that.

James de Lacey56:18

Nice. That's a good way to end this as well before we move on to the members only Q&A. But do you want to maybe just plug where people can find you and follow you and what you're up to?

Jon Mackey56:18

Oh God, if you've got no life, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mostly hang about on Instagram. I don't be there too much these days. Same on Twitter. I think Twitter's a great space for dealing with very knowledgeable people in the academic space and in the practitioner space as well, because you can engage with people.

In Instagram, it's a little bit more hidden, and I think that's why you see a lot of the [expletive] on Instagram, because it's very hard to call it out. A lot of the guys that post [expletive] on Instagram would be absolutely destroyed if they went to Twitter and posted that as the best way to do something.

So look, I'm on Instagram, Jon Mackey. I'm on Twitter, Jon Mackey 14. If people want to latch on to me there, I do post some stuff about skill acquisition on Twitter and some academic papers and stuff like that.

James de Lacey57:30

Perfect. We'll link that all up in the description as well, so anyone listening to the podcast version of this can check that out as well. But thanks for coming on, Jon, appreciate it.

Jon Mackey57:30

No problem, James. It's good to be back. See you.

James de Lacey57:30

Thanks.