Constrain To Break Through
How to take away one option in order to afford another
Alright, let’s dive into it, this is Week 3 of the series of articles inspired by Rob Gray’s How We Learn To Move. Previous installments:
Learning To Move
Error Amplification
This week, I’ll discuss the topic of Constraints-Led Approach (CLA) and some of the ways I use them in practice. Excerpting from HWLTM:
In the CLA, one or more constraints are manipulated in practice in order to:
(1) Destabilize the existing movement solution.
(2) Encourage exploration and self-organization.
(3) Amplify information and invite affordances.
(4) Provide transition feedback about the effectiveness of search.
Again, my goal with these articles is not to explain or summarize Rob Gray’s thoughts or the CLA paradigm in general. The book does a better job of that than me. The value I can bring is to share how I use constraints in my practices. So, here we go:
Destabilizing An Existing Solution
What do you do when an athlete is doing it wrong? Even worse, what do you do when they do it wrong, and can’t seem to change? Rob Gray calls this an attractor well and most of this just call it a bad habit. I once read (maybe in this book, but I can’t remember exactly) that you can’t really change a habit, but you can make a new one. That line of thinking has served me well in coaching.
Instead of trying to change an athlete’s habit, help them make a new one.
Instead of fixing your approach, let’s make a new footwork pattern.
Instead of changing your setting contact point, let’s learn to set from a high contact.
Instead of changing your passing technique, let’s add a new tool to your passing toolkit.
One way to do this is to use a constraint to destabilize the existing solution. The athlete is using that solution because, although you might see what they are doing as a bad habit, the athlete has a feeling (that is probably accurate) that whatever they are doing is the best solution their body is aware of.
So we add a constraint that no longer makes this solution the best solution.
The most common “constraint” that coaches use is verbal instruction. “Hey, don’t hit the ball to the center of the court every time! Hit with range.” Verbal instruction is a constraint, but Rob Gray (and others) would contend it’s not always the most effective constraint. Changing the environment can be more a more effective teaching tool.
An easy example of this can be seen when you play 4s-In-A-Square. Many players have a stable solution of hit the ball right to zone 6 all the time. If you’ve been to a GMS clinic, you hear me emphasize the importance of defending the center of the court, because a lot of players have this stable solution: they hit the ball to the center of the court a lot.
So 4s-In-A-Square is a simple example of destabilizing this solution. This is less of a movement solution and more of a tactical solution. It’s about intent. With no choice but to aim for the corners of the court, athletes now have to find new solutions. Some will do it by altering their approach, some will do it by altering their armswing, some will invent new gestures of exasperation after continuing to hit the ball into the now-out-of-bounds area. To each their own!
You can also destabilize a movement pattern. For example, I like right-handed right side players to transition into the court, rather than wide as they would do on the left side. I can give them verbal insruction, we can watch video and ask them to be mindful, etc.
But often, the fastest way to make this upgrade is for me to stand on the “T” made by the intersection of the 3m line and the sideline. “Hey, don’t run into me.” In order to not run into me, the athlete needs to transition more straight back and less wide. There’s likely still some specific footwork to coach, but I find that easier to do once the previous habit has been disrupted.
Encourage Exploration
At some point I’ll do a full article on Jamball- and since this is now the second time I’ve said this, I really do need to. Any of you who have done a camp or clinic with me have probably seen me run this little small-side game. It’s 2-on-2 short-court and narrow-court. So the court is basically a little 10’ x 10’ box and you get 2 touches. The strategy, then, is for one player to take the first touch and play it high near the net, which then creates a chance to jam the ball down (if the other team doesn’t get up and block), tool the block, or win a joust.
There’s a few ways to play it depending on the rules, how you enter balls, etc. But one thing that’s almost certain is that players will need to explore ways to score points. Beginning players will explore (possibly with some encouragement) the idea of “jumping” to play the ball above (or at least near) the plane of the net.
Intermediate players can expect the other team to be ready to block them and will find that the soft dinks over the block almost never score, and the soft dinks into the block get blocked. These players will explore (possibly with some encouragement or demonstrations) some ways to push the ball off the sides of the block or faster ways to get on the ball and throw it down before the blocker is ready.
Advanced players can expect to play a cat-and-mouse game where: I know that they’ll be up on the block, so I should try to tool them. But they know that I know that they’ll be up on the block, so they might pull their block and my wipe will go out of bounds, so maybe I should just jam it on them. But I know that they know that I know… What I’m saying is that you want to bait the other guy into doing this and then talk trash.
There’s lots of little games like this. With Canada MNT we always did a (usually) 2-on-2 variation at the conclusion of the warmup and we tried to never play the same variation twice- although popular ones would get requested for repeats. You won’t need quite as much variety with lower-level teams, because they won’t, “explore the studio space,” as quickly as more advanced players.
Amplify Information And Invite Affordances
The way I read this is: Match the difficulty level.
I like Split-Court Doubles. I find it particularly valuable for servers and particularly particularly valuable for intermediate-level servers. If you take a solid U15 club team and get them doing this game most practices as the endpoint of a blocked-to-random segment of practice where you’re teaching and upgrading serving, you will see results.
Most teams at this level serve more than half the balls into zone 6, and we know that Serving Zone 6 Is Not Good. When you play a lot of Split-Court Doubles, your players get pretty good at hitting a clean contact straight on. If they fail to hit the center of the ball, the serve probably goes over, but it will often drift off into zone 6. In a normal game of 6v6, or the popular 3v3 Queen of the Court type variants (which I almost never play), this registers lightly as, “oh, I missed my target.” In Split-Court Doubles, the information is amplified, because now it registers as, “oh, I lost.”
However, we want to match the difficulty level. This is an example of game that’s not so good when you’re not so good. Beginners will struggle to keep the ball in 1/3 of the court and this game might not be the best for them.
Sometimes, we need to match the difficulty level by making things easier. Invite Affordances is fancy talk for, “getting the players to try stuff they wouldn’t normally be able to do.”
The ruleset of U12 volleyball is set up this way. Lighter ball, so players who can’t overhand serve a normal ball will now try overhand serving with more expectation of success. Lower net, so players that would be less likely to swing at a ball will be more likely to try to hit.
Often, this means constraining the input, rather than constraining the player’s choices. For example, freshman middle blockers at the NCAA level can be a bit overmatched by the speed and quality of the offense and the difficulty of the reads.1 Middles will often feel frozen by the pass near the net and the middle hitter coming right at them. They'll freeze up and everything will turn into weak shuffle moves along the net.
To help with this, in a BSBH framework, we might constrain the first pass to be at or around the 10' line and eliminate the middle-hitter as an option. Now this middle blocker can relax his body a little bit and just make the front-back read and you often see blockers get a little more dynamic and start making crossover swing block moves and attacking the hitter.
So constraining the offense invites the affordance of the middle blocker making some more dynamic block moves.
And that’s the key here. The magic of this piece of CLA is not that the constraint removes options from players but actually that, by introducing a constraint, the player starts trying stuff they wouldn’t normally try.
Provide Transition Feedback
We’re obviously not talking about volleyball offense-to-defense Transition. What we’re talking about here is feedback about the transition from one solution/habit to another. This transition isn’t always seamless. We recognize this with sayings like, “one step back to take two steps forward.” Sometimes there’s a searching period where the play is trying to make a change but not sure if the change is positive or not.
Transition feedback is essentially the opportunity for the player to hear, “okay, the result isn’t necessarily changing yet, but this sub-piece is changing and that is indicating that you’re moving in the right direction.”
The main method of Transition Feedback that coaches tend to use is subjective evaluation of technique. “Hey, that wasn’t a great set BUT the technique was good. Keep doing that and you’ll get there.”
I hate this and try to do it as little as possible. Sometimes you have to. But I try to do it as little as possible.
I’d love it if there was some sort of secondary constraint that can provide information about the search. I also find these the hardest constraints to create. They are more doable in a tutoring situation. For example, using the above Narrow-Court Doubles example, if you just serve in a controlled fashion in that drill and have the server "hold your finish to the target,” that is a cue, but also a constraint. Players that lack the ability to hit the ball in a straight line will also usually lack the ability to hold a straight-on finish. If a player can hold a straight-on finish, it doesn’t guarantee a successful serve, but it’s an indication that the search is going in the right direction.
It’s sort of like:
Not-proficient at all: Cannot hold a straight finish, cannot hit the ball straight.
Searching: Can hold the the straight finish, sometimes can hit the ball straight.
Proficient: Can hold the straight finish and can hit the ball straight.
Expert: Will rarely hold the finish but still hits the ball straight because the movement is now so fluid.
Some expert players will hold some of their finishing positions or keep a little more of the freezing of certain aspects of the movement. Most won’t because they don’t need to.
In this clip we see two expert serves. The first server holds the finish a bit more deliberately than the second, but both hold the finish a bit less than a server who is still searching for proficiency may need to in order to get that Transition Feedback.
Alright, test out some Constraints and let me know what you think. Do you have any go-tos? Drop me a comment!
And some of you are thinking, “it’s not just the freshman, my guy."