Speaker 1Today on the Perception in Action podcast, how effective are coaches at designing and adapting constraints within the CLA, which has more impact manipulating informational verbal constraints or other physical task constraints like the number of players and size of the field. So it's time for a call to action. Hi, this is Rob Gray from Arizona State University. I've been on a now over 25-year journey as a researcher, professor, and high-performance consultant to understand how we acquire and adapt our perceptual motor skills. Welcome to the Perception in Action podcast, where I discuss how psychological research can be applied to improving performance, accelerating skill acquisition, and designing technologies. Now on to the show. Hi, everyone. This is Rob Gray from ASU in the Perception in Action podcast, back with another article review. Today, I want to look at a really interesting paper looking at the effect of coaches' interventions, right, and coaches using the constraint slide approach, right? How effective are they designing the constraint activity in the first place? How effective are they adapting it? How effective are they guiding it using verbal instructions? So that's what we want to get at today. This is a paper, sorry, this, so basically, right, when you think about coaching in the, this is a diagram from my latest book. Ecological Coaching, How to Be an Ecological Coach, you can think about it, there's kind of three broad steps, right? You have to design the constraint in the first place based on the individual athlete or team you're working with. You have to put the constraint activity in play and then adapt it based on what you, what you see, what, what the athletes are doing. You have to guide it by giving instructions, informational constraints, and then you want to reflect and redesign, okay? So what we all look at is, you know, what are the constraints? These different stages. So this is a study by Duarte Arrugio and colleagues. Agost is the lead author. Influences of coaches' intervention on tactical and, technical and tactical performance dynamics of young soccer players. And so let's look at, have a look at this study. So what they're looking at is coaches' ability to be attentive to what's going on in activity and adapt it based on what they see in front of them, right? So this is kind of an exploratory study. What they're going to do is look at, have coaches design small-sided games. And measure certain aspects to see if their interventions are working. So, okay, and they're going to distinguish between two types of, of constraints, two types of interventions, one verbal or informational constraints. So basically giving a per, your, your team instructions based on how they're performing versus actually changing the physical constraints. And what I mean by that is, so you see how they're performing, you change the size of the field, the rules, the number of players, right? So you're not so much just giving verbal, and you could see it, we'll see how the authors did that, okay? So this was three coaches of 16 and under players, right? They ranged in experience from about five years to 13 years. You'll see they're labeled A, B, and C. The A is the most experienced, C is the least experienced. There's three, four, three distinct stages, right? So what they're going to do is they have to, they're first going to do a pre-analysis of the players and their team, right? Of course, what you have to do is you have to do a pre-analysis of the players and their team, right? Of course, what you have to do is you have to do a pre-analysis of the players and their team, right? Of course, what you have to do to do a good constraints-led approach, you have to know what you're trying to constrain. Then they're going to apply, they're going to design a practice activity, they're going to use it, and they're going to adapt it in certain ways. And they're going to assess how well this influences the behavior of the players. So stage one, they're assessing the performance in small-sided games. They're looking at the number of goals scored, the number of passes, the number of goals given up. And so on, so on. They're looking at how well players are performing. These are two external evaluators identifying, grouping players into highest performance and lowest performance. So two broad categories. Then they're going to put them into teams afterwards. So that's the first stage. Okay. Next, design the practice activity. So Coach A chose the small-sided game to emphasize attacking the goal, right? Getting scoring opportunities. Coach B and C emphasized a practice. Small-sided game for maintaining ball position based on what they saw in the evaluation period. Okay. So that's the basic design. Okay. So each coach designs a small-sided game, lets them play in week. Condition one, they're playing with no intervention. So the coach cannot adapt it at all. They just let them play with their original design small-sided game and see what happens. Second phase, they're only allowed to use verbal information. So before they go back. The coach can give them instructions, can intervene during it, right? And give kind of guide the activity based on what they're seeing. Number four, the game intervention. This is when they're allowed to change the actual constraint activity, the size of the playing area, the position of the goals, whatever they want to change based on what they're seeing. So all the coaches are going through all the steps. So just letting the activity run, using only verbal constraint, using only adaptation of physical tasks. And then the last condition, they could do whatever they want. It was free intervention. They can use more verbal instruction, more adaptation of the task constraint, physical task constraints, or a combination of both. Okay. So that's the four phases. What they're going to do is they're going to use a, what's called an offensive sequence character, a characterization system. This is partly the work developed by Dwarte Arujo to look at kind of, uh, kind of, uh, possession and organization of teams using it to kind of adapt. So that's the first phase. And then the second phase is the dynamic system. So the dynamic system is the dynamic system approach. So there's some simple measures of duration on ball, how long the ball is possessed, how many players are involved, how many touches, right? Getting more towards stuff. They're going to look at spatial exploration. How many surface area covered by the team, um, size and shape of the surface area, um, the stretch index, how much the team stretches and contracts, right? This is all Dwarte's work, right? Using dynamical measurements of team performance. And he's, he showed that all these things relate to goals. So, so they're measuring the performance of the players and the team on various different levels in response to what the coach is doing. Okay. They're doing like a centroid analysis. Where's the center of the team, how big an area do they cover and so on. And these were four, this was four and four small sided game. Okay. Here's the kind of specifics of the intervention. So coach a coach B coach C there's the goals, attacking, maintaining ball position. Uh, they use different field dimensions. They use different, uh, number of players, five versus two, four versus four, there's two, uh, the number of goals, right? Different rule, different, uh, overall goals score as many goals as possible. Make so many consecutive passes that goals that players coaches that were entering emphasizing ball retention. Okay. So they all had very specific small sided games for, for what they're going to do. So right first, they're just going to let the players play and not do anything. Second stage, give a verbal instruction both before and during, right. Um, to kind of guide players, why don't you look to move the ball or why don't you look for open passes more towards the goal, right? You could say whatever you want based on what you're seeing. And then the third stage is just a physical change, the task constraints. So they could change the number of targets, the number of players, the field dimensions, the, what was emphasized, what the goal is, what the rules are and so on. Okay. So coach a coach a, um, they, they did, um, they, um, interestingly, they found that the most effective in terms of, uh, uh, just doing the player's response was the first phase when the coach just set it and forget it. Right. And so the plan, the coach, the other things the coach did didn't really have a significant event. This has shown here's all the variables they measured in terms of technical and tactical performance. Again. There's the surface area covered by the team, the stretch index, the number of touches, the duration of ball possession. The basic thing they found for coach a is there was no real significant difference in the verbal intervention. There were some things that were slightly different and when they actually did the feet physical intervention and then the free intervention, right? So it seems like this coach's activity was working right from the start and they didn't really need to do much, many changes to it. That's coach a. Um, there was some changes. There was, so there was some evidence that changing the rules was promoting, um, the principle of, so in, so that was coach a coach B remember coach B is designed a small side game to emphasize ball possession. They found that for them, there was a significant difference between when they just set it and forget it in the first phase versus when they changed some of the constraints, uh, physical constraints. So they may manipulate the rules. They manipulated some of the, the, the number of players on the, on the field. Right. And what they found was a significant difference in the number of in the ball touches, uh, the ball possessions, players involved in condition three, when they, after they made that physical intervention compared to condition one, where they just set their original activity, right? The verbal intervention did nothing. There was no significant changes in players. Okay. So that's. So. So. The most effective thing was manipulating the physical constraints. Okay. Um, coach C so coach C, um, what they found was they, the, both of the, for coach C, they Coach C, both of their interventions were effective in changing the behaviors, both the verbal intervention and the physical constraint, the structural and functional constraints, right? So they found significant differences in both condition two, where they were just allowed to use verbal intervention, and in condition three and in condition four, where they were allowed to do whatever they want. So this coach obviously was fairly either the couple of things. One, maybe their activity wasn't designed as well in the first place. And or they seemed to be better attuned to what was going on, how players were responding and making adjustments, right? We can't really differentiate those two, right? So some interesting differences for the three coaches, right? So we're seeing not everybody's the same, right? So what we're seeing is that even though these coaches were totally unfamiliar with the players, they just got this initial assessment, they seem to be, some of them at least, to be very good, reasonably good at making adjustments, both using verbal. Instructional constraints and changing the actual practice activity to get more out of the players, right? More passes, more ball position, more area of the field cover. And so we seem to be, there's evidence that we can do this, right? This is something people, you know, that I emphasized in my last book, being attuned, being to what's going on and adaptable, right? That's what we're seeing here. What they emphasize though, interestingly, coach A, right, they seem to get either get it pretty right from the start. Right, the players had pretty high scores, right, from putting the intervention in the first place, didn't need a lot of guidance or changes, right? That's going to happen sometimes. So it's important to consider that in certain situations, there's no need for intervention beyond the design, just allowing the players to explore the small side of game activity, constraints-based activity was effective there. They didn't need a lot of guidance or adaptation of the activity, right? Coach B was good at using mostly adapting the physical constraints. Coach C was both verbal communication and adapting the physical constraints, right? So we get different coaches' intervention strategies working more or less effectively, right? And the authors propose this interesting term they call pedagogical attunement to task dynamics seems to be an important skill to be developed by coaching football coaches. Pedagogical attunement, right, is what I was talking about in my last book, being attuned and adaptive, being able to observe your players and your team and to be able to adapt. And so it's important to understand what's the best way to intervene by saying something, by just reinforcing, by giving different types of instructional constraints, or actually by changing the physical nature of the constraints of that activity again, right? A coach needs to be able to, that's the art of coaching, right? We often call that. So I think this is overall a really interesting study. Actually, you know, it's kind of messy study because not everything is nicely controlled and elaborated, but it's getting at something real, right? How, what kind of interventions work depending on the individual coach, right? There's no way you could do this with a group level, right? Well, you could, but you'd lose all the information if you average across the three coaches, right? You'd lose all the information. So different coaches are going to have different skills, right? They're going to have their own individual constraints that makes them better at either using verbal or physical. So that's what we're seeing here. So I think this is a really interesting study, kind of exploratory, individual level case study work. That as I keep saying, we need more and more of. Okay. That's it for today's episode. Remember, you can contact me at robgray at asu.edu or follow me on Twitter at Shakeyweights. To find out more about the podcast, please check out perceptionaction.com. Finally, to support the podcast and receive bonus materials, including a monthly coaches meetup, please head over to patreon.com forward slash perception action. This is Rob Gray from ASU. Cheers for now and keep them coupled.
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