Surprised I couldn’t find anything on this so far, but then again, I keep getting reminded that this is no longer a martial arts related site and hasn’t been since whenever I don’t care. Or you cunts can’t spell.
Ecological Dynamics. It’s a psychological framework of skill acquisition backed by science and you’ll see me write in an academic manner like this from now on because I am fuckin academic, ya heard.
Anyway, a few months back my coach says to me he’s been looking at this Ecological Dynamics approach to coaching and that he’s been trying to implement it in his lesson plans - at the time I was on this trek through tutorials and seminars of some of the best there is, Danaher seminar, Jones seminar, Ryan tutorials, fucking BJJ Fanatics made a small fortune off me, if a small fortune was a couple of hundred dollars and the links to pirated versions of videos in my Drive were bond back derivatives and now I have no idea what I’m on about.
Essentially what I am saying is I looked at coach like he was this:
“Games? But coach, I’m 100% sure I am on a roll here (see what I did there) and am putting shit together with this systematic approach to learning that has elevated my game for suuuuure!!! Games is for kids.”
A couple of months after, as I’ve intimated in another post, I was overlooked for my brown belt. I was a little pissed, considering I had gone hell for leather on learning and had even asked on several occasions if there was anything I should be focussed on and was told, “nope, keep doing what you’re doing” which in some ways I saw as tacit approval that I would be ranked up.
I’ve done some reflecting on the non-brown belt during which I reviewed my injury prevention, strength training, mobility, all sorts of things, and over time I started to watch/listen to podcast after podcast after podcast about BJJ. Something I’d done more for fun in the past, but now I was honed in.
I was searching because I was pissed off and this time it was looking inwardly.
Why are there friends who started well after me getting their black belts well before I was even halfway through purple? It didn’t make sense. There is no chance they train more than me, I’m doing 4-8 sessions of BJJ a week. It could be burnout, but the end of the week is open mats, I cruise on those. It’s not like I’m a fucking idiot, either, I consistently ranked in the top 1 percentile of all Aussie uni students for engineering and the top 10th for English. I wondered if I had lost the ability to learn? But that also didn’t make sense, as much, because I’m in a constantly evolving digital sector.
Over the past few years there’s been a couple of stand out things that have been said that rang true in my head, but I didn’t really pay attention to how they could be implemented:
- John Danaher talking about how Gary Tonon would put himself in fully sunk in chokes and work to get out.
- Kit Dale talking about his “entirely different approach to grappling that made him a black belt in 3 years”
- Some big dude named Josh I think advertising fuck out of my social media of a new approach to learning BJJ to go from white to purple quicker.
It became apparent that maybe there was a different way to learn and thus I returned to coach and asked for the links to this guy, Greg Souders, the guy who was disseminating the Ecological Dynamic approach to the BJJ community, for free, with a seeming metric shit tonne of backlash, more than a little bit of dismissal, and the occasional brash talk about how black belts weren’t even in his blue belt territory.
I started listening and within a week I was this guy:
Going fucking hard in the paint for this methodology. It made sense, it connected with a number of other strategies that I had already been finding success with, and more importantly IMMEDIATELY improved how I roll and perceive rolling in general.
The effect on my game cannot be understated - I am doing things that I was mentally punishing myself for not being able to achieve just two or three months ago. I’m in the zone, running rampant with whatever I want to do. I know what I need to work on because it is like a glitch in the matrix, it’s like my brain engages while rolling and goes, “there, you just got stuck, how do I know you got stuck, cause you’re talking to me” and I’m like, “check” then back into the matrix.
Now, it is a coaching methodology and this is what intrigued me the most. Around this time last year I realised that the only way I was going to make a mark on the world was to be the best coach I could be, so over the past year I have been consuming sports psychology and methodology, plus a raft of other information regarding prehab, rehab, strength, mobility, etc. I even have a certificate for one of them with a couple more on the way.
So when I heard this Greg Souders say that he “wants to be the best coach” he can be, it was a factor in my being intrigued.
After probably 10 or so podcasts with Greg Souders as a guest, some mildly combative, I realised he was on to something big. I started implementing “games” in my classes with my students and immediately saw what he was seeing, students self-organising around the task assigned. Literally doing shit that me and my assistant coaches had been saying for years but it never seemed to stick.
I was no longer “teaching”, I was facilitating learning. The hardest part is the “practice design”, I’ve probably been too careful in my approach, being that I am still relatively new to the more advanced level and coaching in general. However, I had already been using a concept-based approach to coaching over a pure step-by-step approach.
My coach also had this concept based approach, whereby we would look at the mechanics of what we are trying to achieve as the basis for the lesson, then do the steps. I used to look at it like:
- What are we trying to achieve and how? The concept
- Three steps to do it (they’d go away and try it)
- Three details to help it work (go away and try it)
This was a good approach and I stopped trying to teach multiple techniques in a class, tried boiling it down to one or one and a close variation. My students were learning fast, each grading they were levelling up and all the night time students would always compliment me on how fast they were learning. Life was good.
I was still listening to podcasts and finding a couple of people implementing the Ecological approach, some seemed to do so after they interviewed Greg. Greg also was interviewed by the doctor at the cutting edge of the approach, Dr Rob Gray, and this lead me to devouring both his books on the subject in record time.
So far the two things that I believe have made it effective, for me, at least:
- The reframing of language around outcomes, not steps.
- The Constraints Led approach to games reducing the overwhelming-ness of an entire roll.
I have also started on the book, The Constraints Led Approach - Principles For Sports Coaching and Practice Design.
Now, this has really invigorated my learning and teaching, I have never ever been as excited about the direction of my life as I am now. Yes, not just my martial arts journey, but my life. Through this I have limited outside noise in a way that I have never experienced, I am zoned in.
