Reference

Cassidy, J., Young, W., Gorman, A., & Kelly, V. (2022). Merging Athletic Development With Skill Acquisition: Developing Agility Using an Ecological Dynamics Approach. Strength & Conditioning Journal, 10-1519.

🚀 Article in 3 Sentences

1. Introduces what is involved in agility and how maintaining the perception-action relationship is key when creating practice tasks to develop agility through an ecological dynamics approach
2. Discusses how we can use a CLA to design agility tasks to promote learning and transfer
3. Gives 3 Examples of tasks designed to work on agility

🤝Impressions

The research around agility really got me thinking in a more ecological way and this paper does an excellent job exploring developing agility utilising an Ecological Dynamics Approach.

👨‍🏫Who should read this?

I think it would be really beneficial for any coach to read. The practical examples at the end of the paper are really good and help bring some of the theoretical insights into life.

🎾How Article will influence my coaching

• Coadaptation, a key aspect of designing agility tasks, involves manipulating opposing/supporting players to promote adaptability.- Think a bit more about how you are manipulating the opposing players and what behaviours are emerging
• Reducing time and space challenges players to execute skills under higher defensive pressure, but it also affects the physical demands of the task.-It’s really important to be aware of how the constraints you implement may affect the physical demands of the task.

📃Takeaways for coaches

• Agility varies depending on the demands of the task and differs among sports. It will also even vary between tasks in the same sport -It’s very important to understand the demands of the task when designing tasks to work on agility.
• Agility is a complex skill that involves using perception to guide actions, rather than just following pre-determined movements Maintaining the perception-action relationship is key when creating practice tasks to develop agility through an ecological dynamics approach..-Be aware that the perceptual component of agility is a really crucial part of developing the skill
• Representative learning design (RLD) has two important characteristics-1) Functionality, which means that the information and constraints used in training are similar to those in competition.2)Action fidelity, which refers to the correlation between performance actions during training and in competition. -When putting RLD into practice it’s really important to keep these characteristics in mind
• Movement performance is a functional solution that arises from the interaction of individual, task, and environmental constraints-Think about how the different constraints are interacting to shape the movement solutions that emerge
• Small sided games are effective for developing agility as they mimic the constraints of real competition, enabling players to learn how to respond to the necessary information to guide their actions.-SSG’S Allow us to incorporate the key constraints of the game so the player’s can become attuned to the information to guide their actions.