The 7-foot-4 unicorn, still in the early stages of rewriting how basketball is played, just made a move few in the world can. But it’s the antithesis of why he’s in a quiet Los Angeles gym with San Antonio Spurs teammate Harrison Barnes and his skill trainer, Noah LaRoche. In a summer of new adventures, ranging from kung fu training at a Shaolin temple in China to bicycle kicks on a soccer pitch in Japan, Wembanyama wanted to try one more novel thing.
Six years earlier, Barnes came to a similar conclusion. A former No. 1 recruit out of high school, Barnes had just joined his third NBA team and wanted to evolve as a player. Barnes asked his friend Joe Boylan, an experienced NBA assistant coach, to recommend a skills trainer for his summer workouts.
Now, it is time for Wembanyama to understand what that means.
“Victor wanted to come out to L.A. to train for the summer,” Barnes said, “and I wanted (him) to see what I do.”
They are participating in a three-on-three drill to push the players to make optimal reads each time they touch the ball. Things are going smoothly until Wembanyama does a vast Euro step through traffic to score.
Before anyone can marvel at the bucket, LaRoche calls practice to a halt. He waves Wembanyama over to the courtside video monitor. What looks like a basket that few players in the world can score is actually a problem.
“What did you see here?” LaRoche asked the former NBA Rookie of the Year.
In LaRoche’s gym, nothing can be predetermined. It’s all about making the best decision in that specific situation, not perfecting a single move.
As Wembanyama peered at the video, he immediately noticed something that had eluded him in the moment. In this scenario, there was more space for him to attack in a different direction. He knew exactly how he would react next time.
“My body is starting to understand these movements,” Wembanyama told LaRoche after watching the video.
It was Wembanyama’s first step toward understanding a new perspective on the game he has a chance to conquer. He was learning about three letters that the current Premier League champions (Liverpool), the World Series winners (Los Angeles Dodgers), the last two NBA champions (Oklahoma City Thunder and Boston Celtics) and many other teams across professional sports have already, to certain degrees, incorporated into their organizations.
C-L-A.
The CLA, which stands for Constraints-Led Approach, is a learning method that has made its way from academia to the mainstream, drawing from innovative research in psychology and neuroscience. It replaces traditional block training, where an athlete learns a single movement pattern step-by-step, with game-like situations that feature special rules, forcing them to adapt their moves on the fly. It’s founded on the principle that training perfectly yields imperfect results.
“It changed my career,” said Los Angeles Sparks guard Kelsey Plum, a four-time WNBA All-Star and two-time champion. “Before, I was very skilled. But I don’t think I was ever very purposeful.”
The CLA takes the ground-up approach of block training, which eliminates the infinite variables that affect athletes in the heat of competition, and flips it on its head.
That means putting players into scenarios with different limitations called “constraints” to simulate the unpredictable environment of an actual game. Whether it’s the number of steps they can take, the area of the playing surface from which they are allowed to maneuver or even the weight of the ball they are using, players are repeatedly told to overcome restrictions to accomplish a task. While painstakingly working through mistakes, they are forced to find advantageous opportunities, “affordances” in CLA parlance.
From pool noodles to a game known as “murderball,” coaches around the world are finding ways to put their players in a sea of constraints and guide them on how to work their way back to shore.
By forcing a player to deal with variables that are impossible to predict, the CLA teaches them to execute under duress rather than flawlessly in a vacuum. If a coach can get a player to work through failure and creatively solve problems, the thought goes, practice becomes more complex than the actual games.
“It’s creating different atmospheres and a culture that the toughest part of your day in player development is the practice,” said Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes, whose team is one of the strongest purveyors of the CLA in American sports. “Blocked practice has been shown to have a purpose, but once you get into the elite levels of talent, facing this type of stuff every day, then it’s not as effective. There’s a balancing of confidence pregame and then making sure you’re challenging yourself so that you’re up to the task of facing (Pirates pitcher) Paul Skenes, or whoever.” (...)
The CLA evolved from the study of ecological dynamics, a framework that integrates psychology and neurobiology to examine the relationship between how the brain and body interact to perceive and navigate our environment. It focuses on perception-action coupling, the feedback loop by which your brain processes sensory information and your body coordinates sequences of actions to create motion. It’s a continuous partnership between more than just the brain’s visual system and the body, but also involving touch, hearing, and proprioception — the body’s sixth sense of position and movement.
The latest research in ecological dynamics suggests our brain does not store a specific script of a given movement pattern. Instead, the brain and body work in tandem, using perception-action coupling to develop precise and flexible movements constantly.
Everything is a read, all the time, for all of us.
by Jared Weiss and Fabian Ardaya, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Demetrius Robinson/The Athletic; top photos: Chris Coduto, Andy Lyons, Luke Hales/Getty Images; David Richard/Imagn Images
[ed. See also: Steph Curry's Secrets to Success: Brain Training, Float Tanks and Strobe Goggles (BR).]
