The Constraints Collective

In this month’s roundup, Keith Davids and Ian Renshaw go back to where sports science began. In 1975, Liverpool Polytechnic launched the world’s first single-honours sports science degree at Byrom Street, Liverpool. It grew out of three scientists’ support work with Everton Football Club. As the 1986–89 cohort gathers in Liverpool for its 40th anniversary reunion, Keith and Ian trace how that small course shaped sports science across the UK and around the world.
They talk about the people and places behind the early growth: Tom Reilly’s foundational role, Mike Hughes and Keith Lyons’s early notational analysis, and the first World Congress on Science and Football at Liverpool in 1987, which returns to the Albert Dock in 2027. They also cover the rise of BASES and the ECSS, and the post-Barcelona 1992 funding push that sent university staff into high-performance sport. Keith reflects on what that applied rush did to theory, and Ian raises the opposite problem: scientists who collected data from athletes and never gave anything back.
The conversation then turns to what this history means now. They discuss the “copy and paste” problem of importing coaching models across cultures, why silos still hold back sports science courses, and the case for transdisciplinary support with the athlete at the centre. They make the case for curiosity as a career-long habit, and for knowing the history of your field so you can tell which traditions rest on real theory and which are historical artefacts.

This week Ian Renshaw and Keith Davids go back to episode 21 from October 2024, our conversation with Ana Ramos, a volleyball coach, coach educator and researcher at the University of Porto. Keith was involved in Ana's PhD and hosted the original episode with Martyn; Ian comes to it as a listener. They start with how Ana's research was built: action research cycles (observe, analyse, plan, act, reflect) run across full competitive seasons, using mixed methods that combine numbers on team behaviour with what players say in focus groups and interviews. Ian picks up Martyn's point that the game is the best test of practice design, and Keith reminds us that learning can only be inferred from performance.

They then work through Ana's coaching week: a day off to recover physically and emotionally, two days built from the last match, and the end of the week given to the next opponent, often in small 3v3 games with two balls in play. Along the way they cover the constraints continuum, Ana's six steps for building a practice task, individual success criteria inside a team session, why small-sided games can teach more than 11v11, Bernstein's repetition without repetition, comfort reps before big games, being brave enough to give some chaos, and Ana throwing her drill book in the bin every season. They finish with her season-long study, where a more complex game model made the team perform worse before they understood the game better, and with a discussion of knowledge of and knowledge about the performance environment.

Listen to the original conversation with Ana in episode 21: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2354827/episodes/16010076

**References**
- Ramos, A., Coutinho, P., Ribeiro, J., Fernandes, O., Davids, K., & Mesquita, I. (2020). Increasing tactical complexity to enhance the synchronisation of collective behaviours: An action-research study throughout a competitive volleyball season. *Journal of Sports Sciences*. https://doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2020.1794265
- Ramos, A., Davids, K., Coutinho, P., & Mesquita, I. (2022). Tracking relations between development of tactical knowledge and tactical behaviour: A season-long action research study. *Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy*. https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989.2022.2083099

Part Two of this month's guest podcast: Ian Renshaw and Marco Perazzo (filling in for Keith Davids) continue the conversation with MMA coach Adam Singer (SBG Athens). Adam's whole programming philosophy compresses to three words — "do the thing," scaled for safety and variability, judged only by whether it helps his practice.
The conversation covers what Adam now calls periodization of goals rather than periodization of constraints (broad and varied far from a fight, narrowing toward specificity as it nears), the staph infection that accidentally protected one of his fighters from a fight he'd have lost, the trust and responsibility Adam describes feeling on fight night once the cage door closes, and closes on the constrain-to-afford versus constrain-to-potentiate distinction Ian and Keith have been developing with Constraints Collective members this year — including where Adam thinks it holds up (striking) and where it doesn't (grappling, where seeing and doing are too tightly coupled to separate).
This is Part Two of Two — Part One (aliveness, safety by design, the calf kick) is available now from October's Week One Guest Podcast.
Read the companion blog: Do the Thing
If you're getting value from our podcast check out our membership options and coaching community at www.theconstraintscollective.com where you can access podcast summaries, narrated presentations, early release podcasts and monthly online meet ups with experts from the Constraints Collective.

The Only Thing We Know Is What We Test — Adam Singer on Aliveness, Safety by Design, and What the Calf Kick Proves About Perception
This month's guest podcast: Ian Renshaw is joined by Marco Perazzo, filling in for Keith Davids, to talk with Adam Singer, who has coached mixed martial arts for close to thirty years at SBG Athens (Georgia, USA) and works by day as a biomechanical engineer. Adam's practice runs on a rule borrowed from mentor Matt Thornton: training is either alive, or it isn't — the moment a coach asks a student to modify their resistance, the exercise has become something other than sparring.
The conversation moves through why Adam constrains the training room rather than the person to keep sparring safe, the 1990 Julio Cesar Chavez vs. Meldrick Taylor fight that shaped his position on head contact, why the calf kick still lands on experienced fighters after a decade of everyone seeing it coming, why he doesn't lean heavily on opponent film, and closes on the lack of a shared, written criteria behind Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu belt rankings.
This is Part One of Two — Part Two continues in October's Week Two Podcast, covering Adam's actual session design principles and the constrain-to-afford versus constrain-to-potentiate discussion running through the Constraints Collective this year."
Read the companion blog: The Only Thing We Know Is What We Test
If you're getting value from our podcast check out our membership options and coaching community at www.theconstraintscollective.com where you can access podcast summaries, narrated presentations, early release podcasts and monthly online meet ups with experts from the Constraints Collective.The Only Thing We Know Is What We Test — Adam Singer on Aliveness, Safety by Design, and What the Calf Kick Proves About Perception

This month, Ian Renshaw and Keith Davids chatted about why sport keeps falling for the same trick: something happens to be nearby when a team wins, and within a season everyone else is copying it. Ian's anchor image is Clive Woodward's six-foot pink furry dice, the story he tells in his own presentations about the England rugby team's 2003 World Cup win and how people can be vulnerable to fads and fancies when they copy and paste without any critical analysis. From there the conversation runs through officiating, with Ian arguing (against the popular mood) that referees are getting more decisions right over time, not fewer, and that slowed-down video footage is "just a rendering" that can mislead coaches into reductionist analysis.

The middle of the episode is the sharpest: marginal gains, non-linear systems, and a series of Guardian articles including an interview with Claire-Marie Roberts on pseudoscience creeping into elite sport, all converging on the same warning about short-term hacks in a sport awash with money. Keith introduces the idea of a "motif," a phrase that sounds like an explanation but avoids one, tested against two live examples: muscle memory and a nation's footballing "DNA," which Ian and Keith argue is really just a development system (Spain's, shaped by the University of Lisbon's complexity-science tradition, being a good example). They close on cricket, using Barry Richards's 1970s Gillette Cup footage to make the case for adaptability across eras and against early specialisation: you're a cricketer, footballer, rugby, hockey player first, before anyone decides your specialism.

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If you're getting value from our podcast check out our membership options and coaching community at [www.theconstraintscollective.com](https://www.theconstraintscollective.com) where you can access podcast summaries, narrated presentations, early release podcasts and monthly online meet ups with experts from the Constraints Collective.

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