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.

Support the running of the podcast at [patreon.com/TheConstraintsCollective](https://patreon.com/TheConstraintsCollective).

This month's guest podcast: Ian Renshaw is joined by Jay Carter, Golf New Zealand's National Team Coach and host of the *Talking Performance* podcast (197 episodes and counting), for a conversation built around a clip Jay sent after listening to TCC's Güllich episode. Jay's own 2024 interview with Ryan Fox — republished this August after Fox won The Open Championship at Royal Birkdale — became the case study: a New Zealand sporting-royalty kid (father Grant Fox, All Black goal-kicker; grandfather Merv Wallace, Black Cap) who made First XI cricket and First XV rugby at King's College alongside Tim Southee, and didn't get serious about golf until university.

The conversation moves through why "smash it" beat "be accurate" in Fox's early sporting intentions, the golf course used as an after-school playground before the game's popularity boom priced that out, why practicing to "feel better" isn't the same as practicing to get better, the transactional trap in paid coaching (and what it would take to actually get fired for being honest), boredom as a genuinely useful training constraint, and a caddying story from the Kazuma Kobori bunker at Royal Queensland that turns into a case study in broadening a player's affordances rather than narrowing them to "the right shot."

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**Read the companion blog:** [Foxy's Long Way Round](https://www.theconstraintscollective.com)

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.

This month's guest podcast: Ian Renshaw is joined by Jay Carter, Golf New Zealand's National Team Coach and host of the Talking Performance podcast (197 episodes and counting), for a conversation built around a clip Jay sent after listening to TCC's Güllich episode. Jay's own 2024 interview with Ryan Fox — republished this August after Fox won The Open Championship at Royal Birkdale — became the case study: a New Zealand sporting-royalty kid (father Grant Fox, All Black goal-kicker; grandfather Merv Wallace, Black Cap) who made First XI cricket and First XV rugby at King's College alongside Tim Southee, and didn't get serious about golf until university.
The conversation moves through why "smash it" beat "be accurate" in Fox's early sporting intentions, the golf course used as an after-school playground before the game's popularity boom priced that out, why practicing to "feel better" isn't the same as practicing to get better, the transactional trap in paid coaching (and what it would take to actually get fired for being honest), boredom as a genuinely useful training constraint, and a caddying story from the Kazuma Kobori bunker at Royal Queensland that turns into a case study in broadening a player's affordances rather than narrowing them to "the right shot."
Read the companion blog: Foxy's Long Way Round
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.

This month's theory paper review: Ian and Keith dig into Woods, Richard, Martin & Cairney (2026), "Loosening Tightened Logics: A Comment on the Role of Affordances," published in New Ideas in Psychology, 83, 101289 — a paper that never mentions sport, and covers park benches, glass building facades, and a Brisbane street corner that turned itself into a shared garden without anyone designing it that way.
The idea at the centre of it: every training environment sits somewhere on a tight–loose dial. Tight space prescribes its own use — a cone drill, a single technical model, a serve that must land in a taped box. Loose space supports activity that unfolds in ways nobody specified in advance — an adaptable small-sided game with no one correct solution. Most environments drift tight without anyone deciding it should happen, and the paper argues almost nobody notices until it's named. Ian and Keith trace the theory back to Gibson's concept of affordance, work through the paper's case study of a university building facade that became a free dance studio purely because of what its surfaces afforded, and land on the practical takeaway: a coach's job isn't to fill the room, it's to decide, session by session, how much of it to leave open.
Companion blog: "The Bee Hotel Nobody Designed" · membership/community links to theconstraintscollective.com · Patreon support link.