Movement Terminology Cheat Sheet

• Ecological Dynamics: Considers athletes and sports teams as complex adaptive systems
and examines the emergence of sports performance at the level of the performer-
environment relationship and is distinguished by constraints of each individual performer
and physical characteristics of participation locations for athletes activities, but also by
social and cultural factors surrounding performance. (Araujo, Davids & Hristovski, 2006)

Ecological Dynamics framework sustains a scientific approach to studying the behaviors

of neurobiological systems, especially processes of action, perception and cognition
(Seifert & Davids, 2016).

• Ecological Psychology: A field of psychology where perception is the functional act of

picking up information from the environment to use for regulating movement, NOT for
enhancing its automaticity (Chow et al. 2016). Ecological psychology can be thought as
the functional act of picking up information to use for regulating actions (Chow et al.
2016). The on-going control and regulation of movement is predicated on the role of
information that emerges from the individual-environment system to guide movement
activity (Seifert & Davids, 2015).

The field of ecology studies the relationship between living things and their environments,
thus taking an ecological approach in sport and with athletes considers the sporting
environment and how the athlete interacts within that environment during sport to be top
priority in preparing an athlete.

• Constraints: Internal or external boundaries, limitations, or design features that restrict

the number of possible configurations that the many degrees of freedom of a complex

Attuned. Adaptable. Dexterous.

 system can adapt. (Glazier, 2015. Towards a Grand Unified Theory of Sports
Performance)

Constraints can have spatial or temporal components or both, they reside at all levels of
analysis from microscopic to macroscopic, and they operate over a multitude of different
time scales, from milliseconds to years.

Actions are not caused by constraints; rather, some actions are excluded by constraints.

• Constraints Led Approach: Framework to explain how coordination emerges under

constraints (Individual, task, environment) that operate under differing time scales.
(Newell, 1986)

o Task Constraints: Specific to the task being performed. They are related to the
goal of the task and the rules governing the task. They are not physical; rather
they are implied constraints or requirements which must be met within some
tolerance range in order for the movement to produce a successful action. (Newell,
1986)

Task constraints are easiest to manipulate and can be accomplished by constraining time,
space, number of athletes, starting positions, stances, angles, etc.

o Individual (Organismic) Constraints: Reside in the individual movement

system including those of physically, physiologically, morphologically and
psychologically. (Newell, 1986)

Individual constraints are typically manipulated over longer times scales as

physically, physiologically, morphologically and psychologically changes typically take time.
But instructions and verbal cues can acutely constrain the individual and their attentional
focus.

o Environmental Constraints: External to the movement system. They tend to be

non-specific that pertain to the spatial and temporal layout of the surrounding
world that continually act on the movement system ie playing surface, weather,
ambient light, crowd noise, temperature. (Newell, 1986)

Environmental constraints are also much harder to manipulate, but simple ways would be to
practice/train on various surfaces (especially those similar to be seen in sport), schedule
training/practice as various times (especially times similar to competition), train/practice in
various weather conditions, etc.

• Affordances: Opportunities for action.

Attuned. Adaptable. Dexterous.

 The environment offers “ability” of actions – the ball has catch-ability, the gap has jump-
ability, the space has run-ability. Affordances are dynamic; they can change over short
and long time scales based on changes in the environment and changes in ones ability

Information in the environment is directly perceived, which contains affordances

(opportunities for action). Information specifies affordances, those properties of the
environment whose perceived meaning is the actions they both allow and invite and
organism to perform (Araujo & Davids, 2011).

• Technique: Technique can be considered the kinematics used during a movement. BUT
the study of kinematics alone does not accurately describe HOW that technique emerged.

It is better to think of technique as the execution of a decision. Technique is linked to the

information source, so it isn’t absolute or permanent; it varies depending on the context
in which a movement is being asked. Technique is a result of individual, task and
environmental constraints of a particular movement. Technique is the outcome of
intention and perception, thus technique needs to be studied in that realm.

It’s important to realize that technique is linked to the information source. It is dynamic; it’s
not permanent and not something an athlete owns. It is always changing depending on the
situation and the context.

Nikolai Bernstein said, “No natural phenomenon can be understood without carefully
considering how it emerged.” Thus to change technique, we first need to understand the
problem. Understand that it is highly un-likely that working on technique out of context, is
going to stick when you bring it back to your sport.

• Representative Environment: A framework for assessing the degree to which

experimental or practice tasks simulate key aspects of specific performance environments
(i.e. competition). A representative training environment will maintain functionality and
action fidelity of sport. The key premise being that when practice replicates the
performance environment, skills are more likely to transfer (Krause et al., 2018)

o Functionality: Is the information in practice the same as sport. Is the information

the athletes are using to guide movement useful and relevant to sport? (Krause et
al., 2017)

o Action Fidelity: The complete movement action (intention-perception-action) is

an accurate (it looks, feels and acts) “picture” of sport. (Davids & Passos, 2007)

Attuned. Adaptable. Dexterous.

• Dexterity: Ability to discover a motor solution for any external situation. Bernstein
further stated that dexterity is demonstrated by the ability to solve a motor problem
correctly, quickly, rationally, resourcefully. (Bernstein, 2014. Dexterity and Its
Development)

Dexterity is not a property of the movements themselves, rather in the processes of the
solutions

• Degeneracy: The capacity of the system elements that are structurally different to
perform the same function or yield a similar output” (Chow et al., 2016)

Human movement system degeneracy is the ability of the athlete to effectively perform a
movement in a variety of different ways through varying levels of complexity.

• Repetition Without Repetition: The process of practice consists of the gradual success
of a search for optimal motor solutions to the appropriate problems. Because of this,
practice, when properly undertaken, does not consist in repeating the means of solution of
a motor problem time after time, but in the process of solving this problem again and
again by techniques which we changed and perfected from repetition to repetition.
(Bernstein, 1967. The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movement)

One of the simplest steps many coaches have found to ease into changing
their approach to movement training is adapting a rep without rep style.
Instead of lining up athletes and going through repetition after repetition
of a certain “drill”, you can keep the “drill” but change one aspect
of the “drill” every rep (distance, angle, stance, start, etc).

• Coordination:

o Bernstein said, “Coordination is overcoming excessive degrees of freedom of our

movement organs, that is, turning the movement organs into controllable
systems.”
o Gibson said, “Actions emergent in the temporary couplings formed among the
individual and the environment.”
o Newell said, Coordination can be viewed as the function that constrain the
potentially free variables (DoF) of a system into a behavioral unit (movement
solution)”
o Coordination is a property of the solution that emerges from each individuals
movement system in response to the constraints the system is facing.

Attuned. Adaptable. Dexterous.

• Emergent Movement: Dynamic, functional, and flexible behaviors which are
temporarily and creatively organized out of system degrees of freedom (Chow et al.,
2016)

• Self-Organization: A physical process where a biological system seems to have

developed the capacity to use environmental energy to sustain stability for functional
purposes i.e. they have learned to prevent disorder from disrupting system stability. Self-
organizing dynamical systems achieve functional states of coordination only when under
constraint (Williams, Davids & Williams, 1999). Because of this, constraints and self-
organization are integral to a principled account of the coordination of a movement
system with its environment (Warren, 1990).

• Differential Learning: Takes advantage of fluctuations in a complex system by

increasing them through no two repetitions being the same by constantly changing
movement tasks creating perturbations to the complex system (Schollhorn, 1999).

• Decision-Making: Can be viewed as a functional and emergent process in which a

selection is made among converging paths of actions for an intended goal (Araujo,
Davids, Chow, Passos & Raab, 2009). Learning to make successful decisions is
concerned with the education of intention, attunement, calibration and mastering
perceptual-motor degrees of freedom.

• Degrees of Freedom: The term degrees of freedom typically refers to the independent
components of a system that can fit together in many different ways (Davids, Button &
Bennett, 2008)

• Contextual Interference: The learning phenomenon where interference during practice

is beneficial to skill learning. That is, higher levels of contextual interference lead to
poorer practice performance than lower levels while yielding superior retention and
transfer performance (Magill & Hall, 1990).

Low contextual interference is typically referred to as blocked practice while high

contextual interference is referred to as random practice. Blocked training/practice
consists of performing a skill over and over (repetition after repetition), the same order of
drills, predictable progressions, etc. While blocked practice consists of varying skills

Attuned. Adaptable. Dexterous.

 often & quickly (repetition without repetition), changing the order of drills, unpredictable
schedule, etc.

• Explicit Learning: Learner acquires skill and knowledge deliberately and consciously.
Explicit learning can be thought of as a coach trying to cue, communicate and give
feedback to the athlete.

• Implicit Learning: Learner acquires skills and knowledge without conscious awareness.
Implicit learning can be thought of as the athlete learning as a result of experience and
feedback from the environment with facilitation from the coach.

• Non-Linear Pedagogy: A learner-centered approach to skill acquisition. An umbrella

term for teaching and coaching that uses task and environment design to develop skill
acquisition, where each learner will have individual periods and rates of learning (Chow
et al., 2016)

An umbrella term for teaching and coaching that uses task and environment design to
develop skill acquisition, where each learner will have individual periods and rates of
learning. (Chow et al., 2016)

• Dynamic Systems Theory: The emergence of coordination tendencies that exist

between and within components and levels of complex neurobiological systems (Seifert
& Davids, 2015). Dynamical systems theory does not assign a single causal role to any
specific subsystem for movement, cognition or perception (Williams, Davids & Williams,
1999).

• Skill Acquisition/Adaptation: A functional performer-environment relationship (Araujo

& Davids, 2011). A reciprocal functional relationship between and individual and the
environment.

• Motor Control: How the nervous system interacts with other body parts and the
environment to produce purposeful, coordinated movements. (Latash, 2012. The Bliss of
Motor Abundance)

• Effectivities: Capabilities or physical capacities of an individual (Turvey, 1990)

Attuned. Adaptable. Dexterous.

• Information: Information in the ecological approach refers to specificity between the
structured energy distributions available to a perceptual system and the environmental
and movement properties causally responsible for that structure (Turvey, 1990). In
theories related to ecological dynamics, it is believed that information consists of higher
order variables, such as optic variables, which specify affordances that are picked up
directly through the perception of the organism.

• Information-Movement Coupling: The development of successful functional relations

between movement and information in a specific performance context (Anson, Elliott, &
Davids, 2005)

• Attunement: Being perceptually sensitive to the most specifying informational variables

for achieving a task goal (Jacobs & Michaels, 2007)

• Systems Thinking: A systems approach is one where the structures and configurations of
things are considered as a whole rather than examined piece by piece. In a highly
complex system, all of the parts affect each other in an intricate way, and studying them
individually often disrupts their usually interactions. (Clarke & Crossland, 1985)

• Direct Perception: A theoretical approach, which proposes that an individual perceives

its environment through the direct detection of the information within it. In this approach,
the knowledge of the world is thought to be unaided by inference, memories or
representations (Michaels & Carello, 1981)

• Attractors: The stable and functional patterns of organization exhibited by open systems.
These attractors represent coordination tendencies among system components (Davids,
Button & Bennett, 2008)

• Resonance: A property of skilled movement systems, where the organism is able to

maintain functional contact through this resonance mechanism, which becomes tuned to
the patterns of the structured surrounding energy obtained through active perception of
the affordances of the performance environment (Teques et al., 2017). Resonance is not
an accomplishment of the brain but instead it involves all of the subsystems of the
organism, which are involved in perceiving and acting in the environment (Gibson,
1966).

Attuned. Adaptable. Dexterous.