Today’s podcast is with Tyler Yearby. Tyler is the co-founder and director of education at Emergence, a leading company in sport movement and skill development education. He is a Former NCAA strength coach who has delivered over 200 domestic & international continuing education courses, workshops, and conference presentations in 12 countries. Tyler has worked with a wide range of athletes, from youth to professional, and is currently pursuing his doctorate in sport and exercise at the University of Gloucestershire (UK).
Sport (and the subset of physical training) is defined by how we build and adapt skills over time. Ultimately, both the joy of movement and its eventual mastery are rooted in motor learning and skill acquisition. The sign of coaching where these elements are applied effectively is not just “using textbook principles” but, more so, a total feeling of aliveness and joy in the process of mastery. This is where learning and skill acquisition transcends being something learned in a classroom and is a regular, interactive experience on the part of the coach and athlete.
For today’s podcast, Tyler goes into important topics that cross the worlds of motor learning and coaching in general. He discusses his take on learning “the fundamentals” for athletes, the significance of “prompts” over traditional “commands” during training sessions, and explores these ideas for both the weight room and sports skills alike. Tyler also delves into the concept of self-organization, examining when it’s beneficial and when it could hinder performance. This fantastic conversation has implications for both strength and skill coaches or anyone who wants to understand movement and skill building on a deeper level.
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Timestamps and Main Points
3:15 – Some recent developments with Tyler in his trajectory into the motor learning and skill development aspects of athletic performance
4:37 – The “donor sport” viability of “rough-housing,” free play type activities, such as tackle-basketball
9:40 – How Tyler has learned about learning and skill development from being a father
13:59 – Tyler’s take on the “fundamentals” and what that actually means in movement mechanics and training
20:10 – Prompts and open-ended questions versus commands in a coaching and learning situation
35:29 – Exploring squat and jump-based movements, considering the principle of a base of support
39:17 – How do we know if an athlete’s self-organization strategies continue to help them or if they may be stagnating/using detrimental self-organization and need another form of coaching intervention?
52:25 – Tyler’s doctorate work and the perceived impact and value of education of ecological dynamics in coaching
Tyler Yearby Quotes
“A lot of times a game is co-created with (kids), and it is designed for them to fall in love with movement”
“I’ve learned to be more patient (of a coach) as a father”
“(On the level of teaching the ‘fundamentals’ to athletes) I want them to create a functional fit with an environment, which means starting from a point where they can orient their degrees of freedom, what their thoughts are, and what they are intending to do in a situation”
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, because it’s not the same man, and it’s not the same river”
“A command is ‘do it this way,’ where a prompt is illuminating areas that could be. A lot of how my instruction has changed as a coach is, athletes are not going to be successful if they have one way to do something…. We want to develop adaptable movers, not ones that are more stable, if you will”
“I still view (coaching a lift or a basic acceleration start) as helping them to explore different ways”
“You can make a game out of showing them how to perform the movement, without (directly) telling them how to do it”
“Kids need a chance to not only be kids, but even professional movers need a chance to explore a little bit, play a little bit”
“When I am harnessing what is comfortable for them (from exploring jump stances), their (squat) numbers go up right away”
“When do I step in? A lot of literature is going to talk about, if 75% of the time they are scoring a point, avoid a tackle, something in that realm, then I want to let them run with it (with the 25% of mistakes being fine in that situation), but if it’s more than that, and continually more than that, that’s where a coach needs to step in, and that’s where there is true value in the constraints led approach”
“I’m trying to educate their attention to the space around them; by opening the space, and then adding a question to it, that is helping guide their search. Now I might see them start to self-organize in a functional way”
“I am finding many coaches (in recent years) who are finding value in a co-adaptive relationship,.. basically, inviting the athlete to their party”
“(when using ecological dynamics concepts in coaching) My players enjoy it more, and I have more fun as a coach”
“We need to start using different words to capture the same idea, and one of those words is ‘making training more alive’ on a scale with 1-10, how alive is it?”
Show Notes
“Alive” Movement Problem Solving Checklist
Skill Acquisition Studies:
(Re)conceptualizing movement behavior in sport as a problem-solving activity
Emergence Website:
About Tyler Yearby
Tyler Yearby, M.Ed., is Co-Founder and Co-Director of Education at Emergence, and the Director of Sport Movement Skill Enhancement at Inspire Movement in Minnesota. With more than 13 years of experience, Yearby has taught 200+ training courses in more than a dozen countries, spoken at Olympic training centers, and been featured on a range of podcasts. He currently works with athletes ranging from youth to professional and is a former strength and conditioning coach for the University of Minnesota football program, as well as a former American football running back and strength & conditioning coach at Northeastern State University.
Tyler is currently pursuing his doctorate in sport and exercise at the University of Gloucestershire (UK), exploring the perceived impact on the professional work of sports coaches and practitioners after interacting with online coaching education underpinned by an ecological dynamics rationale, with a particular focus on the theory-practice link and understanding the strengths and limitations they perceive in their craft after applying the ideas in practice.
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