There is a debate that runs through football coaching like a fault line. On one side: all training should be game-based. On the other: players need drills with a lot of repetition. The two camps argue past each other, as if the choice is binary.

It isn't. And a volleyball study can help us understand why. Today we walk through a 2023 paper by Paulo Caldeira and colleagues — research that sits close to the intellectual home of this podcast, with Duarte Araújo and Keith Davids among the authors. The setting is volleyball, but the implications belong to anyone who has thought about representativeness in their training.

The study took skilled young players and gave both groups the same three attack options against the same three block configurations. Same possibilities, same reps. One difference only: one group knew in advance what was coming, the other had to read and decide in the moment. That single variable, pre-arranged versus emergent decision-making, changed everything. The group that had to read the situation improved substantially more, and kept improving after the study ended.

In this episode: what representative decision-making actually means, and why a decision is representative when it is made off the same online information the game provides. What functional movement variability is, and why the best performers don't repeat one perfect technique but find slightly different solutions each time. Also, a football example of how to constrain the option space without losing the decision.

Further reading

• Caldeira, P., Paulo, A., Veloso, A., Infante, J., Davids, K. & Araújo, D. (2023). How functional movement variability facilitates successful skill adaptation during the volleyball attack. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching.

The Progressão book is being translated into English — more on that soon.

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