Shawn Myszka on the Constraints-Led Approach, the NFL Combine, and Coaching the Player Not the Method

The NFL Combine measures the wrong variable. Shawn Myszka has spent two decades training NFL players and watching the gap between what the combine predicts and what wins on Sundays.

Shawn Myszka, founder of Emergence and co-author of Enhancing Skill in American Football, joins Mark McGrath and Brian "Ponch" Rivera on No Way Out to walk through why the dominant model of NFL skill development is failing and what the constraints-led approach offers in its place.

The conversation moves from a 2008 origin story about an NFL veteran whose physical metrics exceeded his draft year while his game did not, into the deeper framework underneath Shawn's work. Perception, cognition, and action operating as an integrated system. Practice design that builds adaptive players rather than drilling isolated movement patterns. The constraints-led approach to skill acquisition. Coaching the player, not the method.

Mark and Ponch bring the OODA framework alongside Shawn's constraints-led approach, and the convergence becomes the conversation. The episode closes with where this goes next: AI in active inference, the shift from alignment to harmony in NFL strategy, and why football has to evolve from a game of attrition to a game of cognition.

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“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”

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Transcript

Moving Better After The Cleats

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 0:20

That in one second. So movement problems. Yes, I am 53 years old and my body doesn't move like it used to when I was 23. So let's start there, Sean. Uh, what can you do to help us out?

Shawn Myszka 0:29

Well, you know, that's funny that you say that, Brian, because after the release of Enhancing Skill in American football, ironically enough, many of the questions that I started to get from football coaches themselves were because of the nature of the aliveness that myself, Tyler Yerby and Rob Gray were sort of presenting with this idea and initiative for American football coaches to embrace. I started to get more and more questions from, well, just refer to those that maybe used to play, that still want to be able to maybe be more engaged in their practice activities. So coaches themselves were actually reaching out to me quite frequently with similar questions as what you just posed, Brian. Like, how do I do this? How do I get in some of these activities? If we're going to branch out into indie drills, how can I actually participate there? Because you're posing these ideas that practice activities need to change everywhere. Would that mean that I need to change my preparation and my training so I can be more adequately prepared and equipped to be able to present problems to my players? And of course, my answer to that question is yes. I actually believe that many individuals, after we sort of hang up the cleats or hang up whatever it is uniform that we wear, we go into a physically dominated training regime that forgets about perception and cognition. It forgets about picking up information in the world and making decisions in the world, even though that's where we were really skillful in interacting with the world prior to that point. And so what I actually advise for people when they do hang up the cleats or hang up the uniform, what they actually do is continue to solve real life, real alive movement problems in their world. And whether that's trying to hang on and go play pickup games and the like, or it's just remaining free and interacting with the world, instead of getting really constrained, really focused on just trying to maintain physical metrics, I try to advise people to continue to solve problems. So I would start there, if I were you, Brian, I would start to interact with more of that alive problems. I would open up some of your degrees of freedom again. And it's not just the movement system itself, but again, it's perceptual and cognitive degrees of freedom is equally as important in an integrated fashion as the physical side, the motor action. So, you know, there's there's a bunch of different practical things that we can do there. But I think what happens, again, when we hang it up, we just stop solving the same type of range of movement problems as we once did. And before you know it, we lose capacity and we start making excuses like I'm not what I once was, or I'm just trying to hang on, or back in the day. Now, I'm certainly not implying that we can continue to be who it is that we were at 23, 24, 25, but I think we can continue to adapt across the lifetime.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 3:26

That's fantastic. Uh, I want to come back to this a little bit later on, but uh for some context, uh AAU basketball weekend, uh everybody's trying to solve for some type of uh activity or affordance or something in the environment. Their coaches don't know how to do that. I I've asked several coaches if they're following CLA. For whatever reason, I don't think people can pick up a book and read that. It's to me, it's not hard to figure out how to do it or where to look. I'm sorry. It it's it's simple, but the application of it is gonna be a little bit harder. Uh and the other context is we just wrapped up the NFL draft, and a few weeks back, I don't remember when exactly, we had something known as the combine. I have a question for you. Let's take a third-year veteran from the NFL and put them in the combine. Will they be able to perform at the same level as these athletes coming out of the out of college?

Perception Cognition Action Meets OODA

Shawn Myszka 4:10

No, they won't. Um, and in fact, that's actually how I came to my first Robert Frost moment, believe it or not, where there were two roads diverging the trail. When I had my first National Football League player approach me uh to train with me at my facility, this was back between the 2007 and 2008 season. So obviously I'm getting a little longer in the tooth now, a little less hair in my head, of course, as everyone can see. But at that time, I had just opened the facility. I had this player come to me, and of course, I did what every respecting strength and conditioning professional would do. And it's to test him on those respective metrics that we at least had some sort of KPIs or key performance indicators around or about. And I was able to trace back, and Brian, ironically enough, he was a three-year vet at that point. So when he got to me, he had already been in the league for three years. He was a starter in the league. So I tested him. And this, of course, even though it was the offseason, this would have been uh, I think he started with me in February. So he had just come off of a long NFL season, of course. But his numbers were so dramatically down, and I'm talking, you know, like to the point where it looked like he had never even done some of these tests before. And uh, of course, again, like any respectable strength and conditioning professional would do, I decided that we needed to chase some of those performance metrics to try to raise that tide and to hopefully raise the boat and the performance of it, right? And so we chased it. And not only did we attain his old numbers from Indy, the three years prior, but we far exceeded them. And when I say we exceeded them, we're talking about like seven and a half inches of vertical jump difference. We're talking about 14 and a half inches of broad jump difference. We're talking about a quarter of a second off of his forward, like extraordinary numbers for a player who is obviously already playing in the National Football League. Well, fast forward, I send him back to his respective team in the end of July, going back to his training camp. And I'm thinking he's gonna just absolutely take the league by storm. Of course, he's already a league starter, he's looking to take that next jump and become a pro bowler. And I remember having phone calls with him when he was touching base with me from training camp. And I'm like, you know, like just couldn't wait to hear what it is that he had to say, because I'm expecting that he's absolutely dominating at training camp. And of course, his answers were like, yeah, it feels okay. Everything is okay, everything's going okay. You know, I'm like, well, are you healthy? Yeah, he's healthy. You know, like, does he understand the playbook? Yeah, he understands the playbook, but there wasn't the same type of like expectation that I had that was being met on the field. And then, of course, I came to this reality check shortly thereafter when I watched his preseason games and then I watched him across the course of the NFL season, and I only had that one player in that respective year. Luckily, that player continued to train with me, and we dramatically revamped what it is that we did going into the subsequent years. And then the other players obviously began to train with me after that point. But I started to realize it wasn't about those physical metrics. Each one of those 1,696 players already were able to do some of those types of things in their sleep. But instead, it was the perceptual and cognitive processes and how those things fed in to how they actually utilize and express their action capabilities. Because all 1,696 of them, they're all freaks of freaks. Like they all won the sperm lottery in relation to the, you know, the rest of us, right? That's just the nature of the beast. But if we were to actually address some of those movement qualities, again, perception and cognition, and I think that's probably what led to the resonation, you know, like this resonance between some of the ideas in the book and then you reaching out to me, Brian. I think it's those things that are those differentiators. It's those things that become the real KPIs, and we have to continue to view perception and cognition is equally in alignment with physical capabilities or then the action capabilities to bring some of these movement strategies truly to life on the field or in the field, wherever it is that Word is going to perform, you know, for us in that respect to perform.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 8:30

No, this is great. So I want to break this down some more. We have, you know, we're coming up in early football season, June, July. Uh training camps will be starting about two, two months out, three months out. Uh, you know, coaches may be listening to this going, okay, what are these guys actually talking about? For let me just share something with you, uh, Sean. We come at this from the lens of John Boyd's observable decide to act, the real one, right? So you brought up perception, cognition, and action. Uh, to us, perception, cognition, and action are actually part of the real ODA loop right at the top there. Most people don't know this. They always go O-O-D-A, right? So if you're a football coach going, why are why are these guys having a conversation about perception, action loops, and OODA loops? And that's not what I understand. The truth is, perception, cognition, and action are embedded inside the OODA loop as we know it. We also have predictive processing, Bayesian inference, and active inference. Don't worry about any of that today. We'll take that off the table, right? We're gonna talk about how do we how do living systems engage with the external environment? And that's where we want to go. So go back to that story and tell us how you came across this. What year was it? What were you reading? You know, we've had Rob Gray on the podcast. He has a great podcast in case you want to go learn something more for our listeners out there, Perception Action Podcast. I'm sure actually Sean's been on there several times, I believe. And then Sean's new book, uh Enhancing Skill in American Football, which is more than 235 pages. If you uh if you count the small fine print on her, it's uh it's it's really good. So, Sean, can you help us unpack? What the hell are we talking about some more for our listeners?

Shawn Myszka 9:57

Yeah, yeah. Great, great question, Brian. And I love the unpacking there because obviously we want to make it practical. We want to make it applicable. Obviously, if you picked up the book, you start to realize that most of the things that we're talking about here are underpinned deeply by the theory. And that was some of the stuff that you already began to highlight there, Brian, that you're taking off the table for those who are more practically driven and practically oriented. I came at this as a practitioner. The story that I just told in regards to the NFL Combine or the Combine tests, and then the players who then entrust me to try to facilitate more enhanced skill when and where accounts, which is on a football field, on an NFL Sunday, under the bright lights, under fatigue, under pressure, under anxiety, and all the constraints that kind of come with it. So I talked about 2008, and from 2008 to 2012, I started to take what I would refer to as a movement-centric approach. I started to try to chase and channel what I would refer to as the perfection of these respective movement patterns for those players because I was able to acknowledge with that one respective story that I just told, that it was the movement and the movement skill that was that I believe that was separating things. When I got to 2012, I had already worked with dozens of NFL players at that time. And I remember being in the Metro Dome for the Vikings in the Packers matchup. Last game of the season, the Vikings needed to win. Adrian Peterson is trying to attain the NFL single season rushing record. And of course, for those of you who don't know, he came up eight yards short of that. And I had a good amount of players on that respective roster. I think I had eight players on that team. And of course, the Vikings won. They went to the playoffs, but I walked out of the Metro Dome with this deeper understanding that something needed to change in how I was doing things. And that something that needed to change in what I was doing was bringing more aliveness, bringing more unpredictability, bringing more repetition without repetition from Nikolai Bernstein's idea. Where players would be presented with more alive movement problems that are highly unpredictable. They are indeterminate, meaning when you start the activity, it is no longer a drill. You don't know where that drill is going to end, and you don't know what's going to happen from point A to point Z. That aliveness requires that constant engagement with an environment, and it has this mutual reciprocal relationship between the two brands that you just mentioned. The problem and solution dynamics coming together so we can perceive, cognize, and act in relation to it. And it's up to us to channel or facilitate more skillful engagement or interaction with that environment then, if we are practitioners, right? And I think that's the piece that hopefully anyone who's listening might be able to take from this, whether they're an American football coach or whether they might coach or facilitate skill in some other realm, which I'm sure plenty of your listeners do. Like all of us, when we move in the world, we are all solving alive problems. And if our practice and training environments water those problems down to isolate them to rote repetitive movement patterns, because we think that we're beating some trail in the brain with muscle memory or some BS like that, as opposed to actually allowing them to engage in real life problem solving. Like that's where the rubber meets the road. And so, Brian, after that point, 2012 and beyond, when I started to have that reality check, that most of the players that I was working with were performing in spite of me and the work that we did, because they were the world's best compensators and adapters, rather than because of, I started to be able to figure out how to leverage that, how to channel the compensation in that adaptive nature of that movement system that they were gifted with. But again, it's not about the gifted individuals. Every human has the ability to adapt. We're all always adapting if we present a problem to the human movement system.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 15:18

That's key. Uh, I want to share a conversation I had over the weekend. And uh Moose is a Marine and I had a conversation at the gym a few days ago with a uh retired 06, and we were talking about how they trained, uh Eli fired and things like that. But over the weekend, hey, you basketball, I'm I'm standing next to the father of uh, you know, one of the kids that's playing with my kid, my daughters, and he's a Navy SEAL, retired Navy SEAL, a Teams guy, right? And he's he's talking about, hey, you know, this is like combat. We got to do things just like we do in combat. I'm like, okay, I got a question for you. Uh when you guys trained on the teams, you you had more quality experience there than what was necessary for combat, right? So in my world in aviation, uh combat flying is kind of benign compared to our training, right? So to equate that to Sunday football, the game is less exciting or less demanding than the practices. So that's what I was getting at with this with the seal. He's like, yeah, you're right. I'm like, okay, so the girls do not need to be at an AAU basketball to get to gain experience. They need a better, I forgot the term that you use quite often, representative design within their practices to get better, right? So let's shift that thinking. Let's don't look at the game on an AAU weekend. I'm using basketball here as where the girls get experience. Let's talk about the design of the training, their practices. And I think you have better terms than I'm using right now for that. But I was just the aha moment came to, you know, came to me as like, wait a minute, we've been looking at this wrong. Now, I want to give you another perspective here. Our backgrounds tell us that this is the right way to do things. Yet we still fall in line with the dominant approach to coaching and to go, well, this is the way all coaches do it, therefore they must know what they're doing. So I just want to give you that background that that even though we know, or we may know, we just let our coaches that are helping our kids do what they want to do. And I think that's wrong. So does that resonate with you? Is that kind of makes sense to what you're seeing or what you saw? Yeah, it absolutely does.

Training For Failure Under Fatigue

Shawn Myszka 17:04

And it does across activities, Brian, to your point, right? Like it doesn't matter if we're looking at tactics, tactical world, or military. It doesn't matter if we're looking at someone who's driving, it doesn't matter if it's a pilot, it doesn't matter if it's a basketball player at the AU level, it doesn't matter if it's an NFL player trying to play on Sundays and be more skillful there. We know that the real life environment brings that type of inherent unpredictability. It's going to require us and demand of us different things than most of our practice and training tasks do. But yet we just do it like a dog chasing its own tail. Round and around and around we go, we just keep doing it. Because someone else along the way in our training told us that was the way that we needed to do it. We have drills for a reason, right? Like we're going to drill this in and everyone is going to behave the same way. And if you don't behave in that way, then you are obviously going to get reprimanded in some way, shape, or form. So you fall in line with behaving in that way. And again, it doesn't matter if it's the military or if it doesn't matter if it's on an NFL 53-man roster, the same thing sort of happens. But yet, when game day rolls around, or when fight day rolls around in your world, like all hell breaks loose, these key performance inhibitors now enter the mix: pressure, anxiety, fatigue, complexity, chaos, messiness, stimulus. And all of a sudden it just comes down to practicality. It becomes to usefulness, it becomes to functionality. Did how you respond solve the respective problem in front of you? And did you make it out alive? Like that's what matters, right? Did you solve the problem in front of you? And were you able to do so to live to fight another fight? And I think that's really what it comes down to at the end of the day. Now, that doesn't mean that we just throw our athletes or our soldiers or whomever it might be, our learners, into the fire every damn day. Because if we do that, they're going to number one get burnt out really, really quickly. Like a learner cannot stay there for very long. But what it does mean is we can scale complexity so it meets the learner where it is that they are on their learning journey. So in that scaling of complexity, we are bringing the information down or the difficulty of the problem down. So maybe in the AAU example, it doesn't say that we play V5 for the entirety of practice. But what it does say is we might be able to manipulate constraints so we can have some scaling of complexity. So it goes from 1v1 to 2v2 to V3, and then potentially to 5v5. Or maybe it's a 2v3 game. So it's offset or small-sided in some way, shape, or form. I think the same type of thing can happen in and across sport disciplines, but also into the tactical world, even that much more, also, right? Again, all the risk doesn't have to be there because you can't actually truly represent most of the risk that y'all face, right? When it really truly is danger and obviously lives are on the line. But what you can do is represent nuances of it, slices and snippets of it that are going to be vitally important for you to get a bunch of goes at solving it, for you to get exposed to what it is that that problem is asking of you. So the problems are really truly emergent, meaning they will emerge in a different way every single time. They are highly variable. And therefore, you get a chance to figure out what information here really matters. What do I need to become sensitive to? What information must I pick up in order to channel my decision making? And then once I make that decision, what decisions are actually on the table for me? And if I make this decision, you gotta be able to, in training and practice, to potentially make said mistake in training. Because that's ultimately what training is about, right? Not trying to get everyone to behave an exact way, but to try to put those options on the table. So before game time comes around, we have a better understanding as to what it is that we might need to do to interact with that problem more functionally or more purposefully.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 21:32

Yeah, we we talk about learning from failure is a great way to learn. And there's an example in your book where you talk about a uh NFL tight end who's on special teams on punt coverage and uh missing missing a tackle. Then you go through some uh data mining to figure out how many times that tight end has actually seen that scenario before. Can you let's let's go down a little bit deeper. Can you use that, use that example and kind of break down what it is you're trying to solve with uh coaches and how they create the environments that uh these players are going to see in the game?

Coach The Player Not The Model

Shawn Myszka 22:00

Yeah, so for me, and the really, really good question, I mean, I love that you're bringing the practical approach here to it as well, guys. So, with this respective NFL tight end, and for those who don't follow American football very much, NFL tight ends aren't expected to go down and cover punts very often. Well, this just so happened to be a highly versatile player, that's why he was signed in that way. That's how he was able to make an eight-year NFL career for himself, because he wasn't overly gifted, even though he was a starting tight end in the league for a handful of those eight years. But he has to find a way to make a play, even if it's not necessarily in his inherent skill set, right? Like he played H back and fullback and tight end in college. He played a little bit of special teams in college, but the better players in college, of course, aren't being asked to go play defense most of the times, also, right? Like where there would be in a punt cover type of case. So he gets to this respective team, he's being asked to go cover punts and kicks, and in practice, he's just not seeing that type of problem very often. But I knew his way to make the roster and to stay on the roster was to make sure that he excelled at least enough to be able to find a way to show that versatility. But also to find a way to make himself more valuable. So when investigating this and seeing the ways that he missed tackles in game situations the year prior, knowing that every year in the NFL is like dog years, right? Like ages looked at it that way in the NFL. Like, you know, you go from 27 to 28, and they think that you've gone from uh 20 to like 46, right? And overnight. And they'll they'll use that against you. So if you don't actually continue to perform and continue to excel, they'll cut your ass in in a heartbeat, right? And so we looked at this and we really looked at it deeply. I found how little he was solving these problems in practice. And I said, you know what? We just gotta go give this a bunch of goes. Like we got to get a bunch of exposure to constantly changing problems in and across punt situations. You have to be under extreme fatigue when you've done it, right? We had to think about some of these things because he would have just played anywhere from at least a minimum of three snaps before they punt, because he was the starting tight end as well, right? So the punt is coming after you've already had three downs at minimum. So he might have just run two or three routes or just physically contacted somebody for a number of plays in the run fifths and the like. Or it could be much, much longer than three plays and they end up punting. So we had to simulate some of this fatigue demands. So after just going through rep after rep after rep with only less than 40 seconds of rest, he then had to run downfield and try to go tackle the most evasive, scattiest, most mouse-like person on the entire opposition's roster, right? That punt returner who's just gonna go create, try to make somebody miss. And essentially my guy was usually the first or second guy down because of where he was positioned in the formation. So I looked at all of this, guys, and I used that investigative analysis. And again, a lot of it was VM through film. I had to go back through all of his practice film, which luckily he and I had access to, of course. We had to look at the scenarios and situations that happened in the game and what was missing or lacking there to try to identify what his weaknesses and gaps were. And then we had to try to constrain to afford, as I would refer to it. So to manipulate constraints to open up potential landscape of opportunities to act, aka affordances. Let that affordance landscape play out, where he might not necessarily know who else is going to be blocking him besides the immediate blocker that he's assigned to. He doesn't know where that putt returner is gonna go. He doesn't know what's gonna happen to his right and to his left. I needed that entire landscape of opportunities to be simulated rep after rep after rep of that. And it all had to be done under conditions of fatigue, changing surface and changing weather and the like. So we look at that, we look at actually what's taking place in competition in the performance environment to try to then channel how I might manipulate constraints in the practice and training environment. And again, that really is no different. That's transcendent between what happens in my world and what I believe probably happens in yours, too. We just have to be really purposeful with how we're manipulating those constraints so we can stretch each learner to their challenge point. And when I say their challenge point, they're gonna make some mistakes to your point that you just made, Brian. Right. Too many people avoid those mistakes because from a coach or as an instructor, we're telling that player or that soldier exactly how it is that they need to perform. But that's not the way real life combat works, whether it's in your world or in mine. Like we might have our instructions, we might have our expectations, we might have our tactical strategies and principles in mind. But at a certain point, the problems get super alive and bring complexity, bring chaos, and they demand something from our entire movement system, and we have to respond on the fly.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 27:27

I'm curious about resources in this context. So let's say I don't I don't spend a lot of time in the NFL, so just make that clear. But I imagine using resources, and we use resources to mean people and equipment, and that that includes the punt returners. So if you grab two or three punt returners around the team and you do this for a tight end or a couple players, I mean that takes a lot of energy, right? That takes, it requires time and you're gonna take, what, 30, 40 minutes to do this? Is that what it's gonna take to do it?

Shawn Myszka 27:52

Yeah, it's probably gonna be a little shorter than that. I guess it all really depends on the time of the year that we're doing it, to be honest with you. And of course, in my learning environment and my practice and training environment, I am vetting players before they get to me. So I understand that I'm a bit spoiled in this way. And when I say I'm vetting them, because they have a very short window to be able to make an NFL career, before I ever even work with a player, we make sure we're gonna be the right fit for one another. So I talk to them about some of the things they're gonna be expected and required to do in our practice and training environment that is going to be very, very different than that which what they would get with other trainers or other specialists, right? In my learning environment, every player gets stretched to their challenge point. So everybody's fallen off the bike, right? Like everybody's fallen off the bike in order to learn how to ride it a little bit more skillfully. You are gonna be a sparring partner for other individuals in that learning environment when you do so. So if I have a punt returner or a running back, you're gonna get a bunch of exposures solving problems in relation to this respective tight end. But then some problems are gonna be designed for and specifically oriented around you and your gaps and weaknesses, right? So I think it becomes this way where we can represent the opportunities that each player is going to have to be able to interact with on game day, and they understand immediately this looks, feels, acts, and unfolds exactly as it will in competition. So I'm probably becoming more skillful here. Like a player that gets in our learning environment immediately recognizes this feels different than just running repeat sprints or executing cone or drills or ladder drills or something of the like, which many of my peers are obviously doing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 29:39

I have this note here. It says, coach the player, not the model. All right, right. So this is important. We're we're coaching the context, not the not bringing a system on and saying this is the we're gonna just coach the system, right? Is that is that what you're talking about here? Yeah, absolutely. Coaching the player?

Reorienting Coaches To See Differently

Shawn Myszka 29:53

Yeah, so for me, one of the things that I think we've done wrong, at least in American football, is so much of our practices have been coach driven. And when I say coach driven, the coach is the knowledge bearer or the truth giver, right? Like he or she holds all the answers at all times for every problem. But that coach is might have been in those problems at one point, maybe it was 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, right? Or maybe they've never been in those problems at all. But no matter what happens, they are the truth giver, they are the knowledge source. And because of that, many of our practices are under the control of the coach. But in an athlete-centered or player-centered or player model-driven model, and the way that you're insinuating here, the player is put first. Their interactions are put first. We have representative co-design. So we talk to the player about what it is that they're seeing, what it is that they're thinking, what led to the decisions they made, what intentions they had on the table, how else they might have been able to interact with that respective problem. And all of a sudden it becomes a mutual reciprocal exchange between the facilitator and the player, or the facilitator and the soldier, right? Like, how did that problem feel to you? Where did it stretch you? When you were in the fire, what were you able to pay attention to? What were your intentions? Why is it that you resorted to this other type of behavior when we trained X, Y, and Z over here? And the player or the soldier might have very specific answers for that, or they might just be swimming in the complexity and the information and not have a freaking clue. But all of that is highly informative to us as the person in charge, right? And I'm putting that in quotations for those who might just be listening as opposed to watching us. Those who are in charge, those who are leading or facilitating and designing the activities. And I'm using those words, that verbiage, very, very intentionally. I know this will probably fly in the face of some of the listeners out there, but I don't like the connotation of the use of the word drill, because drill would imply that we're going to beat this trail, we're going to beat this path, everybody does it the same. And if you don't get it right, you just do it again until you can't get it wrong. You drill it in as opposed to an activity which is more live, it's more representative, and it allows the player to interact with that problem, or the soldier in this case, in their own unique and authentic way. That doesn't mean it's a free-for-all. What it means is we still have to constrain to afford, manipulate constraints, and offer guardrails for that learner to say, you can explore here, this over here is off limits. But they have to understand where that bandwidth is. They sort of got to know the rules and understand some of the rules, and then try to see where the limits are of them, right? If it's our tactics or our principles of execution or our strategies that we're trying to employ. So for me, if we start to make things more learner-centric, all of a sudden the learner and their voice and their experience becomes that much more important. And if we have three learners, they're going to have three different experiences, even if it's the quote unquote same activity that we're doing in training or practice.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 33:19

I love this. The idea of human-centered design, customer-centered design, and then athlete-centered design is perfect. I mean, it fits well with uh everything we've been hearing from everybody else. I do want to do this. I want to talk about three things. And before we do that, I'm going to flip it over to Moose. But the three things I want to look at are you brought up attention, attunement. I think you briefly mentioned that, at least I know it's in your book. Maybe a slight connection to debriefing. Uh, I do want to talk about Tom Brady, if you don't mind. Some things, some lessons from there. And then uh the third thing in the next uh 25 minutes that we have left, I want to look at uh NFL coaches, uh coaches in general that are are accepting this. I mean, what are the blockers and things like that? So three things attunement, uh, attention, Brady, and NFL coaching. And before I do that, I want to flip it over to Moose and kind of give Moose's take on what he's hearing. Moose?

Mark McGrath 34:03

Yeah, I mean, Sean, this is great because what what you're hitting on is that there is a strategic, operational, and tactical approach to all these things. There's a moral, mental, and physical dimension to these things. One of the things, uh unfortunately, when most commonly when you interact with coaches and athletic directors and others, they're so ingrained in their way of doing things depending on the coaching tree that they came from, depending on, you know, quote unquote how we did it, you know, when I was a kid or, you know, whatever. And what ends up happening is they completely lose the cognitive war. And it's something that I've I've written about that I'm particularly passionate about the Pittsburgh Steelers. You know, I I grew up in Pittsburgh, in spite of living in Manhattan, as you could tell from the hat, but um, I'm a seasoned ticket holder of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and I'd been writing on our world of reorientation. The one thing I think that Mike Tomlin could not do was to, and I don't want you to comment on him per se, but what I was pointing out was at the cognitive level that there was no reorientation to incorporate um the ability of thinking outside and not being told what he already knew. You know, here he's already the best coach in the business or one of the best coaches in the business. And all I was saying in the article was like, if you can reframe that, if you can reorient that, you're gonna unlock things that you had never unlocked before. And I think that when when the coaches that I've spoken with that do get it, they understand immediately he's not here to tell me what offense to run. He's not here to tell me what drills I need to do or what nutrition plans I need to have the players. He's not here to tell me any of that. He's actually working on my cognitive space, and that in turn will open up things that I hadn't thought specifically with things that were right in front of me. And I've used this example before on the podcast, but I love this interview of John Madden where he talks about as a young coach, he went to Vince Lombardi's seminar on the sweep. And just for hours and days, they talked about the same damn play. And he says, the longer that we talked about it, the more I realized he wasn't he wasn't trying to tell me how to run a sweep, something I knew how to do. What he was trying to show me was the things that I hadn't thought of looking at what was right in front of me. And that was the point of my article about Mike Tomlin, and that's what I try to convey to a coach. I'm I'm not there to tell you how to be a better hockey coach, basketball coach, football coach, whatever, from a hockey, football, basketball perspective. I'm trying to show you a reorientation that will empower you to see things that others don't, others don't. And once you see it, you can't see it. And when you have that edge and your competitors don't, you will never lose.

Shawn Myszka 36:37

Yeah, Moose, I love where you're going with this. And there's a quote that I use really frequently. I'm actually surprised I did not use it in the enhancing skill in American football, but it's by Wayne Dyer, who says, When you change the way you look at things, what you look at changes, right? And so that idea of looking at that, which what you've seen over and over and over again, but seeing it from a different dimension, seeing it from a different perspective and being able to connect the dots and actually understand the relationships that underpin that which what it is that we're witnessing. If more American football coaches, Moose to your point, would look beyond the X's and O's, look beyond just the tactics and their principles of play, and actually begin to understand more the depth and the nuance of what it is that brings things to life in the behavior on an NFL Sunday. The coaches, some coaches who are very, very intelligent. There's some coaches that I've spoken to who are smart as a whip when it comes to X's and O's and tactics and don't know a damn thing about how the actual behavior comes to life. And they can't relate to players, they can't connect to players, they don't understand what makes them tick, they don't understand their what I would refer to as their form of life, their essence of their skill, their personality of who they are, and how that differs across a 53-man roster. And then I can only imagine when you know you get in your world where you have individuals who are under the biggest of pressure, the biggest of anxiety, the most amount of complexity and chaos, and you put them all together and how they might behave. If you don't understand those things, I don't know how successful you can actually be in ensuring that uh the skill is not only enhanced, but it actually can flourish when and where it counts and how it is that it matters. So, Moose, I love where you're going with that. And I I think you hit the nail on the head there with how many American football coaches, but again, this conversation goes well beyond American football coaches. How many who are in charge of teaching kind of get it wrong? Um Moose, you're you're muted, buddy.

Mark McGrath 38:40

They're so ingrained in what they think they know or how they how they came up. Uh I I don't want to name, well, she's been a guest on our show, so I might as well say Digit Digit Murphy's been on our show. She's a good friend. She was the hockey coach at uh uh for women's hockey at Brown for a long time, uh I think 25 seasons. Wow. And she's she s someone like that gets it. Like they they get it because they're always trying to reorient. They're always trying to uh try new things because they know that what worked won't always work in the future. Why? Because things are always changing. The game's always evolving. The game's always changing, it's always evolving, you know, physically, mentally, and morally, at every at every level, at every aspect of the game. I mean, look at the look at just the other day, uh, again in my native Pittsburgh, 800,000 some people showed up for the draft in in Pittsburgh, beating the record for the last time. The environment is changing, the technology is changing. Things have to change, including the cognition of how you're interacting with uh with people that you're you're leading on the on the field. It's all around us. And people aren't, if they if they don't make that that willful destruction of their cognitive space to rewrite and create a new one, they're gonna be in a lot of trouble.

Shawn Myszka 39:56

Yeah, and and this is why we actually tried to reframe, of course, with the help of Duart and Keith, obviously legends within the field, you know, Keith Davids, who we're very close with, and Duarte Ruggio, who we are also close with, myself, Tyler, and Rob. It's why we had them lead off chapter two, which was oriented around reconceptualizing skill, not as something you store or hold just solely within the brain, but in how you actually interact with the environment in a constantly changing context, right? Like how you have this adaptive functional relationship with the environment. That to us is what embodies and embraces this new, evolved idea of skill moose, to your point. It isn't just something we're gonna beat within you, and then it's something that can't go away. It's something that's constantly adapting, constantly evolving. And it depends on the functional relationship you have with that contextual environment. Like you were going to do something somewhere. And that somewhere, as we all know, is changing. So the context shapes the content. The context of the outside world and that performance environment is going to shape the content of that skill. And Moose, I think you hit the nail on the head there on how so few actually come to that realization.

Mark McGrath 41:10

The medium is the message. I I have an article coming out on Wednesday that talks about this from it's the same patterns, the same things that you literally just said. The content doesn't matter. It's the context, it's the environment, it's the tech. That's what affects us and works us over. So when you add a Marshall McLuhan aspect to this on top of the boyd kind of, you know, orientation, destruction, and creation. You give a coach that, I'm sorry, you're not gonna lose. You might lose a game. That's only because time ran out. Yeah. But you're gonna win in the long run.

Shawn Myszka 41:40

But you know what you're what you're referring to here, Moose, or what would be required based on what you're referring to, is for people to let go, right? Like it's for people to let go of their traditional dogmatic ways of thinking and that way that they've always done it. And as we all know, that that doesn't always happen that easily.

Mark McGrath 41:58

Do you have, I mean, like, I mean, it's easy to say, well, well, Walter Camp, he threw the ball forward, and next thing you know, the game was changed. I mean, football has always been a like a narrative of evolution. You know, Brian and I, yeah, we're all Gen Xers. Like when we were tuning in, you know, when Dan Marino was playing and Joe Montana was playing, the game is not the same as it is. It's always evolving. It's always evolving. It's different than when my dad was a kid. Did I lose you? Yeah, you did. You did you did moments? No, I was just saying, like, think about it. We're Gen Xers, right? What we you know, we came up watching the game in the 80s and the 90s, but even now, you know, see from 2000 and 26 years later, the game's completely different, which is completely different than my 74-year-old father saw growing up, which was different than him. Like, football is a walking great example of just constant reorientation. It's just constantly reorienting. Yeah, unfortunately. We got to do it physically, morally, and mentally. It can't just be physical. It has to be morally, mentally, and physically.

Shawn Myszka 42:57

Yeah, I think again, something that you're speaking to here, Moose, is 100% right. Like the game itself, that product, that which what we see on Sundays has changed dramatically. We cannot compare that which what is happening, just even the nature of the tactics and how it is that people approach their craft with data and the like, how it is that people are looking at analytics and then having that drive many of the decisions they're making without actually looking at what's there in front of them. Like if you were to go to some NFL practices, you guys would be floored at how little it has changed. That's the unfortunate part. The competition itself has changed. We can all look at what's happening on Sundays, but the practices themselves haven't actually evolved along with the competition. And that's why two things have worked to excel. That's why you see a draft pick get selected this past weekend who's never played football. Like, think about this. He's never ever played football, but because he's a freak of nature, the Philadelphia Eagles take a flying chance at him, right? Like they look at this freak of nature and they say, hey, we can shape that into something because they actually don't know about the skill acquisition side. Or they then you have the tactical side or individuals who are just saying, Well, in X's and O's, like it's just our guys who are gonna go based on where the X's and O's say they're going to. But at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, Super Bowl Sunday, it's the most skillful performers who have the ability to functionally adapt in the moment on the fly that end up performing when they're given the room to do so. Like that's the instance that we need to like kind of circle back to and around that is very, very different than that which would have been 10, 20, 30 years ago. But that's why physical qualities and traits are really valued at such a high level. And that's also why tactically driven coaches from the Shanahan tree, the McVay tree, and the like are so highly, highly, you know, appealing to so many decision makers, come every single January and February when they fire their coach.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 45:12

Hey, Sean, I'm wondering this. Uh, we I brought up a two-minute attention earlier in the context of how do you get players to do that? Let's forget about that. Go to how do you get coaches to pay attention to what's going on in the environment? Yeah. I mean, how do you do that?

Shawn Myszka 45:24

I think the same way, Brian, ironically enough, that you get the players to do so. You expose them in practice, in training, to real problems that they're going to face on game day. But if you were to watch how most are practicing, and this is kind of what I was insinuating or getting at, yes, they might have a scrimmage here or there, right? At depending on the level that we're referring to. But many of the constraints that are going to be there on game day are not even present in practice. When I say that, like the coaches have everything scripted down to a T on practice, right? Like what play the offense is going to run, what play the defense is going to run, and every party knows exactly what's going to happen. But then, of course, you get there on Sunday, and your 15 scripted plays that you're walking into the game with probably need to be scraped outside of the first two or three because something different unfolds. Game day brings complexity. Game day brings unpredictability. So, Brian, the same way that I believe we get players to become more attuned and sensitive to the information that could guide or channel their behavior is the same way we would get with coaches. You put them on the sideline, you put them on the communication style that is going to be indicative of game day. And you don't let them control everything with a walkie-talkie as they will on in practice, right? You don't have everything down to isolated component parts, but instead you let those relationships take shape. You let that performance environment begin to speak to each performer, player, and coach alike, just as it will on game day, but in practice. And all of a sudden, before you know it, you must become more aware of that which is relevant. You must become more tuned and sensitive to what is most useful to guide your behaviors through, because some of those things, when hell breaks loose, are no longer going to be present as they were on Monday through Saturday before you got to game day on Sunday. Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 47:34

Uh do what we got a few minutes left with you. Uh, Tom Brady, uh, he's now at the Raiders, has an interest in the uh as far as ownership goes. Can you talk a little bit about his uh his combined scores and uh how he did so well in the NFL? And then let's talk about coaches, what we need to do to help them reorient.

Organization-Wide Change And Talent Selection

Shawn Myszka 47:50

Yeah, really good question. And of course, for those of you who don't follow American football very closely, Brian is talking about arguably the greatest player, at least the most accomplished player to have ever played the game, right? Like we could make arguments about who the most skillful performer is, but certainly the most accomplished and therefore in many people's eyes, the greatest football player to have ever played is Tom Brady. But coming out of Michigan, his draft stock and status wasn't very high, not only because of the way that he performed and behaved in Indy. I mean, all you got to do is type in Tom Brady Combine, and you'll probably see some pretty silly pictures when you look at the lack of physical prowess that he so obviously displayed way back, I think it would have been in 2000, I want to say, is the year when he was coming out. And it just goes to show, now, granted, this is for the quarterback position, but we can use others, such as maybe the other individual that many would argue could be in that debate for the greatest of all time, which would be Jerry Rice, who ran in the four sevens at his pro day at the wide receiver position, and then went on to set untouchable records that arguably, even in this day and age in the NFL, no one is even going to come close to, even in the past happy league that we're now in. But what we find from both of these players is true skill. And when I say true skill, whether you're looking at from an UDA standpoint, whether you're looking at it from a problem-solving paradigm standpoint, with perceptions, cognitions, and actions being intertwined and interwoven, what we're finding is skill that underpins their behaviors, a different way of looking at the game and every problem they face within it. And we saw that from both performers, Jerry Rice or Tom Brady. And the reason why I bring Jerry Rice into the mix is because people will say, well, Tom Brady, pocket passer, did he really need to run that fast in the 40? Or did he need to have some sort of physical capabilities in spades in comparison to his peers? Probably not, because he's not Lamar Jackson, he's not Josh Allen, he's not Jaden Daniels or somebody like that, right? But it's the ability to cognize around the information that's out there. It's the ability to connect to what's actually there moment by moment. It's the ability to do that, not just ahead of time, but in the midst in an online fashion. So once you get presented with that emergent problem, Tom Brady against the Atlanta Falcons, Super Bowl, you're down 28-3 in the second half, and you still understand and have the belief that you are not only going to come back, but you are going to win that game because of other things that you've seen unfold up to that point, even though you're down by 25 with whatever 12 minutes ago in the game, right? And you hear the interactions that he has with his teammates. Like if we can just get this next one because of this, I know that we're well on our way. It's those leadership qualities, certainly, but it's the way that he saw the game that fed into his belief that those action capabilities could come to life. That that could happen not only for him personally, one of 11, but also the other 10 players that were on his side at any given moment when the ball was snapped, right? And it was that, obviously, the infamous, you know, that the 28-3 comeback that I think begins to show who Tom Brady really was. Now, granted, that was years later, after that entry into the league at the combine, but we see it over and over and over again. Many players that excelled back in February, that then got drafted high this past weekend, guys, are gonna be no-name guys come fall. And the reason is because they don't actually have the nuances of the skill of those guys that we're referring to.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 51:39

I do want to uh modify my last question though about the NFL coaches. I want to look at it from the perspective of if you had a whole whole of organization approach, so say you're working with Tom Brady, you're working with the GMs over at the Raiders or pick a team, doesn't matter, right? And you go, hey, look at this new way of looking at uh how we engage with the environment. I mean you can use Oudaloop, you can use perception action, doesn't matter. It's it's to me they're they're the same. But what does that game look like to them? What does it mean for them in winning in the future? What is it, what changes in the game?

Shawn Myszka 52:06

Yeah, I think what does that look like to you? I really love the question. And this is something that in order for at least our approach, our approach being that which what we presented in enhancing skill in American football to really come to life in an organization, it has to happen on a really interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary type of level, right? It can't just be the inclusion of a skill acquisition specialist jumping in and working with, you know, one to five players. It has to be organization-wide in the way that we view what is coming to be as the product or as the team on a Sunday, right? Like there's so many aspects of orienting our frame and scope of analysis on the player environment relationship. And those individuals who go look at the player environment relationship, as so many within every NFL organization or every college or high school or any level really do not, you won't actually see that which what Moose and I were chatting about before, as far as like seeing it from a different lens or different way. If a GM and a head coach, and then down to the position coaches, begin to view the world in this more ecologically valid or friendly way, they start to realize why and how things need to evolve. Talent identification. We no longer look at the combine in the same light as we once did. We look at the player's film and we think, what problems aren't they able to solve on Sundays based on what it is that we've seen from their film? And do we have the capability of bringing that to life? All of a sudden, our talent identification in our and who it is that we select changes. What players we might bring in because of the way that they're able to connect to our strategies, our tactics, our principles and ways of play. All of that changes. What it is that we investigate in our sports science department or our strength and conditioning department, all of a sudden we're no longer investigating the player by themselves, looking at simple, isolated things like miles per hour by themselves. We're looking at what those miles per hour were done in relation to. What problems, what problems invited that player to behave in a rapid and fast fashion in that way? And could other players behave that way if they were afforded the opportunity? So sports science changes, strength and conditioning then changes. We're no longer probably chasing things like physical metrics in the way that we once did. We're trying to support them in their gaps within their skill by increasing and improving upon what it is that supports that skill. Maybe it's rate of force development for a player. Maybe it's actually getting them exposed to more representative practice tasks in their speed and agility sessions. So they're not just trying to run faster, they're trying to run faster in relation to other humans. And then, of course, in our practice design, everything becomes more live. So they're no longer running routes on air, they're no longer cutting at a cone or on an agility ladder. They're doing it in relation to real live humans. Because at the end of the day, come Sunday, that's who they're gonna behave against. And of course, we already began to talk about how coaching changes too there.

unknown 55:22

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 55:23

I love it. I think I'm gonna add a couple more things. AI is gonna have a massive role in this because it will need that capability. I think we're gonna shift from um alignment to more harmony. So post-snap, you're gonna see more adaptedness uh in a harmonic way, like thinking like a uh like a jazz ensemble. So if you can have that adaptedness built in after the snap uh holistic approach, you're gonna start winning more games. Uh hey, I know you're gonna run, but I'm gonna throw this bet down with you right now. I got a thousand dollars that says you and I and Moose will be working somewhere in the NFL together within the next 18 months. I guarantee it. All right, a thousand bucks. Uh I hope you're right.

Shawn Myszka 55:57

I'm an optimistic fellow myself, Brian. So I'm going to uh I would love to be able to do exactly that. Lock arms with you guys to do that. This is true.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 56:05

Yeah. I tell you what, we'll just we'll take the money off the table. I said, I uh for our listeners out there in the next 18 months, uh, you're gonna hear uh us, or you're gonna see us on the sideline talking about this with some uh NFL team. I guarantee you. All right.

Shawn Myszka 56:17

Hey, there's no need to have a plan B if plan A we believe in. So let's believe in that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 56:22

Yeah. Yeah. So Sean, hey, tell our listeners where they can find your work on emergence and anything else you're doing, including your new book.

Shawn Myszka 56:28

Yeah, so people can check me out if anything intrigued them at all. I can be found on pretty much every social media channel as at Movement Miyagi. So, like Mr. Miyagi on the karate kid, but movement miyagi is where you can find me. My YouTube channel, I talk about these things. I break down plays and then talk about how it is that we can uh actually set practice activities that show what it is that unfolded in the game and how we might be able to channel that uh for enhanced skill for players of all levels. Then, of course, you mentioned emergence there, Brian. Emergentmovement.com and movement is MVMT, emergent movement.com. MVMT, that's my brand at Emergence. It's a skill education company. And then, of course, the new book, which you already held up, and I'll hold it up there one more time. Enhancing skill in American football. Myself, Tyler Yurby, Rob Gray, can be found on Amazon or on the Emergence website. And anywhere there you get your books on Amazon, you should be able to punch that in and find it if any of this stuff intrigues you in the slightest.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 57:27

I tell you what, we'll keep you on for a second. That was a blast. Uh, hope to do this again with you real soon. All right. We'll keep you on for a second.

Shawn Myszka 57:32

Thanks. I'm always willing to come on. Thank you guys. I appreciate you, and I appreciate all the listeners taking the time to come along on this journey.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera 57:38

Thanks, Sean.