This series attempts to translate some of the terms and clear up some of the misconceptions in the Ecological Approach discourse from a mostly Judo context. I assume you are already familiar with what the ecological approach is and the discussion surrounding it. I believe the current discourse is largely driven by poor communication that fails to help people understand what the ecological approach actually encompasses. Most good explanations come from an academic view and would make sense to people who have already read and understood the literature. The goal of this series is to bridge the gap between a “dumbed down” explanation that oversimplifies and causes further misunderstanding, and an accurate but academic explanation. I do not recommend using this series as a guide to run your practice. If you’re looking for guides to run your practice, or accurate explanations there is plenty of other content out there. Through this series, I hope to help people understand terms used within the Ecological Approach. This will help those of you who wish to read further into the existing content out there"

Other than the toxic discourse emerging from the BJJ sphere, I think the problem is that Eco advocates are trying to explain their stance utilizing terms that have similar but different meaning outside of the Eco discourse.

For Example:

Those are all common ways people have been “simplifying” explanations for those terms. While they aren’t exactly wrong, it’s also not quite correct. When told this, people tend to get defensive that you are implying that they don’t know what organizing yourself or what a performance environment is, or that what seems to look like situational sparring to them isn’t exactly that.There is further confusion due to people using the terms Eco, Ecological Dynamics, Ecological Approach and Constraints Led Approach (CLA) interchangeably. In addition, it’s difficult to explain the differences between the approaches - all the experts have different takes. Then you also have people saying the right answer is a hybrid approach.

For example, “Interest vs Hobby”. In casual conversation, these words are often used interchangeably. However “interest” refers to something you are curious about, while a “hobby” is an activity in which you actively participate, a distinction that matters in the field of psychology and career planning.

I will go over what CLA, Ecological Approach and Ecological Dynamics is. I’m not an academic expert, so it is based on my limited understanding of the books and research papers I’ve read. I’ll explain it in a way that I feel is the best middle ground between being correct and having people understand it, and will also put it in a judo context with examples whenever possible.

Most of what this series will cover is just scratching the surface of the approach.

Everyone talks and argues about CLA and Eco. Still, there’s very little discussion of what I believe are the core tenets of Ecological Dynamics: Direct Perception and Perception Action Coupling. Ecological Dynamics is about understanding how people move and act by looking at how we continuously interact with everything around us. In Judo we move depending on what our opponent is doing and we don’t follow a fixed plan in our head; we change what we do based on what’s happening around us. There is no need for the brain to do complex thinking or step by step-by-step processing before acting. While the traditional (information processing approach) sees it as a series of mental steps inside the brain followed by a planned action.

Direct Perception means your brain gets enough information from your eyes and body directly from the environment so you can react quickly without having to build an internal map (“muscle memory”). Your brain does not need to execute a stored plan. It goes a bit beyond this but I might make a post on in the future.

Perception Action Coupling means what you see tells you how to move, and the way you move affects what you see next. The two are linked and happening at the same time like when riding a bike or playing video games. What you see on the screen of a video game, or feel while riding the bike directly affects what your hands do.

In my What's Missing from all the Eco vs Drilling post I compare it to believing the Earth is flat vs round. I used that analogy because sailors managed to sail the seas even though they thought the Earth was flat. (more like heliocentric vs geocentric to be historically accurate) But if you believe the Earth is flat, the way you approach certain things, such as designing satellites or sailing a boat, would be completely different, even if there’s overlap on what you do. It doesn't mean that people didn't sail boats at all before they discovered the Earth was round (or believed the Sun revolved around the earth). Thus if you believe in Ecological Dynamics, your approach to drilling (if any) would be very different than if you believed in the Information Processing Approach. It is one or the other; it can’t be both. There is no hybrid approach.

Where I think this analogy falls short is that we know the Earth is round, but we don't know that Ecological Dynamics is 100% correct. We may find a better model or theory to follow or explain what is actually happening in the human brain in the future which may or may not build upon Ecological Dynamics.

The Ecological Dynamics is actually a relatively new and minority position in the field of learning. The reason I still follow this approach and framework when I design practice is because it answers a lot of questions for me that the traditional approach fails to answer.

The Information Processing Approach (IP) explains these examples above by saying that the athletes are anticipating physical cues and using predictive skills from repetitive practice, but to me this explanation fits the Ecological Dynamics’ perception action coupling explanation better. For more examples you can read the studies and Rob Grays books. These are all things that can be easily related to Judo such as reacting in time to uke’s movement.

With that said, ecological approach not actually as fringe as you think and is being used in many other professional sports.

If you understand all this and still disagree and think that humans do learn by storing movement solutions in their brain like a file cabinet to pull out later to use, then great! You actually know what you're disagreeing with. Even if you don’t fully understand the argument for why Eco proponents hold their beliefs. This is already a huge step forward from "we already do this" and "it's just situational sparring rebranded"

Assuming you understand what Ecological Dynamics is from the previous section, how is it different from the Ecological Approach? The obvious answer is that it’s an approach that believes in Ecological Dynamics. What is an approach from the coaching / skill acquisition context? I would describe it as a roadmap or philosophy that influences how you teach, coach or do something.

For example, how you manage a company. Flat and hierarchical organizational structures are incompatible. But you can have a hierarchical structure that has top-down focus decision making or bottom-up focus decision making, or some mixture of both. These two are both hierarchical but are compatible. Constraints led Approach, Non linear Pedagogy and the Ecological Approach would be similar and compatible in this sense.

In an information-processing approach, you believe you store the ideal solution to a scenario by drilling an ideal technique, and then pull it back out when it is needed. This is fundamentally incompatible with the Ecological Approach.

CLA and the Ecological Approach are closely related and frequently overlap in both research and practice. CLA is basically manipulating constraints to shape learning, and the Ecological Approach focuses on how the individual interacts with the task and environment.

Under the Ecological approach, CLA is one of many tools used in coaching. Some other compatible tools include desirable difficulty (challenge point hypothesis), differential learning, representative task design, internal vs external focus of attention, self-organization, degeneracy, nonlinear pedagogy, etc.

You can be using CLA but totally ignore or do the opposite of what other tools suggest, this is when you get people saying "you're not doing eco right", or “situational sparring isn't exactly eco”.

Imagine you're trying to explain what multiplication is to someone who doesn't know what it is but knows what addition is. You try to simplify it using the Peano Axiom to describe it but they have no idea what you're saying or what the Peano Axiom is. So you simplify it even further and just say it's recursively applying addition (or repeated addition). Then they reply with "oh so it's just addition rebranded with a fancy term". This is basically what we're dealing with here.

This definition of repeated addition only applies to natural numbers. It doesn't work the same when it comes to fractions, irrational numbers, real numbers, complex numbers, infinity, vectors and matrices etc. Understanding how it works can take your math beyond basic levels. Calling it situational sparring is basically calling it repeated addition in this context.

What usually happens is people don’t get the full accurate explanation so the eco person tries to simplify the explanation and then people think it’s just situational sparring. Technically true, but also not really.

In the next part we will dive further into why it’s not really the same as situational sparring.