Books
Coaching
Every Moment Matters: How the World’s Best Coaches Inspire Their Athletes and Build Championship Teams: How do the world’s most successful coaches get the best from their athletes? How do top coaches design practices, inspire their players, and build teams that sustain their excellence season after season? How do they instill high-performing behaviors? Do they coach men and women differently? What about coaching their own children?
The Coach’s Guide to Teaching: The mark of a great coach is a constant desire to learn and grow. A hunger to use whatever can make them better. The best-selling author of Teach Like a Champion and Reading Reconsidered brings his considerable knowledge about the science of classroom teaching to the sports coaching world to create championship caliber coaches on the court and field. What great classroom teachers do is relevant to coaches in profound ways. After all, coaches are at their core teachers.
The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance: “The Inner Game” is the one played within the mind of the player, against the hurdles of self-doubt, nervousness, and lapses in concentration. Gallwey shows us how to overcome these obstacles by trusting the intuitive wisdom of our bodies and achieving a state of “relaxed concentration.” With chapters devoted to trusting the self and changing habits, it is no surprise then, that Gallwey’s method has had an impact far beyond the confines of the tennis court.
Ecological Dynamics & The Constraints-led Approach
The first two books that anyone interested in this aproach to skill acquisition should read are Rob Gray’s works on the subject. Gray does an excellent job of distilling the information into a form that is approachable for most people.
How We Learn to Move: A Revolution in the Way We Coach & Practice Sports Skills: How We Learn to Move enhances sports coaching and skill acquisition, advocating for a constraints-led, exploratory, and self-organizing approach to training, moving beyond traditional methods to enhance skill development, injury prevention, and performance.
Learning to Optimize Movement: Harnessing the Power of the Athlete-Environment Relationship: Learning to Optimize Movement examines evidence-based principles for learning and coaching movement, offering contemporary caes and practice activities from sports and exercise contexts as real world examples of effectiveness.
The books listed below are excellent resources, but are also much more academic. If you decide that you are serious about this approach they are worth considering, and are listed in what we consider order of importance.
The Constraints-Led Approach: Principles for Sports Coaching and Practice Design: The Constraints-Led Principles for Sports Coaching and Practice Design enables practitioners to implement constraints-led training in their work.
Nonlinear Pedagogy in Skill Acquisition: An Introduction: Nonlinear Pedagogy in Skill Acquisition is a comprehensive guide that explores the application of nonlinear pedagogy in sports and physical education, emphasizing the customization of learning environments and the effective use of constraints in skill development and learning transfer.
Introduction to Ecological Psychology: Concepts are presented in the book using a conversational writing style and everyday examples that introduce novice readers to the problems of perception and action and demonstrate the application of the ecological approach theories to broader philosophical questions. Blau and Wagman explain how ecological psychology might be pertinent to both classic and newer issues in psychology. The authors move beyond the traditional scope of the discipline to effectively illustrate concepts of dynamics, evolution, self-organization, and physical intelligence in ecological psychology.
Affective Gibsonian Psychology: Affective Gibsonian Psychology presents the first comprehensive ecological approach to our affective engagement with the environment, drawing on James Gibson’s new foundation of psychology.