I posted in the general coaching area about invisible cognitive differences, aphantasia, inner speech, that kind of thing, and I was wondering specifically how CLA coaches actually deal with this in practice. In particular with managing how visible the constraints structures and objectives are to the boxer.
I know Newell’s framework includes cognitive and psychological factors as functional individual constraints. But every time I see individual constraints discussed in coaching contexts, the examples are always body type, fitness, experience, maybe anxiety or confidence. I can’t find much about applying it to mental processes like how someone handles ambiguity. Individual constraints should include how the athlete thinks, not just how they move.
I’m coming at this as a learner as much as a coach. Open-ended exploration without a clear problem to solve never worked well for me. When I was boxing, if you gave me a game without naming the problem, the first game I would play is “guess what this task is achieving”.
Tell me “we’re working on creating angles after the jab” and I know what I’m solving. “You can only score to the body, your partner can only move laterally” now I know the boundaries. Give me structure, then let me play. The exploration is still genuine. I’m still finding my own movement solutions. But the on-ramp is legible. Without it, I’m still creating angles and it might look like I’m achieving the goal of the session, but my focus is on understanding what the game is rather than playing it. The game I am playing isn’t creating angles, it’s guessing whether I have worked out the coaches desired objective, and so the resulting skills aren’t internalised against something I can map onto actual boxing.
For some boxers, rather than “we’re working on creating angles after the jab” it might be better to say “we’re finding ways to land on someone who won’t stay in front of you.” I think there’s a need to pitch this additional information at the right level for the athlete. Desirable difficulty assumes the boxer is engaged with the right task. If the ambiguity redirects cognitive resources from “how do I score” to “what is this exercise for,” the difficulty isn’t desirable, it’s misdirected. The boxer isn’t struggling with the movement problem; they’re struggling with a metacognitive problem that has nothing to do with boxing.
CLA’s implicit learning approach assumes the boxer can enter an ambiguous task space and begin searching for affordances. For a lot of boxers, that works. For those who need to understand the system before they can explore within it, the ambiguity itself becomes the problem. Because they need to map the problem space first, then explore. If the map isn’t there, the exploration doesn’t start.
From a diversity point of view, there’s literature on intolerance of uncertainty and preference for structured, rule-based learning in autism for example. While CLA is built on self-organisation, exploration, letting solutions emerge from ambiguity.
I know the constraints I’m describing are just normal CLA session design. The question I’m really asking is about the explicit framing around them. How much do you tell the athlete about what you’re trying to achieve, and do you vary that based on who you’re working with?
Do you vary the on-ramp based on who you’re working with? And if you had an athlete you knew was neurodivergent, a systems thinker, or someone who struggles with ambiguity, what would you actually change (if anything)?
