The Constraints Collective #87 Tom Parry and Tyler Yearby
Mar 27, 2026
Tom Parry, Kinesiology director focused on motor-skill learning and ecological dynamics. Tyler Yearby, co-director of Emergence, specialising in coach education and movement skill development. They debate opposed vs unopposed practice, purposeful task design, staged progression from 1v0 to pressure, ‘aliveness’ in training, multimodal perception cues, and tricks to shape attention and transfer to games.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Only Use Unopposed Practice With Intent
- Coaches must justify when they use unopposed tasks rather than defaulting to them.
- Tom Parry and Tyler Yearby wrote the paper to explain appropriate use and to push more time toward alive, opposed practice for transfer to games.
Make Unopposed Work Messy And Informational
- Design unopposed tasks that embed interference or moving bodies so they still require decision making.
- Example: rather than static solo passing, add moving bodies to force curving runs and direction changes.
Prioritise Representative Opposed Practice
- Spend the majority of limited practice time in representative, opposed tasks for transfer to competition.
- Prioritise live movement problems so athletes attune to specifying informational variables under pressure.