The Constraints Collective

Keith, Ian and Carl Woods talk through ideas for a series of papers that build on the tight-loose paper Carl and his colleagues wrote. It is an unscripted conversation, edited to remove the catch-up chat and production talk, so you can listen in as the ideas take shape. They move from affordance-based design in architecture and the reflective glass at UQ, through javelin, baseball and the Wallabies, to schools, skate parks and grey spaces, and then to what a design logic for learning design ...

This month's guest podcast: Ian Renshaw and Keith Davids are joined again by Ed Coughlan and Alan Dunton from MTU, a year on from their first conversation about the fully online master's programme in skill acquisition they teach with their colleague Sam Jermyn. The first cohort graduates on 30 October. The conversation covers why the programme is capped at 25 students (20 full-time, five part-time) and why the cohort's mix of sports, from police training to Brazilian jiu-jitsu, matters; the ...

In this month’s roundup, Keith Davids and Ian Renshaw go back to where sports science began. In 1975, Liverpool Polytechnic launched the world’s first single-honours sports science degree at Byrom Street, Liverpool. It grew out of three scientists’ support work with Everton Football Club. As the 1986–89 cohort gathers in Liverpool for its 40th anniversary reunion, Keith and Ian trace how that small course shaped sports science across the UK and around the world. They talk about the people and...

This week Ian Renshaw and Keith Davids go back to episode 21 from October 2024, our conversation with Ana Ramos, a volleyball coach, coach educator and researcher at the University of Porto. Keith was involved in Ana's PhD and hosted the original episode with Martyn; Ian comes to it as a listener. They start with how Ana's research was built: action research cycles (observe, analyse, plan, act, reflect) run across full competitive seasons, using mixed methods that combine numbers on team beha...

Part Two of this month's guest podcast: Ian Renshaw and Marco Perazzo (filling in for Keith Davids) continue the conversation with MMA coach Adam Singer (SBG Athens). Adam's whole programming philosophy compresses to three words — "do the thing," scaled for safety and variability, judged only by whether it helps his practice. The conversation covers what Adam now calls periodization of goals rather than periodization of constraints (broad and varied far from a fight, narrowing toward specific...