The Adaptable Athlete Podcast

Send us Fan Mail This episode is a different format from our usual show. It's Ian Renshaw's acceptance speech for the Emergence Lifetime Achievement Award in Movement and Skill Acquisition, recorded live and shared here in full. Ian is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Queensland University of Technology and one of the most respected names in the constraint-led approach. He has spent over 30 years teaching and researching across England, New Zealand, and Australia, co-edited books with Keith ...

Send us Fan Mail Is speed a capacity, or a skill? Most coaching treats them as the same thing, and that's where the gap starts. Speed as a capacity, not an outcome: why a stopwatch measures something real, but not the thing that actually shows up in a gameSpeed through the constraints triangle: task, environment, and individual, why the same physical capacity looks completely different depending on the sport, the surface, and the athlete standing in front of youSpeed as problem-solving: why r...

Send us Fan Mail What if skill isn't something an athlete has, but something a moment gives them? This episode pulls together three conversations that each answer a piece of that question, more directly than any single guest could get to on their own. What skill actually is: Duarte Araújo defines skill as potential, not possession, using an example from Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon to show how the same person moves completely differently depending on their circumstancesThe mechani...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when a strength coach spends nine years unlearning everything she was taught about "correct" technique? Molly Binetti is the Women's Basketball Sports Performance coach at the University of South Carolina, where she's built a program around a really high player availability rate and a training philosophy that runs counter to how most strength coaches are taught to operate. She brings a variability-driven, athlete-centered approach to a field that still leans heav...

Send us Fan Mail What does it actually mean to train a boxer to be adaptable when the most representative practice, hard sparring, also causes permanent damage? Adam Haniver is a boxing coach and England Boxing DISE program lead who's spent years working through exactly that tension. He brings an ecological dynamics lens to a sport that has historically treated tradition as gospel, and the conversation goes deep on skill acquisition, affordances, and what most boxing training gets fundamental...