August 2026 · Monthly Catch-Up, Episode 105 · Hosts: Ian Renshaw & Keith Davids

"Sir, how could you identify a player's background just by watching his batting stance?" One of coach Amladi's students asked him exactly that, after watching him sort a line of trial hopefuls into two groups without asking a single one of them where they were from.

His answer was simple but insightful. Players from South Mumbai and most of the suburbs had grown up playing overarm tennis-ball cricket. Players from Dadar, Matunga and Shivaji Park had mostly started in the underarm version, played in narrow lanes. That single difference in how the ball arrived had reshaped their technique: a compact stance, bent knees and a lower bat position, along with the balance, footwork and early ball-judgment that come from having to defend against underarm bowling in a lane with no room to spare.

That story came from one of the Constraints Collective's members in India, a cricket coaching coordinator who passed it on to Ian Renshaw during their regular monthly mentoring call, and Ian brought it into August's Constraints Collective catch-up with Keith Davids. It became the thread that ran through the whole conversation: technique isn't a thing you install on top of an athlete. It's a record of the environment that built them.

You Can Tell By The Stance

Coach Amladi's read wasn't a lucky guess, it was pattern recognition built from years of watching what underarm gully cricket does to a young batter versus what overarm does. He didn't need to ask a single trial hopeful where they'd grown up. He read it off how they stood at the crease.

"This it's always, you know, that one criticism I guess that constraints get is, oh, you don't care about technique or you don't focus on technique. But here's a really great example of how the environment shapes the techniques that you develop as well." - Ian Renshaw

Keith's read on it was that the story dissolves a false choice that critics of constraints-led coaching keep raising: environment versus technique. There is no versus. The environment is where the technique comes from, and a coach who ignores it isn't protecting technical standards, they're just missing where those standards actually came from.

Built By Manipulating The Rough

Ian followed with a story from Pete Arnott, who coaches golfers in Scotland. Most Scottish links courses run tight and short by tour standards, hemmed in by coastline, and the course supervisors let the rough grow thick to stop modern driving distances from making the old courses obsolete. The result is a generation of Scottish golfers who are accurate but short off the tee, because a stray shot into that rough costs far more than a few extra yards ever saves.

Pete's response, when he's preparing a player for a European Tour course instead of a home links, isn't a lecture on swing mechanics. He changes the environment. Players hit their tee shot, then he walks the ball back fifty or a hundred metres to simulate the driving distance they'll actually need on tour. Ian and Pete wrote this kind of environment manipulation up properly in A Constraints-Led Approach to Golf Coaching, the book they co-authored with Graeme McDowall.
(Link "A Constraints-Led Approach to Golf Coaching" to: A-Constraints-Led-Approach-to-Golf-Coaching

"So it's been really creative in the design. You know, like you're almost like artificially creating different courses by your manipulations as well." - Ian Renshaw

It's the same logic as the cricket story from the other direction: if the environment writes the technique, then changing the environment on purpose is how you rewrite it.

The Pitch They Refused To Fix

Keith brought his own version of the idea from a colleague in Buenos Aires, Juan Pablo Garcia, who sent through footage of Estudiantes de la Plata's old training ground, La Osha. The club won a championship there in the 1970s, and rather than resurface it, they've deliberately let the weather keep working on it ever since. Academy players training to go professional still learn the game on a surface that looks nothing like a manicured pitch.

"If you can play football on this surface, you can play anywhere." - Keith Davids

Ian connected it straight back to a story of his own: an Indian hockey player, a friend of a New Zealand table tennis international, who believed that Indian players developed extraordinary stick skill playing on rough turf decades ago, back when India was one of the dominant hockey nations in the world. Once international hockey moved onto astroturf, that advantage disappeared. The skill that rough turf had demanded simply wasn't needed anymore, and the game became more of a power contest. Ian paired it with a version of the same pattern from cricket, where Sri Lankan players raised on rubbish pitches full of turn and bounce have, become less equipped to play spin, potentially, since their academies moved onto better surfaces: they're not as well prepared to problem-solve their way through it.

Practising Into The Wind

The clearest example of what happens when preparation and environment don't match came from two stories out of the London 2012 Olympics. In the long jump final, the wind meant athletes had to jump into it rather than with it, a reversal from what most competitors had trained. Greg Rutherford, who took gold with the shortest winning distance since 1972, was reportedly one of the few who had actually practised jumping into a headwind. A pole vaulter at the same Games had done the opposite: disliking the wind in London, he'd moved his training indoors in Manchester, then had to compete outdoors regardless.

Keith used it to make a wider point about how coaches talk about skill. He pushes back on the standard distinction between closed skills, like a stationary shot, and open ones, like a rugby tackle, arguing it's a less accurate way of describing what's actually going on.

"A more accurate, from an ecological relational perspective, is it's better to talk about tasks that have more information and others that have less information that's free to vary. Tasks that are more stable and others that are less stable in terms of uncertainty and context changing." - Keith Davids

Even the most stable-looking tasks carry some of that variability. A crosswind at a shooting range, a subtle incline where a golfer is standing, a pool with no current compared to open water. If a competition venue can vary at all, then training for only the version that stays still is training for a version of the sport that doesn't actually exist on the day.

Different sports, different decades, same finding running underneath all of it: an athlete's technique is a readout of what their environment has already asked of them. A coach who wants to change that readout doesn't start with a cue or a correction. They start by deciding what the environment is going to ask next.

This piece draws on August's Constraints Collective monthly catch-up between Ian Renshaw and Keith Davids. Members can watch the full recording, along with the monthly newsletter and clip library, inside the members area.

Listen to the Full Podcast

Episode 105, Ian & Keith's August Monthly Catch-Up, releases today.
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