Originally Posted By 18B30:
Cardio, Cardio, Cardio…..the Troll (if you were a Det A cat, you know) would run us in full kit, 300 yard to the shoot house and then through the shoot house.  Full kit, explosive breach, target discrimination, and my personal favorite nods on a hot humid West Virginia evenings.

18 series cat is gonna have their own personal stories. My biggest contribution to how to survive a real life gunfight would be you have to be in better cardio shape than your opponent.

In a somewhat related matter, I am alive today because in 1997. I had a six minute ground fight with a man intent on killing me and the only reason I survived and he didn’t  was I had better cardio..

Your mileage will certainly vary… 18 Z 50

What if drills aren’t the answer?
What if skills aren’t things we install, but things that emerge?
What if players don’t need to be corrected so much as given space to discover?

But here’s the thing: the best players I’ve ever coached—the ones who adjusted in real time, who solved strange problems on strange balls, who made magic in motion—didn’t always shine in drills. And the ones who looked flawless in drills? Too often, they disappeared when the whistle blew for 6v6.

That disconnect broke something open in me.

I began to see what we were really rewarding: obedience over awareness. Compliance over creativity. The ability to replicate, not the courage to explore.

If we want adaptable, aware, game-ready athletes, we have to stop worshiping the clean rep and start honoring the real rep.

We must care less about what a rep looks like, and more about what it demands of the athlete’s attention.

I stopped asking, “How do I get them to do it right?”
And started asking, “How do I help them figure it out?”

Obedience doesn’t prepare them for that.
Adaptability does.

We don’t need players who memorize.
We need players who notice. Who solve. Who create—while moving, while breathing, while responding to a world that doesn’t wait.

Which means our job isn’t to give them the answer.
It’s to build the space where the answer might emerge.

Not Every Rep Is Created Equal

We’ve been taught to chase reps.
But what we should be chasing is richness.

A rep is only valuable if it feels like the game.
If it carries information.
If it matters.

Otherwise? You’re rehearsing movements in a vacuum—and hoping they somehow transfer.

Changing movement problems require adaptable movement solutions, so it is paramount for coaches to consider how repetitions unfold in practice. Bernstein’s notion of “repetition without repetition” (1967, p. 134) would see performers solving alive problems of varying complexity in contextual situations under changing constraints. Repetition without repetition is the pursuit of the process of solving movement problems again and again with adapted “techniques” rather than the pursuit of a perfect pattern execution (Bernstein, 1967). For coaches, this means constraints are manipulated from rep to rep (e.g., starting position, number of opponents or teammates, time remaining on the shot clock, and space size). It should be noted that very little might change in the setup of the problem; however, the coach might educate the player’s attention or intention, shaping the way they engage with the next repetition, which encourages repetition without repetition. As Bernstein famously stated at the end of his quote, “if this position is ignored, is merely mechanical repetition by rote, a method which has been discredited in pedagogy for some time.” After 17 years of coaching, I couldn’t agree more with him: variability in movement solutions (through presenting variable movement problems) and the pursuit of authenticity are vital.

...In the pursuit of creative and adaptable behavior, there is value in viewing the movements of others, not to replicate them but to utilize them as an example that guides how one may attempt to interact with the problems they face. Exploratory behavior, while immersed in slices of the game, has the potential to help expand one’s movement skill set. Lastly, if a coach notices a player routinely moving in non-functional ways (i.e., they aren’t solving many problems) or their movement could potentially lead to injury, it’s here where the coach might provide some explicit guidance, educate their attention to specifying information within the problem, or manipulate other constraints to help lead them away from the ineffective behavior.