Episode #15 - Shawn Myszka: Movement Mastery

Shawn is the owner and founder of Movement Mastery: The Art of Optimizing Movement.  He's a movement coach for a dozen NFL athletes and continually looks to push the envelop on what makes great athletes - great!  To him, and I agree, this means movement - not necessarily strength, or weight room numbers, or power, or motor performance - rather great movement qualities, attuned perception and action coupling, free and creative thinkers/movers, and refined motor learning processes. 
In this episode we discuss everything from…

• What a movement first approach means
• How coaches can tweak agility training for better outcomes
• What reactive agility really is
• How warm-ups could be better structured for the subsequent tasks of sport
• Mistakes coaches make during practices in terms of removing messiness, mistakes, and creativity
• Where he found his roots in dynamic systems theory, a constraints led approach, and ecological psychology
• We talk about the greatest mover of all-time - Barry Sanders
• Much More

Favorite Quotes:

• "My only goal with athletes is getting them better when and where it counts, which is in the arena of sport"
• "Sport is a problem solving activity"
• "If the perception is inaccurate or wrong - the action won't be appropriate"
• "I don't refer to it as a warm-up, but a movement preparation scheme.  Warming-up is general; I'm trying to prepare behaviors"
• "A major mistake I see is the training environment is not truly representative that of which happens in the sporting environment"
• "An offensive player and a defensive player have much different requirements in sport - so should their warm-up, training, and patterns"
• "I try and learn from different fields - I've gone to watch dance instructors, martial arts instructors, teachers - it should come as no surpass that we can learn from various disciplines" 
• "Often we gets athletes so restricted on reproducing what we deem an ideal movement pattern, that we don't even know if it's ideal or optimal for that respective athlete.  Instead we should help guide and be a facilitator rather than an instructor"

Books:

• The Coordination and Regulation of Movements - Nikolai Bernstein
• Non-Linear Pedagogy in Skill Acquisition - Keith David 
• Perception - Cognition - Decision: Training the Quiet Eye - Joan Vickers

Social Media:

• Twitter - @MovementMiyagi
• https://footballbeyondthestats.wordpress.com/
• http://www.optimizemovement.com/sq/35323-movement-mastery-intro