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Flow is an optimal state of absorption that may be experienced in appropriately challenging and intrinsically motivating activities such as sports. Flow may be an important concept for understanding the emergence and role of sport in society, yet theoretical explanations of flow have had limited success explaining, predicting, and facilitating flow in sport. Here, we use the ecological dynamics framework, seeking to resolve foundational issues in an explanation of flow, building towards a theory of flow in sport. To address this challenge, we highlight the utility of ecological conceptualisations of experience, intention, skill, attention, information, and temporality, in explanations of flow experiences in sport, before discussing some novel empirical predictions motivated by the theory. We suggest that a multiscale ecological dynamics approach is well equipped to explore flow in performer-environment systems that display interaction-dominant dynamics and conclude by outlining avenues for future research created by an ecological dynamics theory of flow in sport., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest No sources of funding from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not for profit sectors were used to assist in the preparation of this article. We have no known conflict of interests., (Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

In our societally extractive age, sport science risks being swept up in the intensifying desire to commodify the experiences of those that scientists proclaim to study. Coupled with the techno-digital revolution, this stems from a vertical (onto)logic that frames the sporting landscape as a static space filled with discrete objects waiting for us to capture, analyse, re-present and sell on as knowledge. Not only does this commodification degrade primary experience in the false hope of epistemological objectivity, it reinforces the unidirectionality of extractivism by setting inquirer apart from, and above of, inquiry. Here, we advocate for a different, more sentient logic grounded in the relationality of gifting as understood in indigenous philosophies. This foregrounds an ecological orientation to scholarship that sets out neither to objectify or describe that which is of concern, but to correspond with its becoming. On this, there are three threads we cast forward. First, in a corresponsive sport science, inhabitants are not objects of analysis, but lines in-becoming, who in answering to others, form knots in a meshwork. These knots constitute communal places in which inhabitants have joined with the differentiating coming-into-being of others. Second, knowledge is not authoritatively (re)cognitive, but humbly ecological; not produced vertically through imposition, but grown longitudinally in responsively moving from place to place. Third, research does not follow a vertically extractive (onto)logic, but is a practice of participant observation. This perspective appreciates that we, sport scientists, are also lines in-becoming that form parts of the knots in which we seek to know. In coda, our thesis is not a call for more qualitative or applied research in the sport sciences. It is a call to response-ably open up to that which sparks our curiosity, answering to what is shared with care, sensitivity and sincerity., (© 2023. Crown.)

Background: Motor performances of youth are related to growth and maturity status, among other factors., Aim: To estimate the contribution of skeletal maturity status per se to the motor performances of female athletes aged 10-15 years and the mediation effects of growth status on the relationships., Subjects and Methods: Skeletal age (TW3 RUS SA), body size, proportions, estimated fat-free mass (FFM), motor performances, training history and participation motivation were assessed in 80 non-skeletally mature female participants in several sports. Hierarchical and regression-based statistical mediation analyses were used., Results: SA per se explained a maximum of 1.8% and 5.8% of the variance in motor performances of athletes aged 10-12 and 13-15 years, respectively, over and above that explained by covariates. Body size, proportions, and hours per week of training and participation motivation explained, respectively, a maximum of 40.7%, 18.8%, and 22.6% of the variance in performances. Mediation analysis indicated specific indirect effects of SA through stature and body mass, alone or in conjunction with FFM on performances., Conclusion: SA per se accounted for small and non-significant amounts of variance in several motor performances of female youth athletes; rather, SA influenced performances indirectly through effects on stature, body mass and estimated FFM.

The modification of child-sports aims to develop an optimal learning environment that facilitates the emergence of desirable psychological outcomes (e.g., self-efficacy). The aim of the study was to assess the effect of reducing net height and court size on self-efficacy and shot-efficacy of U-10 tennis players in a real-game context. Twenty U-10 tennis players (M = 9.46, SD = 0.66 years of age; M = 3.65, SD = 1.53 years of tennis experience) played two round-robin tournaments one week apart in the same order and schedule. The first tournament was played under the International Tennis Federation's Tennis 10s regulation at green stage (GT). Afterwards, the modified tournament (MT) was played with the same regulation GT, however, net height (0.91 m-0.80 m) and court size (23.77 m × 8.23 m-18.00 m × 8.23 m) were reduced. Results accomplished using Bayesian and Frequentist inferences showed an increase in players' self-efficacy when serving in MT than GT (BF 10  = 4.796; δ = -0.576; and p = .011). This is increase may be due to a reduction in their serving faults in MT (BF 10  = 6.169; δ = -0.591; and p = .010). Therefore, reducing net height and court size enhances the serve performance and self-efficacy and thus promotes positive tennis experiences., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Background: Promoting youth sports participation is an excellent strategy to improve health and high-level sports competition around the world., Aims: The aim of this study was to analyse the potential of commonly used physical-fitness (PF) tests to discriminate against athletes from non-athletes in young populations., Material and Methods: One thousand eight hundred and thirty-one youth people were analysed (boys: 514 non-athletes and 401 athletes; girls: 722 non-athletes and 194 athletes) aged 10-18 years (y). Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), muscular fitness (MF), agility and speed were tested using PF tests., Results: Application of receiver operating characteristics curves was used to assess the discriminatory potential of each PF for distinguishing athletes from non-athletes, with an area under the curve (AUC) higher than 65% (0.65). In the oldest groups (≥16 y), the speed test at 20 m in boys (AUC = 0.70) and horizontal jump test in girls (AUC = 0.75) were the best discriminators, while the push-up-test (AUC 10-11 y boys = 0.68, AUC 14-15 y boys = 0.68, AUC 10-11 y girls = 0.73, AUC 12-13 y girls = 0.87) and the PACER (AUC boys: 12-13 y = 0.68 and AUC girls 14-15 y = 0.73) appeared to be better discriminators than other PF tests, for the younger age-groups., Conclusion: The speed-test at 20 m and the horizontal-jump were the best PF to identify older adolescents with athletic potential, while the PACER and push-up tests were the most discriminatory for the younger adolescents., (© 2021 Scandinavian Society of Clinical Physiology and Nuclear Medicine. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Investigation into correlates across all levels of the socio-ecological model predictive of objectively measured physical activity has rarely been assessed in adults. While considering a diversity of correlates, we determined which correlates best predict sensor-based moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and sedentary-time (ST) in adults. A Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detection algorithm was used to hierarchize the correlates associated with high ST (≥66.6 th percentile) and sufficient MVPA (≥150 min/week) in 865 adults. The main correlate predictive of being active was currently partaking in sport/exercise. The following relevant correlates were being male for the exercisers and having trees in the neighbourhood for the non-exercisers. The final correlate to boost male exercisers' MVPA was having lots of shops in the neighbourhood and not having television in the bedroom for women. The primary correlate for high ST was job activity level, with individuals having highly active jobs being less likely to exhibit high levels of ST; being single, male, and a former athlete also increased the chances of being highly sedentary. To increase adults' MVPA, promotion of sport participation, neighbourhood landscape planning, shop availability, as well as limiting television in the bedroom must be prioritized. For counteracting ST, increasing workplace activity level is warranted.

Background: Physical activity (PA) and physical fitness (PF) are crucial for bone health. However, children participating in competitive sports with high PA are at a greater risk of fracture from trauma or overuse. Given the importance of bone development during adolescence, associations between commonly used physical fitness tests with distal third radius (R-SoS) and midshaft tibia (T-SoS) speed of sound by quantitative ultrasound were assessed in adolescent athletes and nonathletes., Hypothesis: The relationship between physical fitness tests and R-SoS and T-SoS will differ depending on sex and athletic status., Study Design: Cross-sectional study., Level of Evidence: Level 3., Methods: Physical fitness of 285 boys (156 athletes) and 311 girls (74 athletes) aged 10 to 18 years was assessed through strength, speed, agility, and cardiorespiratory tests. Linear regression was used to assess the associations of physical fitness tests with R-SoS and T-SoS., Results: For boys, favorable associations were observed between physical fitness tests with R-SoS in athletes and T-SoS in both athletes and nonathletes ( P < 0.05). For nonathlete girls, favorable associations were found for handgrip (R-SoS and T-SoS, both P < 0.05), whereas the progressive aerobic cardiovascular endurance run, vertical jump, speed at 20 m and 40 m were only favorably associated with T-SoS. For athlete girls, the association between handgrip ( P = 0.03), vertical jump, and 4 × 10 m shuttle run ( P < 0.05) with T-SoS was significantly related to a bone outcome., Conclusion: The handgrip test and vertical jump were associated with T-SoS in boys and girls independent of sport status. These results suggest that physical fitness is associated with bone health in adolescents, particularly boys, and that the relationship between physical fitness and bone may differ depending on sex and athletic status., Clinical Relevance: Physical fitness tests are simple, easy-to-use tools for monitoring bone health and should be used by sport and health professsionals to promote healthy sport participation and prevent bone injuries.

The evolution of performance analysis within sports sciences is tied to technology development and practitioner demands. However, how individual and collective patterns self-organize and interact in invasive team sports remains elusive. Social network analysis has been recently proposed to resolve some aspects of this problem, and has proven successful in capturing collective features resulting from the interactions between team members as well as a powerful communication tool. Despite these advances, some fundamental team sports concepts such as an attacking play have not been properly captured by the more common applications of social network analysis to team sports performance. In this article, we propose a novel approach to team sports performance centered on sport concepts, namely that of an attacking play. Network theory and tools including temporal and bipartite or multilayered networks were used to capture this concept. We put forward eight questions directly related to team performance to discuss how common pitfalls in the use of network tools for capturing sports concepts can be avoided. Some answers are advanced in an attempt to be more precise in the description of team dynamics and to uncover other metrics directly applied to sport concepts, such as the structure and dynamics of attacking plays. Finally, we propose that, at this stage of knowledge, it may be advantageous to build up from fundamental sport concepts toward complex network theory and tools, and not the other way around.

This study examined the continuous interpersonal interactions of performers in dyadic systems in team sports, as a function of changing information constraints. As a task vehicle, we investigated how attackers attained success in 1v1 sub-phases of basketball by exploring angular relations with immediate opponents and the basket. We hypothesized that angular relations would convey information for the attackers to dribble past defenders. Four basketball players performed as an attacker and defender in 1v1 sub-phases of basketball, in which the co-positioning and orientation of participants relative to the basket was manipulated. After video recording performance behaviors, we digitized participant movement displacement trajectories and categorized trials as successful or unsuccessful (from the attackers' viewpoint). Results revealed that, to successfully dribble past a defender, attackers tended to explore the left hand side of the space by defenders by increasing their angular velocity and decreasing their angular variability, especially in the center of the court. Interpersonal interactions and goal-achievement in attacker-defender dyads appear to have been constrained by the angular relations sustained between participants relative to the scoring target. Results revealed the functionality of exploratory behaviors of participants attempting re-align spatial relations with an opponent in 1v1 sub-phases of team games., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Similar to other complex systems in nature (e.g., a hunting pack, flocks of birds), sports teams have been modeled as social neurobiological systems in which interpersonal coordination tendencies of agents underpin team swarming behaviors. Swarming is seen as the result of agent co-adaptation to ecological constraints of performance environments by collectively perceiving specific possibilities for action (affordances for self and shared affordances). A major principle of invasion team sports assumed to promote effective performance is to outnumber the opposition (creation of numerical overloads) during different performance phases (attack and defense) in spatial regions adjacent to the ball. Such performance principles are assimilated by system agents through manipulation of numerical relations between teams during training in order to create artificially asymmetrical performance contexts to simulate overloaded and underloaded situations. Here we evaluated effects of different numerical relations differentiated by agent skill level, examining emergent inter-individual, intra- and inter-team coordination. Groups of association football players (national--NLP and regional-level--RLP) participated in small-sided and conditioned games in which numerical relations between system agents were manipulated (5v5, 5v4 and 5v3). Typical grouping tendencies in sports teams (major ranges, stretch indices, distances of team centers to goals and distances between the teams' opposing line-forces in specific team sectors) were recorded by plotting positional coordinates of individual agents through continuous GPS tracking. Results showed that creation of numerical asymmetries during training constrained agents' individual dominant regions, the underloaded teams' compactness and each team's relative position on-field, as well as distances between specific team sectors. We also observed how skill level impacted individual and team coordination tendencies. Data revealed emergence of co-adaptive behaviors between interacting neurobiological social system agents in the context of sport performance. Such observations have broader implications for training design involving manipulations of numerical relations between interacting members of social collectives.

Research on 1vs1 sub-phases in team sports has shown how one player coordinates his/her actions with his/her opponent and the location of a target/goal to attain performance objectives. In this study, we extended this approach to analysis of 5vs5 competitive performance in the team sport of futsal to provide a performance analysis framework that explains how players coordinate their actions to create/prevent opportunities to score goals. For this purpose, we recorded all 10 futsal matches of the 2009 Lusophony Games held in Lisbon. We analysed the displacement trajectories of a shooting attacker and marking defender in plays ending in a goal, a goalkeeper's save, and a defender's interception, at four specific moments during performance: (1) assisting attacker's ball reception and (2) moment of passing, (3) shooter's ball reception, and (4), shot on goal. Statistical analysis showed that when a goal was scored, the defender's angle to the goal and to the attacker tended to decrease, the attacker was able to move to the same distance to the goal alongside the defender, and the attacker was closer to the defender and moving at the same velocity (at least) as the defender. This study identified emergent patterns of coordination between attackers and defenders under key competitive task constraints, such as the location of the goal, which supported successful performance in futsal.

Previous research has proposed that team coordination is based on shared knowledge of the performance context, responsible for linking teammates' mental representations for collective, internalized action solutions. However, this representational approach raises many questions including: how do individual schemata of team members become reformulated together? How much time does it take for this collective cognitive process to occur? How do different cues perceived by different individuals sustain a general shared mental representation? This representational approach is challenged by an ecological dynamics perspective of shared knowledge in team coordination. We argue that the traditional shared knowledge assumption is predicated on 'knowledge about' the environment, which can be used to share knowledge and influence intentions of others prior to competition. Rather, during competitive performance, the control of action by perceiving surrounding informational constraints is expressed in 'knowledge of' the environment. This crucial distinction emphasizes perception of shared affordances (for others and of others) as the main communication channel between team members during team coordination tasks. From this perspective, the emergence of coordinated behaviours in sports teams is based on the formation of interpersonal synergies between players resulting from collective actions predicated on shared affordances.

This article summarizes research from an ecological dynamics program of work on team sports exemplifying how small-sided and conditioned games (SSCG) can enhance skill acquisition and decision-making processes during training. The data highlighted show how constraints of different SSCG can facilitate emergence of continuous interpersonal coordination tendencies during practice to benefit team game players.

This paper highlights the importance of examining interpersonal interactions in performance analysis of team sports, predicated on the relationship between perception and action, compared to the traditional cataloguing of actions by individual performers. We discuss how ecological dynamics may provide a potential unifying theoretical and empirical framework to achieve this re-emphasis in research. With reference to data from illustrative studies on performance analysis and sport expertise, we critically evaluate some of the main assumptions and methodological approaches with regard to understanding how information influences action and decision-making during team sports performance. Current data demonstrate how the understanding of performance behaviours in team sports by sport scientists and practitioners may be enhanced with a re-emphasis in research on the dynamics of emergent ongoing interactions. Ecological dynamics provides formal and theoretically grounded descriptions of player-environment interactions with respect to key performance goals and the unfolding information of competitive performance. Developing these formal descriptions and explanations of sport performance may provide a significant contribution to the field of performance analysis, supporting design and intervention in both research and practice.

In nature, the interactions between agents in a complex system (fish schools; colonies of ants) are governed by information that is locally created. Each agent self-organizes (adjusts) its behaviour, not through a central command centre, but based on variables that emerge from the interactions with other system agents in the neighbourhood. Self-organization has been proposed as a mechanism to explain the tendencies for individual performers to interact with each other in field-invasion sports teams, displaying functional co-adaptive behaviours, without the need for central control. The relevance of self-organization as a mechanism that explains pattern-forming dynamics within attacker-defender interactions in field-invasion sports has been sustained in the literature. Nonetheless, other levels of interpersonal coordination, such as intra-team interactions, still raise important questions, particularly with reference to the role of leadership or match strategies that have been prescribed in advance by a coach. The existence of key properties of complex systems, such as system degeneracy, nonlinearity or contextual dependency, suggests that self-organization is a functional mechanism to explain the emergence of interpersonal coordination tendencies within intra-team interactions. In this opinion article we propose how leadership may act as a key constraint on the emergent, self-organizational tendencies of performers in field-invasion sports.

In this paper we examined the influence of opposing players constraining the decision-making of an attacker during shooting performance in futsal. Performance during 10 competitive matches was recorded and examined from the moment a shot was taken until the ball was intercepted or entered the goal in sequences of play: ending in a goal, a goalkeeper's save, or an interception by the nearest defender. The variables under scrutiny in this study were (i) the distance of each player to the ball's trajectory, (ii) the time for the ball to arrive at that same point (i.e. the interception point), and (iii), the required movement velocity of the nearest defender and the goalkeeper to intercept the ball. Results showed that values of distance from a defender and goalkeeper to the interception points were significantly lower when they intercepted the ball. The time of ball arrival at the interception point of the defender was also lower when the ball was intercepted. The required velocities of the nearest outfield defender and the goalkeeper to intercept the ball were significantly lower during plays in which they intercepted the ball, than in plays in which the ball was not intercepted. Our results suggest that researchers and practitioners should consider simultaneously both space and time in analysis of interceptive actions in team sports. The required movement velocities of the opponents to intercept the ball are reliable spatial-temporal variables constraining decision-making during shooting performance in team sports like futsal.

Significant criticisms have emerged on the way that collective behaviours in team sports have been traditionally evaluated. A major recommendation has been for future research and practice to focus on the interpersonal relationships developed between team players during performance. Most research has typically investigated team game performance in subunits (attack or defence), rather than considering the interactions of performers within the whole team. In this paper, we offer the view that team performance analysis could benefit from the adoption of biological models used to explain how repeated interactions between grouping individuals scale to emergent social collective behaviours. We highlight the advantages of conceptualizing sports teams as functional integrated 'super-organisms' and discuss innovative measurement tools, which might be used to capture the superorganismic properties of sports teams. These tools are suitable for revealing the idiosyncratic collective behaviours underlying the cooperative and competitive tendencies of different sports teams, particularly their coordination of labour and the most frequent channels of communication and patterns of interaction between team players. The principles and tools presented here can serve as the basis for novel approaches and applications of performance analysis devoted to understanding sports teams as cohesive, functioning, high-order organisms exhibiting their own peculiar behavioural patterns.

Performance analysis is a subdiscipline of sports sciences and one-approach, notational analysis, has been used to objectively audit and describe behaviours of performers during different subphases of play, providing additional information for practitioners to improve future sports performance. Recent criticisms of these methods have suggested the need for a sound theoretical rationale to explain performance behaviours, not just describe them. The aim of this article was to show how ecological dynamics provides a valid theoretical explanation of performance in team sports by explaining the formation of successful and unsuccessful patterns of play, based on symmetry-breaking processes emerging from functional interactions between players and the performance environment. We offer the view that ecological dynamics is an upgrade to more operational methods of performance analysis that merely document statistics of competitive performance. In support of our arguments, we refer to exemplar data on competitive performance in team sports that have revealed functional interpersonal interactions between attackers and defenders, based on variations in the spatial positioning of performers relative to each other in critical performance areas, such as the scoring zones. Implications of this perspective are also considered for practice task design and sport development programmes.

Movement organization of cricket batters' actions was analyzed under three distinct experimental task constraints: a representative condition of a practice context in which the batters batted against a "live" bowler, a ball projection machine, and a near life-size video simulation of a bowler. Results showed that each distinct set of task constraints led to significant variations in the patterns of movement control. Removal of advanced information sources from a bowler's actions when the batters faced the ball projection machine caused significant delays in movement initiation, resulting in reduced peak bat swing velocities and a reduction in the quality of bat-ball contact, when compared with batting against a "live" bowler. When responding to a two-dimensional video simulation, batters were able to use information from the bowlers' action, enabling fidelity of initial behavioral responses consistent with the task of batting against a "live" bowler. However, without interceptive task requirements or actual ball flight information, significant variations in downswing initiation timing and peak bat velocities were demonstrated. Findings stress the need for representative experimental and learning designs in fast ball sports for developing performers.

In this paper we present a model of creativity captured as exploration and production of novel and functionally efficient behaviors, based on the statistical mechanics of disordered systems. In support of the modelling, we highlight examples of creative behaviors from our research in sports like boxing and rugby union. Our experimental results show how manipulation of practice task constraints changes the exploratory breadth of the hierarchically soft-assembled action landscape. Because of action metastability and differing task constraints, the specificity of each assembled movement configuration is unique. Empirically, a movement pattern's degree of novelty may be assessed by the value of the order parameter describing action. We show that creative and adaptive movement behavior may be induced by at least two types of interven-tions, based on relaxing task constraints which we term direct and indirect. Direct relaxing is typically a function of changing task constraints so that the number of affordances that can satisfy goal constraints increases. Indirect relaxing of constraints occurs when a habitual action is suppressed by, for example, stringent instructional constraints during sports training. That suppression simultaneously relaxes other correlated constraints that enable larger exploratory capacity and new affordances to emerge for the athlete or team.

Egon Brunswik proposed the concept of "representative design" for psychological experimentation, which has historically been overlooked or confused with another of Brunswik's terms, ecological validity. In this article, we reiterate the distinction between these two important concepts and highlight the relevance of the term representative design for sports psychology, practice, and experimental design. We draw links with ideas on learning design in the constraints-led approach to motor learning and nonlinear pedagogy. We propose the adoption of a new term, representative learning design, to help sport scientists, experimental psychologists, and pedagogues recognize the potential application of Brunswik's original concepts, and to ensure functionality and action fidelity in training and learning environments.

In recent years, concepts and tools from dynamical systems theory have been successfully applied to the study of movement systems, contradicting traditional views of variability as noise or error. From this perspective, it is apparent that variability in movement systems is omnipresent and unavoidable due to the distinct constraints that shape each individual's behaviour. In this position paper, it is argued that trial-to-trial movement variations within individuals and performance differences observed between individuals may be best interpreted as attempts to exploit the variability that is inherent within and between biological systems. That is, variability in movement systems helps individuals adapt to the unique constraints (personal, task and environmental) impinging on them across different timescales. We examine the implications of these ideas for sports medicine, by: (i) focusing on intra-individual variability in postural control to exemplify within-individual real-time adaptations to changing informational constraints in the performance environment; and (ii) interpreting recent evidence on the role of the angiotensin-converting enzyme gene as a genetic (developmental) constraint on individual differences in physical performance. The implementation of a dynamical systems theoretical interpretation of variability in movement systems signals a need to re-evaluate the ubiquitous influence of the traditional 'medical model' in interpreting motor behaviour and performance constrained by disease or injury to the movement system. Accordingly, there is a need to develop new tools for providing individualised plots of motor behaviour and performance as a function of key constraints. Coordination profiling is proposed as one such alternative approach for interpreting the variability and stability demonstrated by individuals as they attempt to construct functional, goal-directed patterns of motor behaviour during each unique performance. Finally, the relative contribution of genes and training to between-individual performance variation is highlighted, with the conclusion that dynamical systems theory provides an appropriate multidisciplinary theoretical framework to explain their interaction in supporting physical performance.