How Teaching Techniques Early Can Impoverish Fluid Adaptability Later in Life

What if our understanding of skill development is fundamentally backward? We often assume that technical proficiency must precede adaptability, that fundamentals must be mastered before creativity can flourish. But evidence from extraordinary performers suggests the opposite may be true.

There is a famous quote attributed to both Aristotle and St. Ignatius Loyola:

"Give me the child until he is 7 and I will give you the man."

This profound insight recognizes how formative early experiences are in shaping lifelong patterns. It also raises a critical question about our approaches to youth development in sports: "How do people break out of the patterns they've been conditioned to believe are the way?" This is both a practical and philosophical question about how we approach learning in general, and athletic development in particular.

Consider a great soccer player like Lionel Messi. He weaves in and out of defenders with movements that fluctuate with each new scenario. His technique isn't rigid; it's alive and responsive. Messi may use recognizable technique when kicking an isolated dead ball on goal or taking a corner kick, but when he's zigging and zagging through defenders, his movements are anything but rigid technical patterns—they're completely organic adaptations to the changing environment. And remarkably, he was already demonstrating these fluid, adaptive movements as a young child, long before formal technical training could explain his abilities.

Of course, young Messi's movements weren't as crisp, precise, or powerful as what we see today—but they contained the blueprint for what was possible. His childhood adaptability laid the foundation upon which his adult technical prowess would later be built.

Children like young Messi don't start with perfect technique that they then learn to apply flexibly. Instead, they begin with natural problem-solving in authentic situations. Their bodies and minds discover effective solutions through exploration, play, and responding to real challenges. He's even said himself that, "What I do is play soccer, which is what I like." What we later identify as "good technique" emerges organically from these discoveries.

When we observe elite performance, we might mistake the pattern we recognize as "good technique" for the foundation of their success. In reality, what we call technique may actually be our attempt to codify natural, adaptive movement patterns that successful players intuitively discover through experience. Perhaps rather than technique enabling adaptation, natural adaptability is the foundation from which effective technique emerges.

This insight has profound implications for youth coaching. When we prioritize "correct" technical execution before authentic play, we risk:

1. Disrupting natural learning processes

2. Limiting creative problem-solving

3. Creating players who look technically sound but lack adaptability

4. Diminishing intrinsic motivation by emphasizing external validation

   
   

The authority-driven model of technical instruction can become particularly problematic when coaches impose adult movement patterns on developing bodies, or when they value conformity to technical models over effectiveness in real situations.

A more developmentally appropriate approach might involve creating rich, challenging environments where young players encounter authentic problems, then guiding their discovery process rather than prescribing solutions. Technique still matters, but it emerges through guided experience (adaptable games) rather than being imposed from above.

It's also important to recognize that techniques are ultimately just tools or actions that may improve the probability of a desired outcome—they don't predict or guarantee results. Someone with "perfect" technique can miss most attempts on a given day, yet this statistical reality doesn't seem to diminish our collective faith in explicit technical instruction, which remains the dominant approach across the world today. We often confuse probability with certainty, giving technique more credit than it deserves while undervaluing adaptability.

What technique-focused approaches never adequately address is "feel"—that elusive personal, intrinsic sensory experience that each person develops in their own unique way. Techniques in and of themselves are barren wastelands without feel. Consider a musical analogy: when you play middle C on a guitar or piano, there's only one note, but infinite ways to express it. On a guitar, you can strum, pluck, slap, or hit the string. On a piano, the note can be loud or soft, short or sustained. These variations of expression only emerge through exploration and play, not through rigid adherence to a single "correct" method.

Yet even this musical analogy falls short in one crucial way: musical techniques don't involve the open systems of complexity and environmental interactions that define sports. In interactive games, players must constantly adapt to teammates, opponents, playing surfaces, weather conditions, and countless other variables that create a vastly more complex environment than a musician faces with an instrument.

This is precisely what Russian neurophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein meant when discussing "degrees of freedom"—the principle that no movement is ever exactly repeated. The question becomes: why do coaches insist that their version of a technical movement pattern is "correct" if it can never be perfectly replicated? We fall into circular reasoning: "I was taught this way, and my coach was taught by their coach this way, and this book shows technical patterns done this way..." Before we know it, everyone is stuck playing middle C over and over again with no understanding of "feel," which can only be developed in our youngest years through patient exploration and adaptation to the countless unique interactions that games offer.

We must embrace and nurture children's natural capacity for freely adapting to environments by cultivating and supporting their instincts and impulses to be more creative in exploring and discovering solutions through playing the questions themselves. The traditional academic models of instruction-before-adaptation no longer serve the development of truly adaptable athletes.

Instead, we must support—for years—the fluidity and creativity enabled by adaptation that gives a strong foundation and rooted understanding of delving into the unexpected and unpredictable natures of sport. The early formative years up through maturation should be characterized by open freedom in individual and collaborative decision-making, before the imposing of explicit directions from coaches in varsity high schools and beyond, where winning and rankings become expected as youth approach adult models of achievement.

Consider this revealing story from Ted Kroeten, who runs Joy of the People in Minneapolis, Minnesota—a completely open free-play space for youth soccer. In an interview on Stuart Armstrong's The Talent Equation Podcast back in the summer of 2018, Kroeten and a board member once met with Argentina's former captain Roberto Iella in Rio de Janeiro. When they asked Iella about his most influential developmental period, he mentioned joining River Plate at age 12. They then asked what he did before that time.

Paraphrased, "Oh, we played every day, same guys, same field, and my Mom had to call me in for dinner every day," Iella responded.

When they suggested that this period of unstructured play must have profoundly impacted his development as a player, Iella paused and replied, "Interesting, I never thought about that."

This blind spot is pervasive in our over-structured youth sports landscape today. The critical foundation of early free play—following impulses and making independent decisions—is what develops fluid, adaptable players who can later navigate structured environments with freedom within constraints. Unfortunately, these developmental models are rare. Most children grow up in highly structured, imposed systems across sports and academics alike.

Part of the challenge is psychological: most of us have never experienced anything different, making this open, seemingly unstructured freedom feel scary and foreign. Coaches, parents, and administrators often resist approaches that don't align with their own formative experiences, preferring the comfort and familiarity of traditional, directive coaching models.

We believe we are gaining something from our explicit teachings, but perhaps while a pattern seems to emerge, we are losing something valuable on the backend. Often, we impose structure because we believe we're helping children get ahead or speeding up their development process. But what exactly are we speeding up? There seems to be an engrained disbelief that a child who engages with the game in authentic, varied contexts—experiencing a multitude of adaptations in changing environments—will naturally produce increasingly effective movements with each passing year from age 5 onward.

We make the mistake of measuring young players against professional standards rather than allowing natural development to unfold. As the saying goes, let the kids get thirsty before bringing them to water—and certainly before telling them they must drink the specific "Kool-Aid" that we provide.

There is promising change on the horizon. Approaches grounded in Ecological Dynamics and Games-Based learning are gaining traction, recognizing the importance of adaptation to dynamic, open systems. There is hope that more children will eventually have the freedom to follow their instincts rather than being confined to well-intentioned but narrow "one-size-fits-all" approaches that still dominate youth sports today.

"...to make things possible that were not possible before. This requires challenging homeostasis—getting out of your comfort zone—and forcing your brain or your body to adapt." —Anders Ericsson