Why you don't need to worry about optimal movement when it comes to sports performance

There is not such a thing as optimal movement - the term is hyperbole and a heavy hitter in the arsenal of snake oil therapists preying on people with everyday pain and injury.

Enthusiasm for techniques and approaches in physiotherapy and movement sciences goes through waves, and currently we are back in the realm of optimal movement (at least on social media!). This time dressed up in the outfit of fascia - and fascia enthusiasts.

I want to make it clear. This is not a dig at fascia itself; in my opinion it is a redox organ that is essential to health (upcoming blog post) and can actually contract (ref) but the idea that an optimal movement lies somewhere in a combination of fascial sling movements, or any other fringe approach to movement simply is not supported.

Let me explain why.

Human movement is emergent and not an a priori phenomenon sent out into the world

In prior articles we have discussed why variability is a good thing for movement, what attractor states and state space are and introduced the concepts of embodied and embedded movement. For those unfamiliar with this then I would recommend reading the prior articles after reading this one.

Since the last articles I have found myself diving head first into James Gibsons ecological theory of perception and its updated components. This is something I vastly overlooked in prior articles and one that needs to be addressed in this one to lay the foundation for attractor states, embodied movement and variability to build upon.

Personally, it has provided the missing link in the chain for why (IMO) I do not believe top down (a priori hypothesis testing) is the best lens to view how human movement organises and plays out in the real world.

Movement could be considered emergent and dependent on exploration of the perceived environment and the research supports this approach.

James Gibsons theory of Ecological Perception

Unbeknown to me until early 2026, the concept of embodied perception and ecological dynamics had spawned largely out of the seminal work by James Gibson. In brief, his book "ecological theory of perception" suggests that we percieve the world for out ability to act on it. Surfaces, tools, objects and other animals (including us humans) provide opportunities for action to achieve a goal.

Affordances arose from earlier descriptions of meaning of objects in their environment having characteristics of invitation, valence and demand. Gibson stated that the affordance of an object does not change depending on the needs of the observer (Gibson, 1979; 2015) bur rather a constant; the agent may or may not percieve its certain affordance, a term coined as perceptual attunement. This is a concept we will get to later when looking at novice versus expert performance.

Naturally Gibsons' theory has been built upon since its conception. We now know that affordances can be nested together and form three distinct meta-nests of the why, what and how of movement and can be seen sequentially, simultaneously and in parrallel (Vauclin et al., 2023). Because affordances exist in the environment independent of observers wants or desires, exploration of the state space results in perception of new affordances and attunement to this affordance can then directly alter perception of subsequent affordances. Much like adding a jigsaw piece to a puzzle affords new opportunities for action that did not exist prior to the agent before the piece was joined, even though this piece was readily available by the emerging puzzle for use.

Two key points made above (1) affordances exists independent of the desire of the observer; (2) affordances emerge from exploration, perception and realisation of other affordances, allows the body to make use of two very important characteristics. Biological degeneracy and pluripotentiality.

Biological degeneracy refers to being able to perform a certain task in a multitude of different ways and pluripotentiality refers to the fact that on structure has many functions (Siefert et al., 2016). This two phenomenon give rise to two advantages to survival in human behaviour and movement.

1. Greater variability means that we are better able to maintain task stability if success depends on maintenance of system characteristics within narrow, specified ranges e.g a waitress carrying coffee to a customer through a busy restaurant.

2. Greater variability means we can quickly explore the state space, attune to affordances that allow exploration and exploitation of coordination patterns, if the task and environment are constantly changing. For example, a 3 vs 1 game of evade and capture.

Constraints approach to human movement

This has previously been coined the concept of the bliss of motor abundance by Mark Latash (Latash, 2012) and building on this nicely, the constraints approach by Newell (1985) argues that we organise around the constraints of the task, environment and organism (us). In other words, we self organise!!

Consider what the three elements of the constraints approach affords us. Do we attune to all perceptual information or just some? Perceptual realisation of one affordance changes the realisation of others, so a change in perception of the environmental affordances due to a change in constraints e.g. decelerating on wet grass compared to dry grass) will also change perception of the affordances for the conscious agent (us) and the task.

I argue here that Newells' constraints approach could be seen as physical matter in the state space of the conscious observer much like the seat belt of the car that restrains the passenger in the car space. From this, affordances arise and change how we interact with the state space relative to our goal.

If a small change in constraints of either 3 domains results in a change of affordance attunement of an unpredictable amount, otherwise known as the butterfly effect, how does the body deal with this level of uncertainty? Well it does this through a process of emergent movement coordination.

Remember the two approaches we discussed for how the body controls movement? They were top down (cognitive) and bottom up (emergent), or as I like to call them the roller coaster and the sandcastle, here is why.

Riding The Rollercoaster (Top Down) Ride Of Optimal Movement

Imagine you are at the rollercoaster. You are both the controller and the rider and you have different paths the ride can go through but only one successfully finishes at the starting position. You make estimations about which path and a hypothesis about which one will be successful before you even get on the carriage (this is an a priori hypothesis) and set your chosen speed and where you brake on each corner. You climb in and off you go out into ride.

Movement seen from this perspective is the same. We form an a priori about which movement is best and what might happen then the brain sends this down to the rest of the body as an action potential to drive movement. The outcome is dichotomous - did we succeed in completing the task i.e. get back in the carriage to the start of the roller coaster, or did we no? If we didn't then the error rate (difference between perceived outcome versus reality of it) is used to update the computer systems on the roller coaster; same thing happens in the brain its just they are called schemas.

Why the Rollercoaster model doesn't hold up to the scrutiny of the real life experience (Newell, 1991)

Problem 1: No evidence of schema formation. Schema representations were theorised as mental memory maps of how to perform the fundamentals of a certain movement pattern, these were then stored in the brain and selected for use in future movement (part of the movement planning aspect of motor control). The problem is that there is very little evidence for schema patterns in the wider academic literature and

Problem 2: Assumes a steady state world. The world is complex and adaptive, as we have seen above the environment and task can change, along with the organismal constraints. The weather can flip, the task evolves as the opposition team engage with it, fatigue and tiredness changes our bodily capacity - such adaptive responses of the state space are not considered in the top down paradigm. The very foundation of it is that it is built from within the mind before even considering the capacity to act on the surrounding environment. This is one of the most obvious reasons why a top down, a priori hypothesis approach to human movement simply does not hold up in the real world!

Problem 3: Unable to account for how an entirely new movement pattern could emerge from existing (different) patterns. If schema patterns are generalised movement memory footprints that are independent from other schema representations, then it is difficult to discern how these could then 'merge' to combine to form an entirely new movement pattern. Proponents of the schema model are yet to establish a mechanism by which these schema patterns merge together to form an entirely different pattern - even though we know that humans are capable of doing this on a fairly regular basis! The sandcastle (bottom up approach) solves this problem and the two above in a fairly obvious, simply way as you will see below.

Building The Sandcastle (Bottom Up)

Now we are at the beach. You have got your bucket and spade. You begin filling the bucket up with sand and putting the first block down. You fill your bucket up again and put the next block down only this time, the placement of the first block can influence the where you put the second block. You keep continuing this, refining your bucket-block placement with each new blob of sand and over time a structure reminiscent of a sandcastle emerges.

In human movement and coordination this is the bottom up approach to movement, recently coined the Screw-Turin theory of movement (Kim et al., 2025). Under this scenario, coordination of movement is constrained by the environment-task-organism interaction as described above and we (as conscious agents) pick up on affordances in the state space to act on, experts are able to attune to all relevant affordances and consequently can flow through transition states seamlessly and adapt their coordination pattern to fit the changing constraints. Each state transition is the perception and then realisation (through effectivities) of the state space the organism is in aka perception-action coupling, going back to our sandcastle analogy, each bucket of sand would be considered a state transition hence you can see how prior state transitions can influence subsequent ones but each is fundamentally independent of the other.

We don't run into the same problems of the rollercoaster model above. We don't need schema patterns as movement emerges from the state space interactions as the theory views the world as the complex-adaptive-system that it actually is! The coordination pattern needed will emerge through continued perceptual-action coupling and the principle of stochastic resonance. Because we are not bound by an abstract phenomenal pattern, this theory also solves the problem of new movement from existing ones.

Once a sand block is placed (a state transition is executed) then that changes the field of affordances available to the person in state space, ultimately we have no control over which attractor state they hop to next (see prior article here)

Variability in human movement is good but how does it separate the experts from the beginners?

Variability gives rise the right movement through stochastic resonance bur this is not an optimal pattern, it is simply the coordination pattern that best fulfils the constraints and perceptual attunement at the time of performance, and allows successful task execution. This is what I call adaptability - this is what we need to be building into our clients programs to build them back from injury and into the realm of elite performance.

So what exactly is the difference between novice and elite performers in skill development from the perspective of the emergent model of movement and perception-action coupling? It boils down to the ability to perceive a wider range of affordances and act on them appropriately at the right time.

Fits and Posner (Taylor et al., 2012) proposed a 3 stage model of skill where the performer progresses through each stage sequentially until they achieve the stage of being unconsciously competent.

The problem is that this model does not consider the movement from an ecological perspective of exploration - it once again assumes that an abstract 'optimal' pattern exists that we as performers have to identify (the cognitive stage) and then learn to move toward (the associative stage) before mastering it under competition (the autonomous stage). It is still born of the cognitive (top down) model we discussed above.

To get round this I have drawn from inspiration of the likes of Newell, Gibson and Bill Parisi and come up with my own model - whilst untested in the realm of academia it makes sense from an emergent movement perspective. I call it the FEE model.

In the explorative stage the athlete moves through the state space for the first time, blissfully unaware of what they should and should not be perceiving - everything they need is there they just can not perceive it yet. Performance suffers because there is too much variability in their movement and an inability to attune to the task-appropriate affordances for action. If we were to view this in reality, it would be akin to taking a group of 5 year olds who have never played tennis before and asking them to try and have a rally with adults sized bats and balls. Chaos!

During transition to exploration, the athlete begins to take advantage of degeneracy and pluripotentiality and tune to key affordances. A messy but recognisable pattern begins to emerge, as per Bernsteins theory of motor control, the athlete is able to unlock some of their degrees of freedom at this stage. Mistakes are still made and they are unable to transition from attractor state to attractor state smoothly as they are still perceptually attuning to inappropriate affordances for action.

Progression to expert status is renamed 'flow state' and here the athlete tunes to all appropriate affordances and the coordination pattern that best fits the state space constraints emerges. Now given we know the state space changes with interaction, the expert athlete is able to seamlessly flow from attract state to attractor state with transitions that exploit affordances for action in their environment. They flow through the state space effortlessly. Consequently, their coordination pattern is able to switch between exploration (if state space constraints are highly variable) or exploitation if they must maintain stability to achieve the task.

Perhaps it is best to view 'optimal' technique as the coordination pattern that best fits the current constraints and capacities for action, but understanding that this changes on a second-by-second basis as the pattern emerges. This being the case, 'adaptability' is the most appropriate word that springs to my mind to describe what we are really looking for when it comes to skill acquisition and expert performance - the name suggests that one has the ability to mould themselves to the current state space constraints whilst still maintaining the appropriate output for task execution.

Building adaptability should be a focal goal of rehabilitation from injury or pain and subsequent return to performance. If you find yourself doing much the same training as you did before your injury, then you need to build out your repertoire and expand your horizons. The topic of exploratory coaching approaches and how to do this is the topic of the next article in this series - but for now, if you are a water-sports athlete in Cornwall and finding the same movements keep causing you pain and setting you back, then book a consultation now and get yourself down to our clinic in Truro and lets get you back to what you love.

References

Gibson, J. J. (2014). The ecological approach to visual perception: classic edition. Psychology press.

Vauclin, P., Wheat, J., Wagman, J. B., & Seifert, L. (2023). A systematic review of perception of affordances for the person-plus-object system. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 30(6), 2011-2029.

Seifert, L., Komar, J., Araújo, D., & Davids, K. (2016). Neurobiological degeneracy: A key property for functional adaptations of perception and action to constraints. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 69, 159-165.

Newell, K. M. (1985). Coordination, control and skill. In Advances in psychology (Vol. 27, pp. 295-317). North-Holland.

Latash, M. L. (2012). The bliss (not the problem) of motor abundance (not redundancy). Experimental brain research, 217(1), 1-5.

Newell, K. M. (1991). Motor skill acquisition. Annual review of psychology, 42(1), 213-237.

Kim, W., & Ottes, W. (2025). A Symmetry-Based Computational Framework for Motor Skill Optimization: Integrating Screw Theory and Ecological Perception. Symmetry, 17(5), 715.

Taylor, J. A., & Ivry, R. B. (2012). The role of strategies in motor learning. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1251(1), 1-12.