The truth lies in the middle: Youth talent programs should resist both exclusive early specialisation and one-size-fits-all sampling approaches Now before you collect your pitchforks and torches to chase me down, hear me out first. The claim that young athletes should sample several sports before specialising has intuitive appeal. It promises broader movement experience, less repetitive load and a more forgiving route to eventual excellence. And let's admit, that is somethin

But that also makes it hard to measure and train Agility as a perceptual-motor skill When a footballer sidesteps a defender, is that a physical skill or a perceptual one? The honest answer is: both, and separating them may be part of the problem. A 2025 paper in Sports Medicine Open - fully open access - brings together two researchers with apparently opposing views on agility training to find out how much they actually disagree. Jordan Cassidy, an advocate of ecological dyna

Even when its not the best decision for players to make Coaches and their instructions Coaches give instructions. That much is obvious. But how those instructions are framed — and what they direct players' attention toward — has a measurable effect on the quality of decisions players make in the game. This is the central finding of a 2021 study by Adam Beavan and Job Fransen, published in the open-access Journal of Sport and Exercise Science. The study asked a straightforward