What is CLA?

From The Athletic article:

“Victor wanted to come out to L.A. to train for the summer,” Barnes said, “and I wanted (him) to see what I do.”

They are participating in a three-on-three drill to push the players to make optimal reads each time they touch the ball. Things are going smoothly until Wembanyama does a vast Euro step through traffic to score.

Before anyone can marvel at the bucket, LaRoche calls practice to a halt. He waves Wembanyama over to the courtside video monitor. What looks like a basket that few players in the world can score is actually a problem.

“What did you see here?” LaRoche asked the former NBA Rookie of the Year.

In LaRoche’s gym, nothing can be predetermined. It’s all about making the best decision in that specific situation, not perfecting a single move.

As Wembanyama peered at the video, he immediately noticed something that had eluded him in the moment. In this scenario, there was more space for him to attack in a different direction. He knew exactly how he would react next time.

“My body is starting to understand these movements,” Wembanyama told LaRoche after watching the video.

It was Wembanyama’s first step toward understanding a new perspective on the game he has a chance to conquer. He was learning about three letters that the current Premier League champions (Liverpool), the World Series winners (Los Angeles Dodgers), the last two NBA champions (Oklahoma City Thunder and Boston Celtics) and many other teams across professional sports have already, to certain degrees, incorporated into their organizations.

C-L-A.

The CLA, which stands for Constraints-Led Approach, is a learning method that has made its way from academia to the mainstream, drawing from innovative research in psychology and neuroscience. It replaces traditional block training, where an athlete learns a single movement pattern step-by-step, with game-like situations that feature special rules, forcing them to adapt their moves on the fly. It’s founded on the principle that training perfectly yields imperfect results.

“It changed my career,” said Los Angeles Sparks guard Kelsey Plum, a four-time WNBA All-Star and two-time champion. “Before, I was very skilled. But I don’t think I was ever very purposeful.”

The CLA takes the ground-up approach of block training, which eliminates the infinite variables that affect athletes in the heat of competition, and flips it on its head.

That means putting players into scenarios with different limitations called “constraints” to simulate the unpredictable environment of an actual game. Whether it’s the number of steps they can take, the area of the playing surface from which they are allowed to maneuver or even the weight of the ball they are using, players are repeatedly told to overcome restrictions to accomplish a task. While painstakingly working through mistakes, they are forced to find advantageous opportunities, “affordances” in CLA parlance.

From pool noodles to a game known as “murderball,” coaches around the world are finding ways to put their players in a sea of constraints and guide them on how to work their way back to shore.

By forcing a player to deal with variables that are impossible to predict, the CLA teaches them to execute under duress rather than flawlessly in a vacuum. If a coach can get a player to work through failure and creatively solve problems, the thought goes, practice becomes more complex than the actual games.

“It’s creating different atmospheres and a culture that the toughest part of your day in player development is the practice,” said Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes, whose team is one of the strongest purveyors of the CLA in American sports. “Blocked practice has been shown to have a purpose, but once you get into the elite levels of talent, facing this type of stuff every day, then it’s not as effective. There’s a balancing of confidence pregame and then making sure you’re challenging yourself so that you’re up to the task of facing (Pirates pitcher) Paul Skenes, or whoever.”

The CLA has the potential to reshape learning in any field. In an age where many people educate themselves by watching hours of tennis serves or cooking videos on YouTube, the CLA aligns with the paradigm shift of empowering individuals to shape their direction.

But it has taken root as a framework for athletic training, where versatility and improvisational reads have become core principles across many sports. After gaining traction in the player development world over the past half-decade, it’s making its way to the highest levels of team sports around the globe.

“A lot of sports training takes the person out of the environment as if there’s a classical technique all athletes have to develop,” said professor Keith Davids of Sheffield Hallam University in England, who first coined the term “CLA” in a 1994 research paper. “It doesn’t work that way. Context shapes everything.”

For so long, the CLA’s most significant constraint was persuading large organizations to adopt a substantial overhaul of their training methods. However, that is quickly changing. Several NBA franchises are exploring ways to use the CLA more in the 2025-26 season, according to multiple executives and coaches who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the subject on the record.

Over the past decade, the analytics movement has evolved from a roundtable discussion in an MIT classroom to the norm in professional sports. Now, the CLA is poised to become the next frontier of competitive innovation.

The CLA evolved from the study of ecological dynamics, a framework that integrates psychology and neurobiology to examine the relationship between how the brain and body interact to perceive and navigate our environment. It focuses on perception-action coupling, the feedback loop by which your brain processes sensory information and your body coordinates sequences of actions to create motion. It’s a continuous partnership between more than just the brain’s visual system and the body, but also involving touch, hearing, and proprioception — the body’s sixth sense of position and movement.

The latest research in ecological dynamics suggests our brain does not store a specific script of a given movement pattern. Instead, the brain and body work in tandem, using perception-action coupling to develop precise and flexible movements constantly.

Everything is a read, all the time, for all of us.

“The traditional way is top-down, it always comes from the brain to the muscles and then execute. The ecological way is the complete opposite. It’s bottom up,” said Fabian Otte, the goalkeeping coach for 2024-25 English Premier League champion Liverpool, before he moved on to the same position at Tottenham Hotspur. “Everything is self-organized through all the different senses you have. You pick up the right information that helps you to execute something and you don’t need the brain to translate this information, necessarily. It becomes a direct approach from the body to the brain and back.”

No matter how much a movement feels scripted in practice, the environment in which it is performed is different. That means the athlete’s response is technically different, all the way down at the cellular level. The brain and body will always perceive something as changing from the last time.

“The CLA paradigm is focused on the neurological aspect of it and not the musculoskeletal action we historically think of as (muscle) memory,” said Dr. Javier Cárdenas, the Director of the Concussion & Brain Injury Center at the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute and vice chair of the NFL’s head, neck, and spine committee.

“The human brain dedicates an incredible amount of real estate to the visual system. Not just what you see with your eyes, but how the eyes coordinate movements, receive the information, how the information goes through the brain stem and reacts unconsciously to control the pupils and then predicting where an object is going to be.”

Davids’ research ignited the CLA movement in the sports science world, leading him to collaborate with Otte and Sarama on research papers. He built upon the work of Karl Newell, whose 1986 paper “Constraints on the Development of Coordination” introduced the concept to child motor skill development, and James Gibson, whose 1979 book “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception” first popularized the ecological dynamics theory that underpins the CLA. As sports science researchers, such as Sarama and Otte, secured positions with major sports organizations, the research expanded and evolved into the CLA method.

Professor Davids’ findings indicate that CLA training is a better way to help develop pathways within the central nervous system. Forcing athletes to find new affordances within various constraints makes perception-action coupling more efficient. That leads to enhanced decision-making and faster response time on the actual playing field.

Whether it’s for peak performance or injury recovery, the key is getting top players who have an established protocol to buy in. Ohtani has long used the CLA to maximize his historic talent. How do you introduce the CLA to a player who is already at the top of their game?

Otte had to test this quandary last season when newly-hired Liverpool manager Arne Slot recruited him from the US national soccer team. However, rather than having complete say, Otte had to collaborate with Liverpool’s other goalkeeping coach, Cláudio Taffarel, a Brazilian legend who had long worked with Alisson Becker, the club’s No. 1 goalkeeper.

Otte had to walk a tightrope. He needed to get Alisson to adjust to his approach while still respecting Taffarel’s process, which has helped Alisson become one of the best keepers in the world.

“What I learned from him is that training is one thing, but being in an environment where it’s high-performance pressure in a big stadium and everything’s on the table, you have to perform in this moment,” Otte said of Alisson. “When he stands in that goal in those high-stakes games, the feeling you get, the aura he’s got, it’s incredible.”

Otte is fascinated with using the CLA’s methods to manipulate athletes’ senses to enhance perception-action coupling. Sensory deprivation training has become increasingly common over the past decade, notably when Steph Curry popularized practicing with strobe goggles to disrupt his vision.

From the action on the field to the crescendo of fans cheering, soccer has a reliable soundtrack to help athletes prepare for their moment. The problem is that in training, you can hear the footsteps of a striker and the thump of the ball more clearly. Alisson isn’t going to hear every little step when the Anfield crowd is singing at full volume.

The CLA is all about making practice match the game environment, but how do you replicate the experience of 60,000 people screaming at you? Most coaches will blast crowd noise from the speakers, but Otte’s research showed he had to go the opposite direction.

He brought an outside-the-box idea to his training session with his new keepers, something that even an established star like Alisson could latch onto: He handed them construction earmuffs that silence external noise.

Forget about trying to pick out the key sounds through the crowd noise. What happens when you hear nothing at all?

By stripping out all external distractions, Otte forced Liverpool’s keepers to lock in visually without the audible cues their brains are used to hearing. If they could learn to respond without any auditory factors, they could strengthen their other senses when the game noise drowns out the variables from practice.

“Deaf people have better peripheral vision. They don’t hear, so they have to use the eyes more,” Otte said. “The outside of the field of vision is more attuned than (auditorily) healthy people. So, we tried to play around with these different constraints.”

The possibilities for the CLA are endless. It’s growing in the medical field, as doctors use simulators with constraints to train for dangerous cases that can’t be replicated in the field. It’s reframing how businesses onboard new employees, breaking from the classroom/webinar paradigm that often proves inefficient.

It has helped elite athletes like Ohtani become MVPs and the likes of Barnes and Plum become efficiency machines in the middle of their careers. As top players like Wembanyama come into contact with the CLA earlier in their careers, how will it shape the next generation of athletes?

“Vic is extremely intelligent, right? So his ability to want to be pushed, want to be challenged, want to be great, I think (the CLA) was a natural fit for him,” Barnes said. “It’s good to see that because it opens up a different world for guys.”

Or as Boylan puts it: “His spectrum of affordances is unlike anything anyone has ever seen.”