Training or Synergizing? Complex Systems Principles Change the Understanding of Sport Processes

Abstract

There is a need to update scientific assumptions in sport to promote the critical thinking of scientists, coaches, and practitioners and improve their methodological decisions. On the basis of complex systems science and theories of biological evolution, a systematization and update of theoretical and methodological principles to transform the understanding of sports training is provided. The classical focus on learning/acquiring skills and fitness is replaced by the aim of increasing the diversity/unpredictability potential of teams/athletes through the development of synergies. This development is underpinned by the properties of hierarchical organization and circular causality of constraints, that is, the nestedness of constraints acting at different levels and timescales. These properties, that integrate bottom-up and top-down all dimensions and levels of performance (from social to genetic), apply to all types of sport, ages, or levels of expertise and can be transferred to other fields (e.g., education, health, management). The team as the main training unit of intervention, the dynamic concept of task representativeness, and the co-adaptive and synergic role of the agents are some few practical consequences of moving from training to synergizing.

Network Physiology of Exercise: Vision and Perspectives

“…Exercise Physiology, the most influential discipline in exercise and sports training, has remained resistant to the introduction of the science of complex systems in biology (Hristovski et al, 2014;Balagué et al, 2016;Pol et al, 2020). Reductionism has dominated the research and has shaped the way of thinking of exercise professionals.…”

“…It means that the behavior of CAS cannot be simply explained through the variability of any single component, process, or local mechanism. For instance, exercise physiologists cannot rely on critical quantitative endpoints in cardiovascular, respiratory, metabolic, or neuromuscular systems to explain the limits of performance (Noakes, 2000;Venhorst et al, 2018;Pol et al, 2020) and should reformulate their research hypothesis accordingly.…”

“…The term "training", understood as the process of learning/ acquiring specific skills has been recently proposed to be replaced by the term of "synergizing": combining or working together to be more effective (Pol et al, 2020). Synergies are the spontaneously formed structural and functional couplings among components and processes to achieve the main goal in health: keeping the homeodynamics or dynamic stability (Riley et al, 2011;Kelso, 2017;Latash, 2019;Liu et al, 2019).…”

“…In Exercise Physiology, fitness attributes are mostly associated with strength and conditioning. In contrast to this assumption, a new definition of fitness, inspired on theories of biological evolution, has been recently introduced (Pol et al, 2020). The authors sustain that the fittest is not necessarily the fastest or strongest but the most diverse.…”

Theory of Cooperative-Competitive Intelligence: Principles, Research Directions, and Applications

“…While uncertainty encompasses degeneracy, which is the capacity to attain similar outcomes by the spatio-temporal arrangements of structurally different components (e.g., Edelman and Gally, 2001 ), the D/U potential may also include successful changing of goals and intended outcomes. Also, it can include attaining different outcomes by the same means (see Pol et al, 2020 ). In this sense, the D/U potential of behavior has a wider meaning than degeneracy alone.…”