"Drillers are Killers" (they just don't realise that they are killing themselves!)

I'm really pleased to have had this conversation because it's one of those times where you stumble across somebody who has really great content. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Bren because he introduced me to Julia Blau and Jeff Wagman through the interview he did with them on his YouTube channel. That interview introduced me to their great book, which I have been devouring – "Introduction to Ecological Psychology." Check out my interview with Jeff and Julia here

Bren's Journey to Ecological Dynamics

Bren's story has a familiar theme common to many of my guests..."In high school, I wasn't very athletic. I was terrible at football, and I was getting bullied, literally on the field by another athlete. He would just do whatever he wanted, because I was so skinny, unathletic, and weak. I was 5'3", 100 pounds flat – the perfect victim, you could say."

After his first season, Bren made a decision: "I don't feel physically capable of defending myself. Like we could say that affordance wasn't present in my field of affordances – being able to do what I wanted to do on the field."

So he started lifting weights – three hours a day, every day, with incredible dedication. Between freshman and senior year, he put on 45 pounds of muscle and significantly improved his speed. His 40-yard dash time went from about 5.67 to 4.9 seconds – a substantial improvement.

But here's where it gets interesting: "As far as actually getting better at football, which was my main goal, I really didn't improve despite getting way stronger, significantly bigger, and significantly faster. In the traditional strength and conditioning sense, I had all the things I needed to be a good player, but I didn't experience that at all."

This was Bren's first hint that something was missing in the traditional approach to athletic development.

In college, Bren studied biochemistry, working on disease prevention research. "It's hyper isolated. You're not focused on the disease so much as the pathway and the specific protein within the disease. It really started to feel like a luck-based process."

Around the same time, he discovered the work of Ido Portal, who talks about movement as a general practice rather than specialisation. Bren became fascinated with the concept of "movement intelligence" – skill in a general sense of how to use your body, rather than just what you can do on specific athletic tests.

This led him to shift his focus: "Rather than trying to work on this one protein, maybe I could do more social good by working with the system in a more holistic sense. Working with facilitating movement for people and inspiring people to move more, sleep better, and eat better – that is a very high likelihood of actually quite good effects."

Eventually, Bren discovered ecological dynamics through a grappling coach and has spent the last two years making a documentary about it. "I just really started with making a video about this because it's important. Then the scope of the project kept expanding because I realised this is so important and I need to dig deeper."

Tasks vs Drills: The Heart of Ecological Practice

Bren highlighted one of the key differences between traditional and ecological approaches: "For coaches in sports or movement practices, I give the same advice – don't have your students drill anything. No joke... only tasks."

He explained that the traditional coaching assumption – that we can learn fundamental skills, store them in the brain, and recall them later – leads coaches to isolate movements and drill them repeatedly. "You want to get them perfect and have students do it just right, just like you want it to be done, because you think that's the most effective way."

Functional Movement and Mobility

Bren shared how he's applying ecological principles to mobility training, contrasting it with traditional isolated approaches:

"Mobility training right now is very, still very isolated. It's like, 'we're going to do this stretch, that stretch, that stretch.' Rather than locking down every other joint and targeting one joint at a time, we can build tasks where you have to use the whole structure together."

He described a simple task: "You're standing on one leg, I give you a target. Don't touch your other leg to the floor; you've got to touch your hand to this target, and I move it around in different directions. Every joint is fair game. Every joint could be and should be contributing towards you getting to that target."

This approach creates a richer learning environment: "Not only are a lot of things developing mobility and being challenged near the end range of motion, but other things are learning to help balance. There are so many different aspects that are now present that we're completely missing when we isolate to the extreme."

The beauty of this approach is that it's both more effective and more enjoyable: "It becomes a thing where it's hard because we're challenging it, but it's so much more fun."

The Path Forward

As our conversation drew to a close, we reflected on the exciting future of ecological dynamics and its potential to transform coaching and movement practice.

Bren emphasised that the approach not only works better for skill development but is also more enjoyable: "It's so great that it's also more fun. That engagement, that instinctive feeling that drilling is boring – I think that's because we have an intuitive sense that it doesn't work. I don't think it's just that we're not disciplined; I think it's that we feel that drilling isn't helpful."

I closed with a thought about working with constraints rather than against them: "When you understand that the environment presents critical information for movement development, and you work backwards from the environment towards the individual, everything shifts. When we really start to play together, that's when the joy happens. Once you see not only the impact but also the enjoyment and genuine sense of curiosity, exploration, freedom, and creativity that comes with working with somebody in that way, you just can't go back."

For those interested in exploring Bren's work, you can find his content on YouTube at "Bren Teaches Movement" or contact him through his website.