'Knowing as we go': a Hunter-Gatherer Behavioural Model to Guide Innovation in Sport Science

An Ecological Dynamics Approach to Understanding Human-Environment Interactions in the Adventure Sport Context—Implications for Research and Practice

The last few decades have witnessed a surge of interest in adventure sports, and has led to an emerging research focus on these activities. However, recent conceptual analyses and scientific reviews have highlighted a major, fundamental question that remains unresolved: what constitutes an adventure sport. Despite several proposals for definitions, the field still seems to lack a shared conceptualization. This deficit may be a serious limitation for research and practice, restricting the development of a more nuanced theoretical explanation of participation and practical implications within and across adventure sports. In this article, we address another crucial question, how can adventure sports be better understood for research and practice? We briefly summarize previous definitions to address evident confusion and a lack of conceptual clarity in the discourse. Alternatively, we propose how an ecological perspective of human behaviors, such as interactions with the environment, may provide an appropriate conceptualization to guide and enhance future research and practice, using examples from activities such as freeride skiing/snowboarding, white-water kayaking, climbing, mountaineering and the fields of sport science, psychology and avalanche research and education. We draw on ecological dynamics as a transdisciplinary approach to discuss how this holistic framework presents a more detailed, nuanced, and precise understanding of adventure sports.

From a Technology That Replaces Human Perception-Action to One That Expands It: Some Critiques of Current Technology Use in Sport

Information technology has been integrated into most areas of sport, providing new insights, improving the efficiency of operational processes, and offering unique opportunities for exploration and inquiry. While acknowledging this positive impact, this paper explores whether sufficient consideration has been directed towards what technology risks detracting from the learning and developmental experiences of its users. Specifically, viewed through the philosophical lens of the device paradigm, and considering a more ecological account of technological implementation, we discuss how technology use in sport could subtly disengage educators and applied sports scientists from performance environments. Insights gleaned from such an ecological account of technology implementation could lead sports science and educational teams to ask and reflect on tough questions of current practice: i.e. has too much control been given to technological devices to ‘solve’ problems and communicate knowledge (about) in sport? Has technology improved the skills of players and performance staff? Or are performance staff at risk of becoming over-reliant on technology, and as a result, reducing the value of experiential knowledge (of) and intuition? Questions like these should be asked if technological devices, purported to support aspects of practice, are continually integrated into the sporting landscape.

Weaving Lines of Inquiry: Promoting Transdisciplinarity as a Distinctive Way of Undertaking Sport Science Research

The promotion of inter- and multidisciplinarity - broadly drawing on other disciplines to help collaboratively answer important questions to the field - has been an important goal for many professional development organisations, universities, and research institutes in sport science. While welcoming collaboration, this opinion piece discusses the value of transdisciplinary research for sports science. The reason for this is that inter- and multidisciplinary research are still bound by disciplinary convention - often leading sport science researchers to study about a phenomenon based on pre-determined disciplinary ways of conceptualising, measuring, and doing. In contrast, transdisciplinary research promotes contextualised study with a phenomenon, like sport, unbound by disciplinary confines. It includes a more narrative and abductive way of performing research, with this abduction likely opening new lines of inquiry for attentive researchers to follow. It is in the weaving of these lines where researchers can encounter new information, growing knowledge in-between, through, and beyond the disciplines to progressively entangle novel and innovative insights related to a phenomenon or topic of interest. To guide innovation and the development of such research programmes in sport science, we lean on the four cornerstones of transdisciplinarity proposed by Alfonso Montuori, exemplifying what they could mean for such research programmes in sport science.

Methodological Considerations for Furthering the Understanding of Constraints in Applied Sports

Commonly classified as individual, task or environmental, constraints are boundaries which shape the emergence of functional movement solutions. In applied sport, an ongoing challenge is to improve the measurement, analysis and understanding of constraints to key stakeholders. Methodological considerations for furthering these pursuits should be centred around an interdisciplinary approach. This integration of methodology and knowledge from different disciplines also encourages the sharing of encompassing principles, concepts, methods and data to generate new solutions to existing problems. This narrative review discusses how a number of rapidly developing fields are positioned to help guide, support and progress an understanding of sport through constraints. It specifically focuses on examples from the fields of technology, analytics and perceptual science. It discusses how technology is generating large quantities of data which can improve our understanding of how constraints shape the movement solutions of performers in training and competition environments. Analytics can facilitate new insights from numerous and complex data through enhanced non-linear and multivariate analysis techniques. The role of the perceptual sciences is discussed with respect to generating outputs from analytics that are more interpretable for the end-user. Together, these three fields of technology, analytics and perceptual science may enable a more comprehensive understanding of constraints in sports performance.