Why Your “Fundamentals First” Approach is Breaking Players
Skills don’t grow from isolated drills — they emerge from the game itself.
Last week when I read Mangalam’s 2025 review of Optimality in Human Movement Science, I noticed that its fresh original research would enhance a topic I was writing about in one of my previous posts. So this a better-grounded piece with sharper focus and clearer recommendations.
The Fundamentals First Fallacy
On a grey Monday, a U11 coach pulled me aside at practice.
“Look,” he said, pointing at his kids tripping through agility ladders,
“before they play real games, they have to master fundamentals.”
It’s a familiar refrain. Fundamentals first. Master the basics before earning the game. It feels safe. It feels logical. But it’s wrong.
The Struggling Moment
Watch enough youth sessions and you’ll see it: kids moving cleanly in drills, then freezing when the game starts. The choreography of “perfect” technique unravels the moment an opponent enters the picture. Coaches blame nerves, immaturity, or “not enough reps.” But the truth is harder: their practice design taught them to crumble.
They’ve been fed the Fundamentals First Fallacy—the belief that skill begins with isolated basics, mastered in advance, before it can be applied.
The Forces Holding the Fallacy in Place
Why does this belief persist?
Cognitive comfort. Fundamentals are visible and nameable. “Square your hips.” “Chop your steps.” “Keep your eye on the ball.” Coaches gravitate toward what they can measure and command. Perception, timing, and decision-making are invisible—so they get sidelined.
Teaching habit. As Michael Polanyi argued, we know more than we can tell. Masters often can’t explain their tacit know-how, so they default to verbalizable techniques. What’s easy to say gets mistaken for what’s essential to do.
Cultural myth. The stories of Kobe grinding free throws or Federer grooving forehands make it sound like “back to basics” is the secret of greatness. The actual training these athletes used—varied, contextual, decision-rich—gets flattened into a ritual of “reps.”
Add it up and the logic feels airtight: teach the fundamentals first, then the game. But the evidence says otherwise.
The New Habit
Reps without decisions are choreography, not skill.
Representative practice binds perception and action together. A pass without a defender is rehearsal. A pass chosen under pressure is skill.
Technique without perception crumbles under stress.
Performance under pressure depends less on polished mechanics than on perceptual-cognitive anchors: the quiet eye, anticipatory reads, faster decision-making. Athletes drilled on isolated technique collapse not because they’re weak, but because their training never prepared them to perceive.
Optimization is a mirage.
Mangalam’s 2025 review shows why biomechanics is abandoning “correct form.” Evolution produces good-enough compromises, not optima. Human movement is fractal, variable, and emergent. Variability is not error; it’s the system’s adaptive strength. Chasing “the one best way” to shoot, cut, or throw is chasing a ghost.
Every rep either builds transfer—or automates failure.
Blocked, repetition-heavy drills produce short-term fluency but poor retention and transfer (Shea & Morgan, 1979; Schmidt & Bjork, 1992). They look great in practice, but they program fragility. True consistency arises from repetition without repetition—Bernstein’s phrase for repeating outcomes through variable means.
Fundamentals emerge from the whole.
Sam Elsner calls it permanent beginnership: students drilled on isolated basics never advance, while masters who engaged the whole game had their fundamentals emerge naturally. Small-sided games and constraint-rich tasks build fundamentals faster and sturdier than any cone cemetery.
None of this means isolated work has no place. In flag football, you sometimes do need a quiet moment for first exposure (e.g., how to hold a ball, what a legal rush looks like), for re-entry from injury, or to rehearse safety-critical skills. The fallacy is treating these edge cases as the foundation, rather than a temporary support.
The Outcome
Shift the design and the picture changes.
She crouches at the line, flag belt hanging loose, eyes darting. The coach told her only to “chop your steps.” So she chops, in rhythm, until the receiver bursts off the line. By the time she notices, she’s frozen mid-step, body square but beaten. The footwork was perfect — and useless. Nobody taught her to read.
Two weeks later, same girl, different setup: a 3v3 game in a narrow channel. This time the receiver cuts inside. She hesitates, then mirrors, hips turning late but flags still safe in her hands. Her steps weren’t textbook, but they worked. The constraint forced her to watch the attacker, not her own feet. Her “fundamentals” arrived anyway, born from the read.
Fast-forward four years. The same player now tracks an overload: three attackers against two defenders. She feints a rush towards the runner, then delays, buying time for a teammate to recover. The cut she plants on isn’t smooth. It doesn’t need to be. The “fundamental” she shows isn’t choreography — it’s judgment. The messy footwork keeps her alive in the play.
The promise of fundamentals-first is security. The reality is stagnation. The promise of fundamentals-through-play is risk. The reality is growth.
Try This
If you want to break the fallacy, try this tonight:
Pick your favorite “fundamentals drill.”
Ask: Where’s the decision? If it’s missing, add one.
Shrink or tilt the space to force perception, not just repetition.
Add or remove players to load tactical choices.
Insert a constraint—throw clock, rush lane, rollout, or silent defense—to stir variability.
Run the drill.
Use PICOD (Pressure, Information, Coordination, Opponent, Decision) as a quick checklist to see what’s constraining the athletes. (It’s a coach’s lens I put forward, not a formal score—two coaches may grade it differently, and that’s fine.)
Ask players what information guided their choices.
Re-grade: did the drill grow transfer, or just choreography?
Keep one tweak, drop the rest, try again next week.
But let me add that not every tweak works. In one session, we stacked a throw clock, rollout rule, and silent defense all at once. The result? Chaos: QBs froze, receivers stopped their routes, defenders argued. Nothing transferred. The fix was simple—strip it back to one constraint. The lesson: not all variability builds learning for everybody; dosage matters.
Closing
The Fundamentals First Fallacy comforts coaches because it makes learning look like a staircase: master the basics, then climb to the game. But skill doesn’t work that way. Fundamentals are not rungs you conquer in advance. They are shadows cast by the game itself.
So the next time someone says, “We need to get back to fundamentals,” answer with a better question:
👉 Are we giving athletes the kind of practice where fundamentals actually matter?
Because the game is the teacher. Fundamentals are its residue.
Rolf is a non-linear pedagogy advocate, author, and coach developer from Germany. He writes about humane coaching, purposeful change, and the road toward dreams worth chasing.
If his work resonates, why not walk a stretch of the road with him?
📌 PS: If you found this post helpful, would you please consider restacking it and sharing it with your audience? This post is public, so feel free to share and forward it.
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Sources
Mangalam, M. (2025). The myth of optimality in human movement science. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.
→ A sweeping critique of “optimal movement” assumptions in biomechanics and motor control, highlighting variability and emergence as central.
Shea, J.B. & Morgan, R.L. (1979). Contextual interference effects on the acquisition, retention, and transfer of a motor skill. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 5(2), 179–187.
→ Classic study showing random/variable practice can impair practice performance but enhance retention and transfer.
Schmidt, R.A. & Bjork, R.A. (1992). New conceptualizations of practice: Common principles in three paradigms suggest new concepts for training. Psychological Science, 3(4), 207–217.
→ Landmark paper linking desirable difficulties and contextual interference to better long-term learning.
Bernstein, N.A. (1967/1996 translation). On dexterity and its development. In Dexterity and Its Development (M.L. Latash & M.T. Turvey, eds.).
→ Source of the “repetition without repetition” concept: skilled performers produce consistent outcomes through variable movements.
Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Doubleday.
→ Seminal work on tacit knowledge: “we know more than we can tell,” relevant to why masters default to teaching visible fundamentals.
Elsner, S. (n.d.). The Fundamentals Fallacy. (opinion piece / commentary, here on Substack.
→ Coined “permanent beginnership” to describe how isolated fundamentals trap learners.