I was curious about this too. Coming from a Japanese koryu perspective, the constraint led/environmental approach that jumps into games baffles me. I could see using it for accessory work for different things, but I know people that basically only use games.

I cant speak for the gyms you are talking about, but if they are in any way similiar to us then we dont skip the fundamentals, we just teach them differently. We do highly constrained games that teach fundamentals. If a student is even mildly athletic they will find good form all by themselves because of the requirements that the games set. That doesnt mean that students will never acquire some less than favorable movement solutions, you then have to correct those by either giving them opportunitys and ideas to experiment with other solutions or adjust the constraints to make the old solution a bad option etc. Trust me, we care about good form as well. This has the caveat that with unathletic students or remedial students, as russ calls them, there can be some difficulties. For example: If they dont have prerequisite strength to do the correct movement they will always tend to do suboptimal movements.

@@Overdrive-19 I agree that a good CLA method will include games to teach basics, but what Russ is talking about here is something more specific than general athleticism. He emphasizes the need for discipline in posture and uses the example of holding the arm just a couple degrees too low in a high guard as having a large impact. It is not impossible to make a game around something this specific but it would be fairly difficult especially with beginners. The other thing Russ mentions which kind of collides with the CLA method is the part about needing to constantly reinforce the basic drills as a means to retain the movement mechanics required by different systems. This kind of goes directly against many people who use the constraints method because they claim that drilling is largely useless (especially solo drills). So there is clearly some tension between these ideas and I would be interested to know Russ’ opinion on the matter given his expertise in biomechanics.

My experience with CLA is that those who are exceptional athletes pick it up immediately and benefit tremendously from it, while those who are intermediate to remedial athletes are exposed to said games and immediately crash and burn or else limp along with levels of form which are entirely substandard and hurt their performance and then have to be corrected. I think there are things about CLA which are theoretically correct. No one who has even a remote amount of training thinks that anyone actually repeats the exact same motion twice ever. Micro fluctuations in balance make that impossible and anyone who has studied human motion even on a surface level knows that to be the case. But there's too much of CLA that goes against how I know the nervous system to operate and there's a little bit of a hand waving between the two and the two and the five they come up with about how that's supposed to actually work. It strikes me as the whole language approach to coaching, something which for gifted athletes such as you'll see at the college and even the better high School levels can be exceptionally useful. In my coaching I'm working with usually remedial athletes who are coming in at talent levels below. That of even the average Hema club, and coming in with a CLA approach would be disaster. They would get discouraged and quit, and rightly so.

@@russmitchellmovement Thanks for your insight! I like many things about CLA but I also think that the best fencers who have amazing economy of motion usually get to that level with drills.