The widespread inferential understanding of human action attributes to the brain the power of modelling actions and predicting immediate changes in environmental circumstances. However, an ecological rationale proposes that sport performance is founded on coupled perception and action, avoiding the need for the brain, as a mediator, to be lagging behind immediate corporeal contact with the sport environment. Here, a theory of cognizant action is presented where behaviour is understood in terms of self-organized action, shaped by a performer's complex skills, directed towards perceived affordances. Cognizant action is defined as the conservation of intentionality by coupled perception and action. Being oriented towards action possibilities (affordances), cognizant action self-organizes in every performance environment, and at the same time it is constrained by performers' skills. Accordingly, the study of cognizant action demands representative experimental designs and analysis of eco-physical variables to understand sport performance. Current debates include the role of knowledge, the symmetry between performer and environment, and team cognition. Future research might be directed to test tensegrity as well as 'strong' anticipation in individual and team sport tasks.

This article clarifies the distinctive role of eco-physical variables in analyzing and modeling the dynamics of goal-directed behavior in sports. While behavior in sport is inherently purposeful and context-dependent, most current performance metrics neglect how athletes direct their actions toward task-relevant environmental properties. Although traditional indicators and continuous variables (e.g., collective, compound, and order parameters) have been widely used to quantify performance, they often conflate different constructs and remain neutral to situated intentionality. A conceptual clarification is necessary, as these metrics are frequently used interchangeably in the literature, leading to confusion among researchers and practitioners. Rooted in the theoretical approach of ecological dynamics, the concept of eco-physical variables seeks to address these issues by capturing how performers intentionally perceive and act in their environment to achieve task goals. These variables reflect how athletes act toward task goals, shaped by the socio-material properties of their performance environment. To our knowledge, this is the first article to focus exclusively on eco-physical variables, define them as a distinct class of metrics in sport, and outline their theoretical, methodological, and practical implications. It resolves conceptual ambiguity around similar terms and offers theory-informed guidance for developing variables that preserve dynamics and context. Specifically, this article: (a) reviews existing sports performance metrics; (b) overviews the ecological dynamics approach to sport performance; (c) defines eco-physical variables and reviews their application; (d) provides recommendations for their development and measurement; (e) explores their role in dynamical systems and artificial intelligence modeling; and (f) identifies debates, challenges, and future research.

Anticipation is essential for successfully performing in dynamic environments, yet it is often framed as mentally inferring a future state without considering how action is embodied and embedded. This paper introduces an action-based approach to anticipation and team synergies based on perception-action couplings. Using football as a case study, we measured anticipation as the players’ prospective coordination with the match environment towards task objectives. We explored how team synergic behavior emerged from players’ anticipatory movements, guiding the teams’ ability to maintain goal directed behavior. Defender-ball-goal angles were computed from game positional data and submitted to cluster phase analysis to develop a team coherence model expressing how defenders collectively blocked the progression of the ball towards goal. Cross-correlation analysis measured defender-ball coupling strength and delay (ρ), capturing how defenders coordinated with the ball to sustain and interchange among blocking roles, so the team could maintain coherence. Results showed that higher coupling strengths (ρ) were associated with defenders’ anticipatory movements in relation to the ball, exhibited by negative coupling delays (median lag = -1.02 s). This indicates that defenders coordinated their movements with future ball positions to assume and interchange among blocking roles. Regression analysis showed a strong association (R² = .74) between blocking role interchanges and team coherence stability. This action-based approach helped clarify how perception-action is coordinated among team members to foster team synergies, offering a comprehensive framework for studying anticipation as an embodied and embedded human skill, while providing a tool for its broader application across group performance domains.

Background: Research highlights that understanding movement functionality in football requires contextualizing physical demands. Ecological dynamics provides a useful framework for this contextualization by examining how players adjust their action capabilities (effectivities) to opportunities for action in the match environment (affordances). Purpose: We explored the relationship between movement intensity and variability to capture how movement is regulated by the dynamic interplay between a player’s action capabilities and opportunities for action in the match environment. Each situation imposes distinct demands, and team functionality depends on the players’ ability to adapt to the context. Methods: Using positional data, we identified players’ movements (n = 1021) in attacking and compared how players (n = 28) adjusted their speed and direction to act on distinct match affordances. Through linear regression, we associated transitions between affordances with team attacking functionality. Results : An inverse relationship between intensity and variability was found. Comparative analysis showed that s upporting affordances were characterized by movements with slightly higher direction variability ( U = 106,365.00, P = .008) and attacking affordances by higher mean speed ( U = 150,586.00, P < .001). Linear regression showed that match affordance transitions explained 36% of positive variations in total passes, F _1,47 = 26.42, P < .001, and 49% in possession length, F _1,47 = 44.89, P < .001. Conclusions: These findings provide preliminary evidence of nuanced movement regulation, as players engage with different affordances during the match, characterized by small to moderate effect sizes. Moderate associations with team functionality indicators suggest that movement variability may contribute to maintaining coordinated and effective team play.

A fundamental concern for coaches and sport practitioners is developing athlete performance while preserving health and well-being. An emerging topic is that performing in nature-based environments may have more benefits than performing in typical built/indoor environments. However, to understand athlete performance and well-being, it is essential to recognize how performers accommodate (adapt) skills and resources under environmental constraints in pursuit of sport and exercise task goals. This article presents a narrative review to support a hypothesis on the sustained benefits of performing in nature-based environments, with health and well-being as necessary aspects for performance, grounded in the ecological dynamics theoretical framework. We start by discussing: (i) performance in nature-based and indoor environments underpinned by affordance perception; (ii) evidence for the role of nature-based environmental constraints on movement and psychological aspects; (iii) the hypothesis that prolonged engagement with nature-based environments during sport and exercise may promote adaptive skill development, health, and well-being, and may facilitate the transfer of these adaptations to performance in built indoor competitive settings; (iv) the distinct lived experiences (e.g., emotion, well-being) that emerge from exercising in nature-based and built indoor environments; and (v) suggestions on how to include nature-based constraints on sport and exercise training, and future research considerations. Overall, the reviewed theoretical and empirical evidence provides a rationale for the hypothesis that prolonged engagement with nature-based environments during sport and exercise may promote adaptive skill development, health, and well-being, with potential transfer of these adaptations to performance in built indoor settings. Future longitudinal and experimental studies are required to test this hypothesis and determine whether, and under what conditions, these proposed adaptations transfer to performance in built indoor sport settings.

Interpersonal systems in combat sports, such as judo, can be understood as complex dynamical systems in which athletes mutually constrain each other's decision-making. In such systems, decisions, such as throwing the opponent, emerge as bifurcations in interpersonal dynamics guided by the ongoing perception of affordances. However, dynamical systems modeling remains limited in showing how perception and action are coupled, such as in combat sports, where existing formalizations tend to rely on conditional probabilities. Guided by the ecological dynamics theoretical framework, this study developed a nonlinear stochastic differential equation model and its corresponding potential function to formalize the multistable, interpersonal dynamics of dyadic systems in judo. The system’s state variable (x) represented interpersonal coordination, while the relative angular velocity, expressing the ongoing perception of throwing affordances, was formalized as the control parameter (k). Model simulations examined how variations in k reorganize the fixed point structure of the dyadic system across equal- and opposite-body stance configurations (b). At low values of k, the system exhibited multistability, characterized by an attractor, a repeller, and a saddle-node. As k increased, the attractor and repeller merged into a saddle-node, leaving two saddle-node fixed points. At higher values of k, all fixed points disappeared, indicating a transition to a non-equilibrium regime in which stable coordination no longer persists. These successive bifurcations in the dyadic system's structure illustrate how throwing decisions in judo can emerge from and be expressed by interpersonal dynamics guided by affordance perception, thereby advancing previous research in combat sports.