An Ecological Dynamics Framework for the Acquisition of Perceptual–Motor Skills in Climbing

Uncertainty in extreme sports performance environments, like rock and ice climbing, provides considerable psycho-emotional and physiological demands which challenge the acquisition of perceptual–motor skills. An ecological dynamics theoretical framework adopts concepts and tools of nonlinear dynamics and ecological psychology to investigate and model the relationships that emerge in extreme sports between athletes and their performance environments. In this relation, the interactions of athletes with key objects, surfaces, events and significant others during a sport like climbing emerge from interdependent personal, task and environmental constraints on performance. Performance behaviours emerge through the continuous and active exploration of environmental properties by individual athletes. Properties of rock cliffs, icefalls and mountains provide a high level of uncertainty due to continuous weather-driven changes. Their unpredictability signifies that performance may be considered as an ongoing coadaptation of climber’s behaviours to dynamically changing, interacting constraints, individually perceived and encountered. In this chapter, we consider the continuous interactions between climbers and their environment to understand how they can be coached to perceive key environmental properties when climbing and adapt their behaviours towards achieving performance goals.