Elite Coaches Are Using This Unexpected Approach To Build Better Athletes

Many of us spend our whole lives chasing more: more options, more time, more open space on the calendar. But when I sat down with David Epstein, acclaimed journalist and author of Inside the Box, and Range he made a case against this desire that I didn't expect. He argues that constraints, not open-ended choice, are what drive creativity and peak performance.

My conversation with Epstein started with him citing psychologist Daniel Willingham, who has argued that our brains aren't actually built for thinking. Thinking uses a lot of energy in our bodies, so our brains are actually built to avoid thinking whenever possible. This is why we default to the path of least resistance when we're handed a blank slate. When we have too many options, we choose the familiar thing, the first idea that surfaces, or the move we've made before.

To be creative, Epstein says you have to block that path and force yourself into productive exploration. One psychologist calls this the Green Eggs and Ham effect. Dr. Seuss wrote one of his greatest hits after he made a bet that he couldn't write a book using just 50 words. That restriction pushed him to experiment with rhythm in a way he never would have otherwise, and it became his signature. It's a perfect example of what a well-placed limit can unlock.

As Epstein explored the idea that limitations are actually good for our brain, he was introduced to the constraints-led approach.

The idea is that a coach, trainer, or parent acts as an environment architect. Instead of telling pupils what to do and how to do it, they set up boundaries that force them to explore and find their own solutions. It's a coaching model that's been around for a while, but it's been gaining traction since star athletes like Victor Wembanyama, Shohei Ohtani, and Kelsey Plum publicly identified with it.

Wembanyama works with a trainer who blocks his preferred move in practice, forcing him to develop new ones. Plum said the approach changed her career, in an article for The Athletic . She said the setup takes away whatever she's most comfortable with, forcing her to diversify her toolkit. The approach doesn't make existing skills disappear, it just stops them from being the only option.

I asked Epstein the obvious question. If constraints are so great, what makes a bad one? Extreme financial scarcity, for example, literally consumes cognitive bandwidth in ways that make it harder to function. But Epstein understands this nuance and says deprivations if very different from productive pressure.

Another good example is deadlines, which are a double-edged sword. They can sharpen focus and force prioritization, but only if they let you hone in on the task at hand. If a deadline pushes you to multitask, it destroys productivity and creative problem-solving. Epstein says any constraint that removes a person's ability to surprise themselves has gone too far. If you are being told both what to do and how to do it, it's no longer productive.

The NASA mission LCROSS is a good example of a stressful but successful constraint. Engineers working on the project were given about half the time and budget they wanted. At first they complained, but then they figured out how to get it done anyway. They didn't have the resources to build from scratch, so they borrowed imaging equipment from Army tanks and engine temperature sensors from NASCAR.

The engineers ended up building a probe that confirmed water on the moon, and it never would have happened without the original constraint. However, Epstein is skeptical the mission would have been as successful with a quarter of the time and budget. He says that would have been pushing the constraints too far.

The constraints-led approach isn't just about what you add to a training environment. It's also about what you take away, and that's where most of us have a blind spot.

Epstein explained that we have a hardwired cognitive bias called additive bias, along with its cousin, subtraction neglect bias. We're wired to overlook solutions that involve removing things. The theory is that for most of human history, the problem was having too little, not too much. That's why our brains are built to collect and accumulate, but the result is adding drills, tools, obligations, and projects, even when cutting one would improve performance.

The fix to this is similar to the constraints-led approach: do an intake of the environment, then deliberately remove something.

Epstein used a world-renown genomic lab as an example. The scientists were at the top of their field, so they started taking on more and more work, until they started losing samples. When they mapped everything on a wall, they realized they had twice as much in progress as they could possibly complete. They made a new rule that nothing enters the work funnel until something comes out completed on the other end.

The phrase "dizziness of freedom" comes from Søren Kierkegaard, one of the founders of existentialism, who wrote about the weight of having to make all your own choices about who to be and how to live. Epstein lived a version of this when he left his traditional journalism job to become an independent writer. He committed to spending every moment of his day by his own choosing, working only on what he decided. But two years later, he was struggling to decide what to work on, wasn't syncing up with people in real life, and wasn't happy.

His fix was deliberate. He joined a nonprofit board, started going to dance meetups, and joined a dinner and discussion club. He rebuilt a network of obligations—people he had to show up for and who showed up for him.

Epstein summarizes his argument by saying the goal is to have "freedom within a framework," and I couldn't agree more.

The athletes who are performing at the highest level right now aren't doing it because they have unlimited options. They're doing it because someone built the right boundaries around them and let them figure out the rest.