What is CLA, the revolutionary coaching method used by Victor Wembanyama and other top athletes?
LOS ANGELES — Victor Wembanyama is doing something wrong.
The 7-foot-4 unicorn, still in the early stages of rewriting how basketball is played, just made a move few in the world can. But it’s the antithesis of why he’s in a quiet Los Angeles gym with San Antonio Spurs teammate Harrison Barnes and his skill trainer, Noah LaRoche. In a summer of new adventures, ranging from kung fu training at a Shaolin temple in China to bicycle kicks on a soccer pitch in Japan, Wembanyama wanted to try one more novel thing.
Six years earlier, Barnes came to a similar conclusion. A former No. 1 recruit out of high school, Barnes had just joined his third NBA team and wanted to evolve as a player. Barnes asked his friend Joe Boylan, an experienced NBA assistant coach, to recommend a skills trainer for his summer workouts.
Boylan gave him LaRoche’s number and a message: Trust his unconventional methods.
Now, it is time for Wembanyama to understand what that means.
“Victor wanted to come out to L.A. to train for the summer,” Barnes said, “and I wanted (him) to see what I do.”
They are participating in a three-on-three drill to push the players to make optimal reads each time they touch the ball. Things are going smoothly until Wembanyama does a vast Euro step through traffic to score.
Before anyone can marvel at the bucket, LaRoche calls practice to a halt. He waves Wembanyama over to the courtside video monitor. What looks like a basket that few players in the world can score is actually a problem.
“What did you see here?” LaRoche asked the former NBA Rookie of the Year.
In LaRoche’s gym, nothing can be predetermined. It’s all about making the best decision in that specific situation, not perfecting a single move.
As Wembanyama peered at the video, he immediately noticed something that had eluded him in the moment. In this scenario, there was more space for him to attack in a different direction. He knew exactly how he would react next time.
“My body is starting to understand these movements,” Wembanyama told LaRoche after watching the video.
It was Wembanyama’s first step toward understanding a new perspective on the game he has a chance to conquer. He was learning about three letters that the current Premier League champions (Liverpool), the World Series winners (Los Angeles Dodgers), the last two NBA champions (Oklahoma City Thunder and Boston Celtics) and many other teams across professional sports have already, to certain degrees, incorporated into their organizations.
C-L-A.
The CLA, which stands for Constraints-Led Approach, is a learning method that has made its way from academia to the mainstream, drawing from innovative research in psychology and neuroscience. It replaces traditional block training, where an athlete learns a single movement pattern step-by-step, with game-like situations that feature special rules, forcing them to adapt their moves on the fly. It’s founded on the principle that training perfectly yields imperfect results.
“It changed my career,” said Los Angeles Sparks guard Kelsey Plum, a four-time WNBA All-Star and two-time champion. “Before, I was very skilled. But I don’t think I was ever very purposeful.”
The CLA takes the ground-up approach of block training, which eliminates the infinite variables that affect athletes in the heat of competition, and flips it on its head.
That means putting players into scenarios with different limitations called “constraints” to simulate the unpredictable environment of an actual game. Whether it’s the number of steps they can take, the area of the playing surface from which they are allowed to maneuver or even the weight of the ball they are using, players are repeatedly told to overcome restrictions to accomplish a task. While painstakingly working through mistakes, they are forced to find advantageous opportunities, “affordances” in CLA parlance.
From pool noodles to a game known as “murderball,” coaches around the world are finding ways to put their players in a sea of constraints and guide them on how to work their way back to shore.
By forcing a player to deal with variables that are impossible to predict, the CLA teaches them to execute under duress rather than flawlessly in a vacuum. If a coach can get a player to work through failure and creatively solve problems, the thought goes, practice becomes more complex than the actual games.
“It’s creating different atmospheres and a culture that the toughest part of your day in player development is the practice,” said Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes, whose team is one of the strongest purveyors of the CLA in American sports. “Blocked practice has been shown to have a purpose, but once you get into the elite levels of talent, facing this type of stuff every day, then it’s not as effective. There’s a balancing of confidence pregame and then making sure you’re challenging yourself so that you’re up to the task of facing (Pirates pitcher) Paul Skenes, or whoever.”
Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes (right) watches star Shohei Ohtani warm up. Ohtani and the Dodgers were among the first in baseball to use the CLA’s training methods.Jayne Kamin-Oncea / Imagn Images
The CLA has the potential to reshape learning in any field. In an age where many people educate themselves by watching hours of tennis serves or cooking videos on YouTube, the CLA aligns with the paradigm shift of empowering individuals to shape their direction.
But it has taken root as a framework for athletic training, where versatility and improvisational reads have become core principles across many sports. After gaining traction in the player development world over the past half-decade, it’s making its way to the highest levels of team sports around the globe.
“A lot of sports training takes the person out of the environment as if there’s a classical technique all athletes have to develop,” said professor Keith Davids of Sheffield Hallam University in England, who first coined the term “CLA” in a 1994 research paper. “It doesn’t work that way. Context shapes everything.”
For so long, the CLA’s most significant constraint was persuading large organizations to adopt a substantial overhaul of their training methods. However, that is quickly changing. Several NBA franchises are exploring ways to use the CLA more in the 2025-26 season, according to multiple executives and coaches who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the subject on the record.
Over the past decade, the analytics movement has evolved from a roundtable discussion in an MIT classroom to the norm in professional sports. Now, the CLA is poised to become the next frontier of competitive innovation.
Kenny Atkinson is pacing back and forth at the Cleveland Cavaliers’ practice facility in the spring of 2024. His interview for the team’s head coaching vacancy is about to begin, and he’s debating whether to make a daring proposal.
What if the Cavs rebuilt their entire identity through the CLA?
Atkinson first learned about the CLA three years earlier when he attended a workout with then-LA Clippers star Paul George and LaRoche. It was immediately clear this session was different. As defenders held pads and sticks to make it feel like five Wembanyamas were guarding George, LaRoche created different constraints to force George to make different reads.
Atkinson, then an assistant coach with the Clippers, was surprised to be the only one in a crowd of coaches watching the workout, captivated by the methodology. He’s always gravitated toward outside-the-box thinkers who aren’t weighed down by the burden of tradition. After meeting LaRoche, Atkinson spent the next three seasons on Steve Kerr’s bench in Golden State, where he had a front row seat for Steph Curry’s neurocognitive efficiency training process.
However, the seed LaRoche planted really germinated last year, when Atkinson was on his phone scrolling through X. Atkinson spends his downtime seeking out the latest basketball trends and innovations wherever he can, always curious to find a fresh idea. He hit the jackpot when he came across a post from Alex Sarama, a British coach who wrote the book “Transforming Basketball” on the theory and implementation of the CLA.
Finally, someone who literally wrote the book on the process he couldn’t forget, the perfect person to show Atkinson how to take this from theory to practice.
Atkinson reached out to Sarama, who was then an assistant for the Portland Trail Blazers’ G League team, the Rip City Remix. The two quickly bonded over their shared passion for creative coaching. It didn’t take long for Sarama to sell Atkinson on the efficacy of the approach.
So when Atkinson finally sat down with Cavs general manager Koby Altman and the franchise brass, he saw the whiteboard, cracked the cap off the marker and wrote “C-L-A.”
“Kenny came in with such a player development acumen, we were going to listen to whatever he was going to pitch,” Altman recalled. “We were literally on the whiteboard drawing up scenarios of how we can elevate Evan (Mobley’s) shot routine. How can we make it more game-like? If we add this constraint, that constraint, this will be really good for him.”
At the time, Atkinson didn’t know he would go on to win the NBA’s Coach of the Year award and lead the Cavs to a 64-18 record, the second-best in franchise history, and a 16-win improvement despite returning virtually the same roster from the previous season. He realized the NBA had evolved from the days of thick playbooks and believed teaching improvisation was paramount to reviving Cleveland’s spark. The CLA provided a pathway for implementing the strategy.
He also knew convincing established NBA players to change their methods and initially struggle by design would be a tough sell to the locker room. The CLA is counterintuitive to how most people train, much less professional hoopers who have spent their entire lives developing muscle memory to hit particular jump shots from specific spots or execute complex dribble moves they’ve practiced in an empty gym for 10,000 hours.
There’s just one problem, according to CLA advocates.
“There’s no such thing as muscle memory,” Davids said.
In fact, just about every conversation with any CLA practitioner includes, unprompted, “Did you know muscle memory is a myth?”
“There’s no such thing as trying to get your muscles to produce the same pattern,” said Sarama, who Atkinson hired to become the Cavaliers’ director of player development last year and then promoted to assistant coach this summer. “The problem is when you are doing the same technique, it’s making you less adaptable because the constraints are always different.”
The CLA evolved from the study of ecological dynamics, a framework that integrates psychology and neurobiology to examine the relationship between how the brain and body interact to perceive and navigate our environment. It focuses on perception-action coupling, the feedback loop by which your brain processes sensory information and your body coordinates sequences of actions to create motion. It’s a continuous partnership between more than just the brain’s visual system and the body, but also involving touch, hearing, and proprioception — the body’s sixth sense of position and movement.
The latest research in ecological dynamics suggests our brain does not store a specific script of a given movement pattern. Instead, the brain and body work in tandem, using perception-action coupling to develop precise and flexible movements constantly.
Everything is a read, all the time, for all of us.
“The traditional way is top-down, it always comes from the brain to the muscles and then execute. The ecological way is the complete opposite. It’s bottom up,” said Fabian Otte, the goalkeeping coach for 2024-25 English Premier League champion Liverpool, before he moved on to the same position at Tottenham Hotspur. “Everything is self-organized through all the different senses you have. You pick up the right information that helps you to execute something and you don’t need the brain to translate this information, necessarily. It becomes a direct approach from the body to the brain and back.”
Fabian Otte (right) utilized the CLA methods to assist world-class goalkeeper Alisson Becker (left) and Liverpool in winning the 2024-25 Premier League title.Nick Potts / PA Images via Getty Images
No matter how much a movement feels scripted in practice, the environment in which it is performed is different. That means the athlete’s response is technically different, all the way down at the cellular level. The brain and body will always perceive something as changing from the last time.
“The CLA paradigm is focused on the neurological aspect of it and not the musculoskeletal action we historically think of as (muscle) memory,” said Dr. Javier Cárdenas, the Director of the Concussion & Brain Injury Center at the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute and vice chair of the NFL’s head, neck, and spine committee.
“The human brain dedicates an incredible amount of real estate to the visual system. Not just what you see with your eyes, but how the eyes coordinate movements, receive the information, how the information goes through the brain stem and reacts unconsciously to control the pupils and then predicting where an object is going to be.”
Davids’ research ignited the CLA movement in the sports science world, leading him to collaborate with Otte and Sarama on research papers. He built upon the work of Karl Newell, whose 1986 paper “Constraints on the Development of Coordination” introduced the concept to child motor skill development, and James Gibson, whose 1979 book “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception” first popularized the ecological dynamics theory that underpins the CLA. As sports science researchers, such as Sarama and Otte, secured positions with major sports organizations, the research expanded and evolved into the CLA method.
Professor Davids’ findings indicate that CLA training is a better way to help develop pathways within the central nervous system. Forcing athletes to find new affordances within various constraints makes perception-action coupling more efficient. That leads to enhanced decision-making and faster response time on the actual playing field.
It’s why Plum, despite committing a turnover in a recent game against her former team, the Las Vegas Aces, could only laugh as she looked toward LaRoche in the crowd. LaRoche, watching from the sixth row, shot a smirk right back to her. They both knew she had been through far worse. She is one of the biggest proponents of the CLA and has spent years with LaRoche pushing through every constraint they can think up.
“What teacher would teach during the test?” LaRoche said. “The teaching is done during practice and that’s the whole point.”
Plum started working with LaRoche during the COVID-19 pandemic after being connected by one of his clients, WNBA legend Diana Taurasi. At the time, Plum, the 2017 No. 1 overall pick, was coming off an Achilles injury and still hadn’t found her game as a pro.
LaRoche put her to work right away, introducing a drill Plum had never experienced. She was trapped at half court by two men twice her size and given just five seconds to score. If she succeeded, she got one point. If she didn’t, they got three. First to seven wins.
“When I first started, and even in this past year, I’m like, ‘What the f— is this? This is bulls—,’ ” Plum said. “But it builds a resistance mentally to just be able to adapt. And when you play in the game, it’s like, ‘Oh, this is way easier than getting trapped by all these people.”
As she stuck with it, she noticed how much easier it was for her to make more advanced reads faster when coming over screens. By the end of their first season together, she was the WNBA’s sixth player of the year. The following season, she was third in MVP voting en route to the first of Las Vegas’ back-to-back championships.
After the 2024 season, her final one with the Aces before an offseason trade to the Sparks, Plum was shocked when her coaches informed her that she had led the WNBA in blow-by drives by 50. She’s one of the shortest players in the WNBA. However, she concedes she’s just a decent athlete, but working in the CLA with LaRoche has enabled her to sprint to the ball ahead of opponents while simultaneously reading the space to find solutions — affordances — before her first dribble.
“It’s building the awareness of why you’re doing what, and seeing it ahead of time,” Plum said. “Just being super intentional about that has completely changed my game. For me to lead the league in paint touches (5-foot-8 guard) is kind of absurd.”
Kelsey Plum has used the CLA’s methods to become one of the WNBA’s best scorers.Joe Nicholson / Imagn Images
The CLA is also gaining prominence in strength training and injury rehabilitation. In September 2023, Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, the first full-time slugger and elite pitcher since Babe Ruth a century ago, used its methods to rehab from his second Tommy John surgery. Pitchers typically sit out a season after the procedure. However, Ohtani is also one of the league’s most dangerous hitters and wanted to rehab his right elbow efficiently enough to take the plate on opening day.
So he ventured up to Driveline Baseball’s headquarters, just outside Seattle, to participate in their CLA rehabilitation program. Driveline has become an innovation lab for baseball over the past decade, with teams regularly poaching its staff to augment their own sports science programs. Ohtani started training at Driveline before the 2021 season to prepare for his first season as a full-time pitcher and hitter.
During this visit, Driveline had Ohtani throw with balls of varying sizes and weights to manage the strain placed on his surgically repaired elbow. Heavier balls prevented his arm from generating too much of a snapping torque, which would have strained the recovering tendons and ligaments. Over time, they used lighter balls to help Ohtani gradually gain more arm speed.
“The heavy ball uses the constraints to throttle them down,” said Connor White, director of high performance at Driveline. “The engine is so high that telling them to just do this slower (with a normal ball), they might be able to execute that. But it’s not going to actually bridge back to performance.”
Whether it’s for peak performance or injury recovery, the key is getting top players who have an established protocol to buy in. Ohtani has long used the CLA to maximize his historic talent. How do you introduce the CLA to a player who is already at the top of their game?
Otte had to test this quandary last season when newly-hired Liverpool manager Arne Slot recruited him from the US national soccer team. However, rather than having complete say, Otte had to collaborate with Liverpool’s other goalkeeping coach, Cláudio Taffarel, a Brazilian legend who had long worked with Alisson Becker, the club’s No. 1 goalkeeper.
Otte had to walk a tightrope. He needed to get Alisson to adjust to his approach while still respecting Taffarel’s process, which has helped Alisson become one of the best keepers in the world.
“What I learned from him is that training is one thing, but being in an environment where it’s high-performance pressure in a big stadium and everything’s on the table, you have to perform in this moment,” Otte said of Alisson. “When he stands in that goal in those high-stakes games, the feeling you get, the aura he’s got, it’s incredible.”
Otte is fascinated with using the CLA’s methods to manipulate athletes’ senses to enhance perception-action coupling. Sensory deprivation training has become increasingly common over the past decade, notably when Steph Curry popularized practicing with strobe goggles to disrupt his vision.
From the action on the field to the crescendo of fans cheering, soccer has a reliable soundtrack to help athletes prepare for their moment. The problem is that in training, you can hear the footsteps of a striker and the thump of the ball more clearly. Alisson isn’t going to hear every little step when the Anfield crowd is singing at full volume.
The CLA is all about making practice match the game environment, but how do you replicate the experience of 60,000 people screaming at you? Most coaches will blast crowd noise from the speakers, but Otte’s research showed he had to go the opposite direction.
He brought an outside-the-box idea to his training session with his new keepers, something that even an established star like Alisson could latch onto: He handed them construction earmuffs that silence external noise.
Forget about trying to pick out the key sounds through the crowd noise. What happens when you hear nothing at all?
By stripping out all external distractions, Otte forced Liverpool’s keepers to lock in visually without the audible cues their brains are used to hearing. If they could learn to respond without any auditory factors, they could strengthen their other senses when the game noise drowns out the variables from practice.
“Deaf people have better peripheral vision. They don’t hear, so they have to use the eyes more,” Otte said. “The outside of the field of vision is more attuned than (auditorily) healthy people. So, we tried to play around with these different constraints.”
Otte also flipped the senses around, having goalies wear Swivel Vision goggles to take away their peripheral vision.
Liverpool’s clear understanding of the CLA’s vision contributed to a Premier League title, with Slot winning coach of the year and Mohammed Salah earning player of the year honors.
However, in the wake of a round of 16 Champions League defeat to eventual champions Paris St. Germain, Liverpool cleaned house with Slot’s coaching staff, and Otte joined rivals Tottenham this season. The constraint can often be time.
As difficult as it can be to build an individual through the CLA, implementing it at a team-wide level is an even greater challenge. Last season, two teams became test cases for the CLA in the NBA.
One was the Cavaliers. The other was the Memphis Grizzlies, who brought in two highly paid assistant coaches to integrate the CLA under head coach Taylor Jenkins.
Tuomas Iisalo had used its methods as head coach of the Paris Basketball club the year before. It was the same club where Sarama also served as an assistant under the preceding head coach, Will Weaver. All were hired by David Kahn, the former president of basketball operations for the Minnesota Timberwolves, who has elevated Paris Basketball from the second division in France to one of the top teams in the country.
The other coach Memphis hired was none other than LaRoche himself.
The two teams’ journeys this year were proof that the CLA concept can work at a team level, while also illustrating some of the challenges in getting players to buy in.
In Cleveland, Atkinson, Sarama and the Cavs coaching staff established principles of play that their players must adhere to, rather than a rigid offensive system. When Donovan Mitchell drives one way, Jarrett Allen is going to cut that way. There were dozens of these combinations and overall concepts, creating a coordinated system of randomness. The trick was to build a shared understanding of how to identify the right affordances to exploit, refining the chaos.
They eliminated the five-on-zero walkthroughs, ensuring that even conceptual offensive installations at practice occur against a real defense. While Atkinson would run sessions to teach an offensive action, a separate coach quietly gave the defense their own instructions. Rather than the offense getting to practice attacking a particular coverage, they had to deal with the unpredictability of how the opposing defense would guard them the next night. There were no breaks from competition.
With Sarama designing practices and individual development plans for players, the Cavaliers implemented a series of complicated off-ball cuts. Those enhanced the speed of its All-Star backcourt, featuring 6-foot-3 Mitchell and 6-foot-1 Darius Garland, with the collective size of frontcourt partners Mobley and Allen creating usable space above the basket.
“I wouldn’t call it a clusterf—, but it was a clutter,” Mitchell told The Athletic last December. “We had never done it before. So when you’re learning these things, it definitely can be different.”
As Atkinson and Sarama layered on more elaborate constraints, the players mastered a variety of synced actions that sliced up every defense they faced throughout the regular season.
It wasn’t natural at first, but before the preseason even ended, the players began to buy into the program.
When someone would make a good read, teammates would scream, “CLA!”
Sarama kept upping the ante on the players’ constraints, eventually being anointed “Professor Alex.”
Garland, who made the All-Star team for the second time in his career, fondly remembers Sarama contesting shots in practice with a pool noodle.
“I ain’t gonna lie, that’s probably my favorite one,” Garland said. “He’ll hit you in the f—ing face if he wants to.”
The Cavaliers won their first 15 games of the season and finished with the best offense in the NBA on a per-possession basis. While injuries contributed to an upset defeat by the Indiana Pacers in the second round of the playoffs, the Cavaliers’ success proved that the CLA could scale to a team level.
Kenny Atkinson (left) used the CLA to transform the Cavaliers into title contenders.Matt Krohn / Imagn Images
Meanwhile, as LaRoche discovered in Memphis, not everyone falls in love with the process to the same degree.
After becoming the Grizzlies’ director of player development, LaRoche implemented the CLA in a similar way to Cleveland’s coaches, but took it a step further to eliminate most of the early action pick-and-rolls that had become a core part of most NBA offenses over the past decade. LaRoche believes waiting for a big to set a screen wastes time and adds traffic, eliminating affordances unnecessarily.
The new system yielded strong early returns, as the Grizzlies had the fifth-best offense and fourth-highest net rating in the league heading into the All-Star break. But privately, Ja Morant, the team’s 26-year-old franchise guard who relishes taking on elite defenders, was voicing displeasure with the system’s de-emphasis of pick-and-rolls. Those complaints began to seep into public view as things started to go south in the second half of the season.
With nine games left in the season and the Grizzlies stumbling toward the Play-In Tournament, general manager Zach Kleiman abruptly fired Jenkins and LaRoche. Boylan, who joined Memphis’ staff to run the CLA offense with LaRoche, resigned as well. Iisalo was named the interim head coach; he was given the job on a full-time basis after the Grizzlies’ first-round sweep at the hands of the Thunder.
Like LaRoche, Iisalo was a CLA practitioner who was being recruited by multiple NBA teams.
Iisalo shaped his principles in a game with a memorable constraint, one he called “murderball.” The rules of murderball are simple: there are no rules. You play as fast as you can, the refs swallow their whistles and defenders can hack away to their hearts’ content. This was the CLA concept at full bore, just as Plum experienced. How can you find the affordances when the opponent can beat them out of you?
Unlike LaRoche’s approach, though, Iisalo adopted the CLA into an existing high-paced, pick-and-roll heavy system that looked more like what Morant wanted. As Kahn notes, the CLA is an essential part of Paris Basketball’s identity, but not the only part.
“Success has many fathers. Defeat is an orphan,” Kahn said. “We have a lot of fathers here.”
After spending so long on the periphery of the sports training world, just how far can the CLA method spread?
While most NBA teams are still trying to keep their plans private to maintain a competitive advantage, others, besides the Cavaliers and Grizzlies, have already laid the groundwork.
For example, Portland Trail Blazers assistant GM Sergi Oliva spent last season coaching the Rip City Remix G League team to test out the efficacy of the CLA at a team level. Others noticed the Cavaliers’ success and plan to emulate it in their own ways.
“We’re gonna see who’s been swimming with no pants, because the tide is going to go out,” LaRoche said. “We’re gonna see who’s been coaching with no pants.”
The possibilities for the CLA are endless. It’s growing in the medical field, as doctors use simulators with constraints to train for dangerous cases that can’t be replicated in the field. It’s reframing how businesses onboard new employees, breaking from the classroom/webinar paradigm that often proves inefficient.
It has helped elite athletes like Ohtani become MVPs and the likes of Barnes and Plum become efficiency machines in the middle of their careers. As top players like Wembanyama come into contact with the CLA earlier in their careers, how will it shape the next generation of athletes?
“Vic is extremely intelligent, right? So his ability to want to be pushed, want to be challenged, want to be great, I think (the CLA) was a natural fit for him,” Barnes said. “It’s good to see that because it opens up a different world for guys.”
Or as Boylan puts it: “His spectrum of affordances is unlike anything anyone has ever seen.”
The CLA can even foster a more profound and stronger connection between its practitioners. After all, it requires time, consistency, patience and long hours together outside the game. It can be taught and learned on rides home from the arena — or even when waking up in the morning.
Plum and LaRoche worked together so well on the court that they ended up moving in together and are now dating.
Sometimes, the affordance is love.
— Fabian Ardaya contributed to this story.
(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; top photos: Chris Coduto, Andy Lyons, Luke Hales / Getty Images; David Richard / Imagn Images)
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