BOULDER, CO — Marcus Weller, 38, a third-degree black belt and head instructor at Apex Movement Sciences, has sold every available seat at his weekend ‘Ecological Constraints-Led Pedagogy Intensive,’ a $475 workshop whose accompanying 47-page spiral-bound workbook — sold separately at the merch table for $40 — consists almost entirely of positional sparring games that academies across North America have been running without fanfare since the late 1990s, sources at the event confirmed Saturday.
The workbook, reviewed by this publication after brown belt Derek Sandoval, 34, audited the seminar on a comp ticket and photographed every page on his iPhone 14 during the lunch break, follows a consistent template. Each drill opens with a block quote from an unnamed motor learning researcher, followed by a diagram with arrows, followed by instructions that multiple attendees independently identified as drills they have been running since George W. Bush’s first term.
Page 3, titled ‘Bilateral Engagement Constraint Drill,’ instructs the practitioner to begin in open guard. The bottom player wins by sweeping. The top player wins by passing. The winning player stays on the mat. A footnote in 9-point font clarifies that the drill is ‘conceptually rotational’ and should not be described to participants as ‘king of the hill,’ as this framing ‘reintroduces monarchic success-state imagery.’
Page 8, ‘Dyadic Locomotor Goal Game,’ is king of the hill.
Page 19, ‘Spatially-Restricted Survival Acquisition,’ asks the student to lie flat on the mat underneath a larger training partner and escape. A sidebar recommends that partners be ‘heterogeneously weighted to enrich the constraint landscape.’ Page 32 is positional sparring from turtle, rebranded ‘Quadrupedal Affordance Sampling.’ Page 41, ‘Emergent Dyadic Free Exploration,’ is open mat. Page 47, the final page of the workbook, is blank, save for the heading ‘Emergent Self-Organizing Free Roll’ and, at the very bottom in italics, the word ‘Optional.’
Sandoval, who has been doing the drill on page 3 every Wednesday at 6 a.m. at his home academy since 2009, estimated he has performed it approximately 780 times without ever once being told it had a Greek prefix.
‘He took the things my professor taught me for free and gave them Greek prefixes,’ Sandoval said. ‘Then he charged forty dollars to staple them together.’
Weller, who holds a Master of Science in Kinesiology from a university he declined to identify by name over the phone, defended the workshop’s originality during a 42-minute video call, during which he referenced ‘the literature’ eleven times without citing a single paper, researcher, or institution.
‘He doesn’t grasp the underlying motor learning theory,’ Weller said of Sandoval. ‘There is a framework at play here. If you haven’t read the framework, it’s going to look like drills you already do. That’s by design.’
Asked to summarize the framework, Weller pointed to a PowerPoint slide titled ‘Affordances.’ Asked what an affordance is, Weller said, ‘It’s an opportunity for action.’ Asked how an opportunity for action meaningfully differs from an opportunity, Weller said, ‘It’s more rigorous.’ Asked in what respect it is more rigorous, Weller said, ‘It’s rigorously more rigorous.’ Weller then asked whether we had any questions about the workbook specifically, adding that he would be available for a follow-up after his 11:30 Zoom with ‘a collaborator in Norway.’
The seminar, marketed on Instagram under the banners ‘Post-Technique,’ ‘Self-Organizing Grappler,’ and ‘The Drill Is Dead — Long Live The Task,’ attracted 38 paying attendees of varying belt ranks. Three white belts — Tyler Abernathy, 24, Connor Janowski, 26, and an individual who would identify himself only as ‘Mike B.’ — requested refunds at lunch on Saturday after completing what turned out to be the same drill in three different-sized boxes. They did not receive refunds. Page 2 of the workbook contains a non-refund clause, printed in 6-point font, under the heading ‘Ecological Commitment Covenant.’
The workbook sold out within ninety minutes of the merch table opening.
‘I walked to the ATM during the Spatially-Restricted Survival drill to withdraw cash for the book,’ said purple belt Heather Molina, 31, who drove in from Cheyenne. ‘They don’t take Venmo because Venmo isn’t rigorous.’
Not every attendee shared Sandoval’s skepticism. Zack Perelli, 29, a second-year medical resident who arrived in a rash guard printed with the URL of his own podcast, told this publication the seminar had ‘completely changed how I think about pedagogy.’ Pressed on how he planned to apply the lessons to the fundamentals class he co-teaches at a gym in Denver, Perelli said he intended to rename his warmup ‘a Multi-Component Readiness Scaffold’ and ‘stop calling the hip escape the hip escape.’
A second-degree black belt from a rival academy, who asked not to be named because he is ‘tired of having the ecological conversation,’ reviewed the workbook at this publication’s request and concluded that pages 6, 14, and 23 — each labeled an ‘Affordance Constraint Task’ — are the same drill performed in a small box, a medium box, and a large box. ‘He drew three boxes,’ the coach said. ‘He put the same drill in each box. And he charged forty dollars.’
The only drill in the workbook not immediately identifiable as a 1998-era positional round is Page 27, titled ‘Non-Verbal Reciprocal Information Exchange,’ which appears to instruct two practitioners to stand across from each other and maintain unbroken eye contact for six minutes. Apex Movement Sciences declined to clarify whether the six-minute eye contact is materially different from ordinary eye contact.
Weller’s wife, Allison Weller, 36, who staffed the merch table in a black polo shirt reading ‘APEX MOVEMENT SCIENCES — TRANSCEND THE DRILL,’ confirmed that all seven of her husband’s forthcoming seminars — scheduled for San Diego, Austin, Raleigh, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, and Columbus through the end of August — are currently at capacity, with waitlists of forty or more. A ninety-minute ‘Distillation of the Intensive’ webinar is planned for mid-May at $189. The webinar will cover the same material as the workbook, with fewer diagrams, over Zoom.
Asked whether he had ever run the drills himself before giving them their current names, Weller paused for six seconds.
‘I’ve run a version of them,’ he said. ‘The important thing is that now, they’re rigorous.’
Asked if he was also the environment, Weller said he would have to get back to us.