Abstract : After more than 20 years since the introduction of ecological and dynamical approaches in sports
research, their promising opportunity for interdisciplinary research has not been fulfilled yet. The
complexity of the research process and the theoretical and empirical difficulties associated with an
integrated ecological-dynamical approach have been the major factors hindering the generalisation of
interdisciplinary projects in sports sciences. To facilitate this generalisation, we integrate the major
concepts from the ecological and dynamical approaches to study behaviour as a multi-scale process.
Our integration gravitates around the distinction between functional (ecological) and execution
(organic) scales, and their reciprocal intra- and inter-scale constraints. We propose an (epistemological)
scale-based definition of constraints that accounts for the concept of synergies as emergent coordina-
tive structures. To illustrate how we can operationalise the notion of multi-scale synergies we use an
interdisciplinary model of locomotor pointing. To conclude, we show the value of this approach for
interdisciplinary research in sport sciences, as we discuss two examples of task-specific dimensionality
reduction techniques in the context of an ongoing project that aims to unveil the determinants of
expertise in basketball free throw shooting. These techniques provide relevant empirical evidence to
help bootstrap the challenging modelling efforts required in sport sciences.