> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://adamringler.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # #004 Dr. Mike Sonne - URL: https://adamringler.com/podcast/004/ - Published: 2017-03-13T19:43:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-20T06:57:20.000Z - Author: Adam Ringler - Tags: Decoding Excellence, #podcast, Sport Science, Athlete Monitoring In this episode of the Decoding Excellence show, I am speaking with **Dr. Mike Sonne**, an ergonomist examining injury mechanisms surrounding muscular fatigue and part-time baseball enthusiast. If your interested in analytics, you do not want to miss this episode. **Dr. Sonne and I discuss:** - His background in ergonomics - The passion for baseball - Pitching mechanics & muscular fatigue - Performance technologies - Workload monitoring strategies ## Key Takeaways Dr. Sonne studies injury the way an engineer studies a bridge: by understanding how repeated stress breaks structures down over time. Here are the principles this conversation reinforced for me, and they apply far beyond baseball. - **Fatigue changes mechanics before it changes outcomes.** The arm does not wait for permission to compensate. By the time performance drops, the movement has already changed. Monitor the human in front of you, not just the workload on the spreadsheet. - **Technology is a flashlight, not the map.** Performance tech shows you where to look. It does not tell you where to go. Data is only valuable when it helps you ask better questions, communicate clearly, and make informed training decisions. - **Work the objective and the subjective together.** The sensor says one thing. The athlete says another. The truth is usually in the overlap. Never let a dashboard overrule what your eyes and your gut are telling you about the person in front of you. - **Positions matter more than we admit.** Ergonomics is the study of how bodies interact with their environments under load. That is also a perfect description of strength and conditioning. Groove good positions before you add intensity, because intensity multiplies whatever pattern is already there. - **Simple monitoring beats perfect monitoring.** The best workload system is the one your athletes actually complete. Chase clarity, not complexity. A consistent simple system will outperform an elaborate one that nobody maintains. You can find Dr. Sonne on Twitter at @DrMikeSonne or at his website [mikesonne.ca](http://www.mikesonne.ca/?ref=adamringler.com) This episode of the Decoding Excellence show is brought to you by Vald Performance, the makers of the NordBord, DashBord, and the GroinBar. They can be found at [ValdPerformance.com](http://www.valdperformance.com/?ref=adamringler.com) Stay updated with the podcast by following me on Twitter via @AdamRinglerIn addition to those social mediums, you can head over to [AdamRingler.com/Newsletter](http://www.adamringler.com/newsletter?ref=adamringler.com) and sign-up for my weekly newsletter. This is a newsletter for the curious. It's chalked full of interesting articles I've read through the week, things I'm exploring and finding fascinating through my week, and a collections of thought experiences and resources I've cultivated. *It's essentially a Birchbox newsletter for performance-related articles, research, and daily musings.* Thanks again for listening to the Decoding Excellence Show! I appreciate all the support growing this Sport Science, Strength & Conditioning, and High-Performance Coaching resource. If you have taken anything away from the show, please login to iTunes and navigate to the [Decoding Excellence](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/decoding-excellence/id1205636566?mt=2&ref=adamringler.com) page and leave us a review. --- --- ## Key Takeaways - Fatigue changes mechanics before it changes outcomes. By the time performance drops, the movement has already changed. Monitor the human in front of you, not just the workload on the spreadsheet. - Technology is a flashlight, not the map. Performance tech shows you where to look, but it does not tell you where to go. Data is only valuable when it helps you ask better questions. - Work the objective and the subjective together. The sensor says one thing, the athlete says another, and the truth is usually in the overlap. Never let a dashboard overrule your eyes. - Groove good positions before adding intensity, because intensity multiplies whatever pattern is already there. - Simple monitoring beats perfect monitoring. The best workload system is the one your athletes actually complete. ## About the Guest Dr. Mike Sonne is an ergonomist who studies injury mechanisms surrounding muscular fatigue. He and Adam discuss his background in ergonomics, pitching mechanics, performance technologies, and workload monitoring strategies. ## Listen and Subscribe Find this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show on [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decoding-excellence/id1205636566?ref=adamringler.com) and [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/093GVrPwd9l832q3EWhVKc?ref=adamringler.com), or use the player above. --- ## Go Further in This Episode Enjoyed this conversation? Here is how to get more from it: - **Read the transcript below** to revisit key ideas at your own pace. - **Share this episode** with a coach or colleague who would benefit. - **Subscribe to the Decoding Excellence Show** on [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/decoding-excellence/id1205636566?ref=adamringler.com), [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/093GVrPwd9l832q3EWhVKc?ref=adamringler.com), or your favorite app. - **Join the newsletter** at [adamringler.com/newsletter](https://adamringler.com/newsletter/) for weekly insights on human performance. --- ## Episode Transcript *This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.* \[00:00:00\] Analytics should be used in place to, uh, to support and solidify what, you know, scouts are saying what coaches are seeing. Uh, it should be evidence that's usable by coaches to help measure performance and evaluate numbers are your friend. And I think what you're seeing a lot now in sports is the people that are really against them are the ones that are falling by the, the wayside. Sports science, strength and conditioning, high performance coaching. Welcome to the decoding excellence show. Today's episode is brought to you by VOD Performance, the makers of \[00:00:44\] The Nordboard. If you haven't checked out their website yet, I highly suggest you head over there whether it's return to play injury prevention or just plain performance testing. VOD Performance has the tools that you need. Check them out at VODPerformance.com. Today on the decoding excellence show, I have guests, Dr. Mike Sun, armed to discuss analytics, pitching mechanics, muscular fatigue, and the importance of truly understanding the implications for rural changes in MLB. This is a wide-ranging conversation that discusses monitoring strategies, muscular fatigue and \[00:01:24\] Performance technologies. If you are interested in using technology and information to impact your athletes' well-being, then this is a show that you cannot miss. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Mike Sun. Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks Adam. Thanks for so much for agreeing to come on and talk a little bit with us. I just find your materials and everything that you've been sharing on social media, riveting, and again, the whole nature of this show for me is to sort of scratch my own itch and to have an opportunity to reach out to \[00:02:08\] People like yourself, people that are involved in research, involved in their professional pursuit and whatever discipline that they might be in, and having an opportunity to pick your brain and get to know you a little bit more on a personal level, and to get to understand what makes you tick, what makes you you, and I'm just excited that you had the availability and we finally been able to connect. How's everything going for you today? Things are going well. It's a beautiful blue sky here up in Hamilton. Pretty cold today, but it's a beautiful winter day. Oh, perfect. \[00:02:48\] It's deceiving out here. So even though it's like early March for us in Kansas, it's been the least amount of winter that we've ever had before. So it's shorts and T-shirts in the middle of February. So for me, I can't complain as a Northern, coming from Michigan, I'm used to packing up in a parka and moving around and having seven scarves on. So it's that welcomed, you know, and certainly I've been down here for a little bit, but it's a welcome change to get away from the snowy, winery mix that usually seems to linger around forever, man. But I wanted to \[00:03:28\] Get you on today because I think you've been sharing some great materials and again, I wanted to get to know you a little bit more and talk about maybe what your specialty is. I'll let you kind of dive in a little bit deeper to that as well. But I wanted for you, or wanted to hear from you, maybe like an updated bio. Like, what are you currently up to in your day to day in, you know, what you might consider your nine to five, and then what is what are you doing in the evening? Like, what is your what's the latest going on in your life? Yeah. So the the passions and the \[00:04:10\] Occupations Venn diagram is starting to bleed together a lot more than it was maybe six months ago. But I work at an organization in Ontario called the Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario workers, and I'm an ergonomist there. So my role there is to be a resource to anyone in the province of Ontario who wants to know more about occupational injury or how to keep themselves healthy and safe in the workplace, and primarily through the discipline of ergonomics, which is the study of how people work. So my day job is ergonomics primarily for our grand workforce here. But what's been bleeding \[00:04:53\] Into the night is applying all those lessons I've learned in ergonomics for injury prevention and applying those to to my favorite pastime of baseball. So trying to understand, you know, how pitchers perform, how hitters perform, and and how we can apply what we've learned in this totally, you know, somebody would say a totally opposite field, but trying to learn some of those lessons and bring them forward to baseball. Man, that's that's fascinating. I that it lends me to what is my next question, which is how did you get interested? What was the story behind \[00:05:34\] Maybe your passion, if you can recall back to childhood memories or adolescent memories? Why, why baseball? What is it that first sort of excites you about that sport and then we'll maybe dive into the injury prevention piece second? So my family, we've always joked that we're terrible Canadians because every birthday I had growing up as a kid just outside of Toronto. It was going to Blue Jays games and and playing Little League there. My sister played softball growing up. My dad played slow pitch. My mom was my baseball coach. We were just huge baseball junkies and then \[00:06:16\] Football was a ways down in second. And then hockey was somewhere off in the in the distance third. So we sometimes get threatened to take her passports away, but we were just always a huge baseball family. And the last few years with the Blue Jays making the playoffs again, it's brought back a lot of those great memories of being in grade two, grade three and watching the Jays when the World Series. So yeah, the baseball has always been a huge part of my life. There was a long period where I didn't do anything related to playing after high school. And then, you know, during my doctoral \[00:06:53\] Studies and my postdoc, I started getting into some of the databases, the pitch FX databases, and applying just some of the things I knew about statistics and research methods and ergonomics and bringing it all together. So it's my passions and my professions and we're bringing them all together and having a lot of fun with it. And I think that's like where the magic happens when you can start to piece together both what is your professional means of income and what you're doing to support your lifestyle and your life and your family and everything else. And then the passion, \[00:07:28\] Right? And that's that seems to be baseball at this point and this injury prevention piece. And as I look through and certainly having conversations with other professionals in the industries, it seems like you're in a good spot with the Blue Jays as well just in close proximity because they also have a huge injury prevention and certainly emphasis as most professional organizations do aren't pitching mechanics and using technology and using objectifiable information to make real-time live decisions. So that's I'd love for you to maybe talk a little bit more if you would \[00:08:12\] About what your doctoral studies were in and maybe if you feel motivated, compelled to kind of dive deep and talk a little bit more at detail about it. This is sort of my first exposure was reading some of your work and going through that. And I'd love for you to share that with the audience of a large deal here. Yeah so our lab at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, we had a grant with the automotive industry and our grant was to better understand ergonomics job simulations using digital human models. So to break that down, it's essentially using the same \[00:08:59\] Machines and equipment that EA Sports used to do predictions of assembly line work and see if jobs are acceptable and keep workers safe. So my little piece of that puzzle was to better understand how muscle fatigue works and we were first and foremost a biomechanics lab but when you study ergonomics, biomechanics is just a small piece of that puzzle. So my PhD thesis actually involves some traditional biomechanics work looking at forced production but then I had a study in there that was a lot more neurophysiology based so looking at muscle stimulation and twitch responses \[00:09:42\] During fatigue and then even some psychophysics in there. So relying on people's perceptions to see how much force they deemed to be acceptable. And then we got some mathematical modeling and at the end because you always have to have that type of nerdy stuff when you're when you're in biomechanics. But the really fun thing about ergonomics is that you're limited to your imagination when it comes to tools to study the field. So we have people who are trained cognitive ergonomics who have a psychology background. We've got mechanical engineers, industrial \[00:10:20\] Engineers, kinesiologists, physiologists, really across the entire board. And we're all trying to get together at the end and understand you know how do injuries happen, how do we keep people more productive, have higher quality work and you know I have people go at home at the end of the day and be able to do their hobbies and spend time with their families. So yeah it's \[00:10:45\] The overall crux of it was how can we predict fatigue in complex tasks. And the initial focus of that was how do we predict fatigue in one of the big three auto manufacturers assembly lines where people are you know moving tires, using wrenches, they're doing all these different things together. You know how much fatigue would they incur. And then you know in the postdoc world what I ended up doing was applying that to to baseball. And we had one paper published in journal sports sciences that looked at the influence of the possible pitch clock rule on predicted muscle \[00:11:24\] Fatigue. And that was kind of my launching point into the baseball world. That's yeah that's fascinating. And if yeah for the audience certainly if you haven't checked out your blog it's Mike Sons s o n n e dot c a if you're fascinated about everything science and baseball. But I love for you to also I mean like when you think about the the blend between what you do professionally and this passion of baseball. I mean where maybe it's intuitive maybe it it comes from you know just the the nature of having you know the two disciplines. But why what do you think was the \[00:12:08\] The genesis. What do you think the reason was that you started to gravitate to pitching or mechanics and that muscular fatigue and injury sort of injury rates. Like how did that come to be in your world. Honestly it was it was kind of just this might be a fun thing to do and over a couple scotches with some friends we talked about the idea and you know it it was relatively easier to get something put into the fatigue model and and give us some results that were relatively interesting. So like most of the ideas that I've had in the research world it's it's tends to just come from \[00:12:51\] Having general conversations with friends and and then all of a sudden you have a research idea. You know kind of blending the the professional and the the the hobbies the one thing I kept saying the fan diagrams kind of closing because the way that I give general ergonomics presentations now to you know I was down talking to my brothers and sisters with the United Steelworkers Union in in Pittsburgh last September and you know there's some people in the room they're like oh you know my job there's no way ergonomics can be applied to this so I'm I'm here because you know it's it's \[00:13:27\] Part of the schedule and I have to be yeah but what I do is I start off the presentation and I say okay here's a workplace where workers are working a really high effort job their cycle repeats of you know up to 120 times per shift and now and now their management is trying to take away some of their rest break during their shift and you know that's a risk because it's going to cause them more fatigue do you have any idea of what industry this is and people come in they say oh it's nursing oh it's an assembly line oh it's a you know an office worker it's this and that \[00:14:00\] And then I put up the slide say nope this is actually an example of applying ergonomics to the baseball world and after that everybody's pretty interested and they kind of say okay you know what I can see maybe maybe there's a role for this in my workplace yeah yeah and I think I I wonder too with just how data heavy the baseball world is I mean between like saber metrics and and the fact that they're literally everything is is predictable in some respects to baseball and it relies so much on numbers at least historically if that might have lend itself to being one of the the first sort \[00:14:40\] Of sports that that really had such a data emphasis and I'm trying to think of other sports that might have preceded America's pastime that relied so much on numbers and analytics but if you were to put on your sort of nostradamus sort of cap and sort of predict the future I mean do you see others I mean I I think but do you see other sports starting to have more and more of a analytical approach to sort of measuring this monitoring measuring this muscular fatigue well I mean if you look at the Sloan Sports Conference that's going on right now it may not \[00:15:22\] Necessarily be fatigue that they're looking at but there was actually there was one paper that looked fatigue in like NASCAR or IndyCar drivers so everybody wants like every sports the same they all want to know how to predict if they're gonna win better they want to know how they can predict if their players will stay healthy so it's all the same baseball is unique in that it's the same event repeated over and over again with like a fixed number of possible outcomes unlike hockey or soccer where you know it's a very dynamic and fluid game and you know you it'd be very difficult to \[00:15:59\] Predict what's gonna happen on a given play baseball is unique in that respect because you know realistically everyone gets the same opportunities and whether you're really good pitcher or really bad pitcher we have data and in a lot of cases we have the same amount of data whether you know you had a good outing or a bad outing so that's what makes baseball unique so I don't think you'll ever get to a point where we have the same quality of data in every other sport or the the ease of analysis in every other sport but you can see right now you know there's NHL analytics every \[00:16:38\] Sport is really getting into this analytics realm and I even remember watching a couple football games this year where they were showing player top speeds because they had accelerometers embedded their their shoulder pads and you know you're looking at concussion risk factors from player speed in that so it's a it's an exciting world if you're a data scientist and the sports fan right now yeah I mean I certainly I'm looking at like the NFL and what they're doing with zebra technologies and then you know you have sport you have a technology companies with accelerometers and gyroscopes \[00:17:10\] Like catapult sports starting to bleed into every sort of sports whether it's NBA or hockey and the reason I mentioned blue jays is because I I thought at least on I don't think this is proprietary information by any means hopefully not I'm trying not to get a season to cis letter but yeah or just some black van show up in front of your house and then you disappear and they're not hurt from me I'm good I'm gone and you're my wife and kids don't know where I'm at but I mean I know they were working with some minor league organizations trying to develop a pitching \[00:17:42\] Algorithm to predict muscular fatigue through the use of a center mass GPS and accelerometers so and I believe blue jays was one of the pilot teams that we're doing yeah well I know like that that catapult system mark a strum and he tore his ACL two years ago and that was like a huge huge thing from monitoring a central fatigue when he was doing his rehab and I mean there's a great article on the sportsnet.ca website by shy Davide that talks about the entire rehab process and how he worked with Nikki Huffman the physiotherapist at the blue jays or Duke at the time who issues \[00:18:24\] Now with the blue jays but just the how how data driven his rehab process was and I think that's what you're kind of seeing too now in not only rehab but in some of the monitoring that they do it pictures like you know years ago it was a hundred pitches because it was a nice round number and you know 200 innings was a nice round number but realistically if they're not showing any signs of central or peripheral fatigue then there's no sense in stopping pictures and then you know the opposite of that is if they are showing those signs and they haven't hit that inning limit \[00:18:56\] Then that's the time to shut a picture down. Yeah yeah no doubt and Nikki's great and the conversations I've had with her at least on Twitter has been I always walk away from them and my mind is blown and I'm thinking about like what can we continue to do better here and then yeah I think when you when you mentioned Sloan I'm regretful that I didn't make it up to Boston because with silver on silver this year I heard that it only was it was like standing room only and it was crowded and it was amazing. I'm curious about you know like obviously with \[00:19:32\] Sort of the fixed outcomes and the sort of already the historical analytical approach of baseball. I mean we're starting to see the sports view as far as positional tracking and NBA we already have accelerometry data with a number of sports and when you look at certainly like football and I say football but I guess I really mean like American soccer those organizations already rely so much on statistics and I think when we look at sort of that Sloan conference and you know how far out do you think that we really are from having a better understanding of both \[00:20:13\] Using statistics using analytics using numbers to sort of impact coaching decisions in sort of mainstream professional coaches daily sort of decision making abilities are we close are we far in from in your sort of professional opinion. It's an interesting thing I was having a conversation with a friend of mine named Dan Hamilton who he works in the basketball field doing some analytics and what I was saying is that it's interesting because there may already be a lot of that stuff happening but the big difference between you know the ergonomics world and the sports world \[00:20:51\] Is generally all companies are working together in ergonomics to try and prevent injury because it's not good for the economy to have injured workers it's not good for you know you know this socio economic aspects of it are it's not good to have those injuries so people work together and you know my PhD grant was funded by an organization called the US Car which is a conglomerate of the big three auto industry who work together on non competitive issues but in the sports world everything is a competitive issue so there's not a lot of open data well that you you see some but \[00:21:29\] Then there's other things that are kept secret like we'll never have access to all the catapult data from every organization will never have access to all the modus sleeve data from every organization because those are proprietary things and even something like that kinetrac system where they're looking at capturing picture kinematics that's that's really useful stuff for a team to have to try and get a competitive advantage so there's a lot of issues that may be already being addressed but we may not know how far along they are in being towards being solved because they're proprietary \[00:22:06\] And there was a great article in that sports conference that Dan sent me that looked at just like the the lack of transparency and the lack of open access algorithms and data that are in all these papers especially in like the finalists but realistically a lot of those abstracts are you know dynamic resumes for these authors who are looking to get jobs in sports and then once they're snapped up by a team you know that now becomes their competitive advantage to try and beat the next team and win a championship and put more fans in their stands and and have more prestige so the nature \[00:22:48\] Of sport in general it's causing a lot of advances which is wonderful but then we kind of are in the dark a little bit at the real cutting edge of it because we just don't know exactly what is being done by all these different organizations yeah and I think you know until there's a sort of an open source database for some of these which will never happen right for sort of IP purposes \[00:23:16\] The ability to scrape data and then be able to get sort of a enough data points to make some some decisions and run it through you know predictive algorithms I think will be incredibly challenging and probably very limited just because of the professional nature and the competitiveness of this sort of professional market that they're in and you know obviously start looking at you know when it's equipped human subjects and they uh now you're dealing with player unions and player associations which is uh it seems like a challenge right now that the \[00:23:50\] NBA is certainly going through with trying to figure out wearables and and where their stance is from uh you know both a player health player wellness standpoint and also you know from a contract negotiation standpoint so uh I'd be curious with with with your background um we you said something just a moment ago and I thought for clarification purposes just because again this is a wide ranging conversation and discussion with you know hopefully borrowing from every discipline but for those people that aren't familiar with the modus sleeve and I know I've referenced catapult and \[00:24:29\] Other sort of technology companies but from a professional standpoint from a consumer standpoint sometimes at the opposite ends of the continuum this sort of modus sleeve is a economical sort of way of starting to get some some workloads as far as from a pitcher's shoulders and certainly it's made its way into the NFL which I think was maybe not its intended purposes but could you share a little bit if you feel comfortable and to talk a little bit about the modus sleeve and and uh and how it's sort of infiltrated uh the the pitching the baseball world yeah I actually just had a really good \[00:25:09\] Conversation with uh with Ben Hansen who's the chief technology officer for modus and they're a rapidly growing company they started out as a motion capture kind of biomechanics company and now they're getting into consumer products for baseball and and football and what it is is a little accelerometer with a Bluetooth interface that links up with your cell phone iPhones right now and it gives you um things like predicted UCL stress uh it gives you or ulner collateral ligament stress so that ligament that can rupture and and require a pitcher to get Tommy John surgery \[00:25:45\] It looks at your arm slot your shoulder rotation angle all these different um different things that you know at one point in time you needed to have a half million dollar motion capture lab to get even close to these data now it's available for like two hundred dollars and uh you can you create like a team account and all your different players can feed into it and as a coach you can say okay this person's got uh you know a large workload we we should maybe back off of them or this person has a little more room to work a bit harder today um and they recently put out an abstract that showed \[00:26:21\] Predicted UCL stress uh from this modus uh sleeve was really comfortable to you know a more expensive lab uh which is super exciting and as long as these data are reliable I mean this is our the infancy of some of this workload monitoring and it's going to just keep getting better but you're so much further along now by having access to something like this then we were you know 10 years ago when we people were kind of just guessing at workloads yeah yeah and I think this is that point where the intersection between technology and sport performances is relying on this \[00:26:55\] Ability of of capturing what was otherwise a very subjective information like hey it looks like you know the pitch pitch velocities down maybe they're a little fatigued or you know they're off their mark okay let's pull them out and now we're starting to get some objectable sort of uh real information to actually make some decisions uh from it uh to to pair that um with maybe another line of questioning uh I'd be curious to hear because obviously this is made its way into baseball and your background with baseball um and then the blend of technology and everything but \[00:27:35\] So I I want to dive down into some of your blog because if and again I I'll put it out there Mike's on s o in in e dot c a um with the MLB announcing at least the idea or playing with the idea I literally I think I was listening to the gym room show and the last week or two weeks ago perhaps and they were talking about um that proposed at least pitch clock to try to speed up the pace of the MLB game and and why you know we're the MLB and baseball is losing potentially a younger fan base and they're sort of proposing that the game drags aren't I I think this would be a great segue \[00:28:18\] Into your one of your latest blog pieces about pitch clocks and its relation on muscular fatigue and injury prevention or injury sort of causing mechanisms but if you want to go ahead and take the baton on that I'd love to hear what your thoughts are and and I'll let you I'll let you run with it for a little bit so um there was a really good paper by uh by Dr. Bruce and Dr. Andrews that just looked at some of the different risk factors related to uh to injuries um in pitchers and one of the things they came up with was fatigue and when I say fatigue I don't mean like um like \[00:28:55\] Okay so taking one step back there's two types of fatigue we typically study there's central fatigue which is uh you know an inefficiency of your your heart to pump blood and deliver oxygen to your tissues um and then there's peripheral fatigue which is like a failure of the muscle to do a contraction and generate a force and they they kind of play off each other but muscle fatigue is the one that we're concerned about when exposing the ulnar collateral ligament to more stress so when somebody throws um we know that that stress level is more than enough to rupture that ligament \[00:29:31\] So there's clearly something happening that uh the body is using to protect the ligament during throwing and what that typically is is you have a group of muscles in your forearm uh I'm just realizing this is an audio podcast and I sitting here in my office gesturing to myself and touching my arm but um though there's a group of muscles in your forearm called the flexor pronator mass those contract and they take the stress off the ligament in your elbow so if those muscles can't generate as much force because they're fatigued now that stress is going to get transmitted \[00:30:05\] Into the ligament and as a result that's where we see uh injury happening so it makes total sense from a scientific standpoint uh why fatigue would be a concern here and velocities are going up which has been tied to having higher uc all stresses we know that uh Tommy John surgeries are becoming more and more prevalent for more and more pictures at younger ages and they're all kind of tied together so with the pitch clock thing what I did was just kind of modeled what predictive fatigue would be um for different pictures uh if they were \[00:30:43\] Enforced have a that 22nd pitch clock versus their self-selected pace which I got from some of that open data the MLB game day data and in this one example that I have with a David Price start uh if you implemented the the pitch clock he'd have an 18% increase in the amount of fatigue and his forearm arm muscles and only an 8.3% decrease in time of the game so you're essentially talking about shaving a couple minutes off the game and in all honesty if you're seeing a good well-pitched well-performed baseball game where there's lots of hits and lots of action uh do you really care \[00:31:22\] About that extra three minutes at the end of the day um so really the the point that I'm trying to make with this pitch clock argument is that if we know one of the guaranteed risk factors for increasing the risk of Tommy John surgery in pictures is fatigue and there's now two scientific papers out there that have shown that pitch clocks are going to increase fatigue and there's a group out of uh I believe Taiwan that studied a more physiological approach to how much fatigue a pitcher would have uh you know even on the consecutive days in a pitch clock environment and they \[00:31:57\] Showed this carried over by like three days like this is a known risk factor putting in that constraint of saying somebody has to pitch in a given time and not when they're ready so why are you going down this road uh when you have an injury epidemic and at the same time you are willingly going to expose your pictures to a risk factor it just doesn't make any sense to me yeah I think especially when you know every sort of professional organization is doing everything they can right now through uh implementing uh policy to protect the professional athletes that \[00:32:34\] Serve and you look at player unions and player associations and the power of their voice and their vote um it blows my mind that sometimes what can be presented uh to them is counter to their actual well-being or longevity for the sake of trying to increase exposure of the game that they play for an increased revenue or an increased sort of viewership and I get the understanding from a business economical model but you need the best players on the field and when you're having a pitching duel or you're having a great played game that's gonna turn eyeballs to the television or \[00:33:14\] Get people in the seats more so than shaving three or four minutes off the clock to try to get one more commercial in well that's exactly it right they're not talking about reducing commercial breaks or you know finding ways to minimize the amount of advertisements it ultimately comes down to money and trying to make more money and uh you know I don't know it doesn't necessarily seem like the best decisions are always made when it when it comes to this this argument you know that being said um maybe you know like I know in the SEC conference the the way their pitch clock works is it's \[00:33:52\] Only when uh there's nobody on base so maybe it won't have as big of an influence but I just I I can't see that uh these pictures or these uh these decisions being made at the highest level are being made with uh equal weighting to all different sides of the table it seems like the only weighting they care about is is this a possible way for us to make more money for the game yeah absolutely and I think this is uh this is a good point too because you know this listening audience may be familiar with the the day-to-day sort of uh demands of what a picture might go through \[00:34:28\] And maybe they aren't I mean I again this is a wide-ranging conversation that sort of distills intangibles of what make people successful in all various different professional pursuits but I think this would be a great segue uh at least for me for you as well um to to share that like you are the host of a podcast called day games which interviews and it seems so far and and into this season that it surrounds itself with baseball so if if any of this my listening audience is interested in sort of what you're talking about already please I highly suggest going \[00:35:09\] ITunes go to uh go to this blog and uh and I'll link it into the show notes as well to uh to day games because uh for me being four episodes in um I find it riveting and certainly with working with baseball and softball and and uh throwing athletes there's a lot that I can take as a coach as a practitioner from the materials that you've been sharing so I just wanted to say thank you and kind of plug your show as well um because again I think you're doing great work uh you're great work with the show as well um I'd be curious I know we've talked uh we've we've \[00:35:47\] We've geeked out a little bit and that's that's by purpose of the show but before I go into the next line because I have to say this because I will regret if I don't um in 2000 I out this is my attempt of at least telling someone else this story outside of my brother but in 2010 I had an idea that was this was at the sort of the the boom and certainly in australian overseas they've been equipping accelerometers aren't athletes for for many many years before we started to gravitate to using that in the in the states but I thought why hasn't anybody ever affixed this to uh around \[00:36:30\] The elbow around the shoulder and I was like if I could develop a sleeve that had accelerometers and market it to baseball that would be a million billion dollar idea but obviously right like the difference between a million dollar million dollar idea and a million dollars is actually the execution of it and which is a big one that's a big one yeah I was like okay great idea don't know anything to do with it I don't know how to proceed with it but damn that would be a great idea so I'm glad that there are companies that are are doing this um and you're the the second person \[00:37:09\] That's heard that store that idea that at least at least uh I feel good that someone's making a profitable business off doing that um how did this is again I how did you get was there anybody in your life and maybe it was during undergrad during your grad work or doctoral work I mean how did you mentor a person that pushed you in this I mean to to study what you do um and pursue it is certainly a PhD route for it what uh any significant influencers or mentors in your life yeah so uh my supervisors for all my degrees um dr. Dave Andrews was my master supervisor dr. Jim \[00:37:54\] Popin was my supervisor for my doctoral studies and dr. Peter Kier supervised me during my post doctoral fellowship all three of those guys were great scientists they've done some incredible work in their careers but ultimately what attracted me to work with all of them was how they had a great interest in the world outside of their own research careers so dr. Andrews was a great photographer and an awesome family man uh he uh he you know he was a great slow pitch player and uh you know he was uh always had a great sense of humor uh dr. Popin and I we got along great \[00:38:32\] Talking about music and and football um you know he is probably one of the smartest people that I've ever met in my life he's uh it's intimidating the intelligent uh but we always got along because we just had all these shared interests in uh in things that weren't necessarily just the science but that made our relationship that much better so that we could have a really good scientific relationship and then dr. Kier he was a he's a good hockey goalie great sense of humor um and just really a lot of fun to work with so all three of them had the you know the main attraction \[00:39:07\] Of these are great people they're fun people to be around and they're the type of people that you know you want to spend those those long hours with because uh you know it's not always a smooth road when you're when you're doing those types of studies so you need to have some sort of a human connection not just a a research and academic connection with those guys man yeah I uh I think some of the the the most significant mentors in my life has shared that that dual approach of being completely committed to your professional pursuits whatever they might be the thing that that's \[00:39:42\] Passionate uh or drives you but also to also respect the other half of it and that's the life and the disconnect from it because sometimes passion can be it can be a double edged sword and you know like for me especially in the coaching industry you know I I see way way too many really really high level successful coaches that ultimately pursue that but at the sake of it lose friends and lose family and lose loved ones and lose kind of a sense of identity outside of uh of their own sort of professional pursuits so you know I I feel also pretty fortunate that I had very early \[00:40:21\] Mentors that that also shared that same sort of resonating experience of you know like pursue what you love but also you know have the humility and have the ability to disconnect from it and which I think is lost and and when you do have those passions you know what they they bring everything together um you know this baseball thing um it did come about at a point in my life where I was definitely experiencing a lot of burnout and just the pressure of being in a postdoc and constantly searching for uh for faculty positions and I knew uh in my downtime it was difficult for me to \[00:40:59\] Turn it off completely so I channeled it into something that was that was constructive and uh you know they in those times where it was a hard time sleeping or you know you're doubting whether or not this was the right career move it was something that would be productive keep me moving forward uh and a lot of the ideas that I had in the baseball world uh I've actually applied back to the ergonomics world and vice versa so uh they really don't uh they don't operate independently of each other and it's the same with those those mentors in mind uh a lot of the things that they did \[00:41:34\] In their you know their spare time uh those fueled some of their passions for their research projects and and you know you can't view your hobbies as being something that takes away from your professional life it's something that complements it uh it keeps you sane uh it keeps you you know in touch with the the rest of the world that's outside of your lab and those are really important things yeah no doubt I think uh having that sort of approach they uh they only make each other stronger you know like for me and I said this on uh maybe a similar show but um \[00:42:12\] The I always try to tell my staff members here that the very best advice I can give them is to be where their feet are and if they're in the uh if they're in the weight room or they're in their training environment to be fully committed here and then when they're back at home to be fully committed with their families and their loved ones and uh I think it fuels both of them because you know like obviously when you give your best at uh your professional pursuits you should want to go home and recharge with your family and after fully recharging uh with your family or your other \[00:42:42\] Sort of hobbies and other pursuits um you should be fully committed to come back in and do the job that you you certainly love and you pursue um I I I don't know I know this is a wide-ranging conversation but I'd love to kind of dive back into uh because again I think you're right now you're the first guest that I have that uh is so deeply involved in analytics and statistics and looking at muscular fatigue and you know like my purpose and what I've really tried to drive here has been about workload monitoring and prevention of of injuries but you know there was a uh at the SSA \[00:43:21\] This year they spoke about talent acquisition and both at talent ID and acquisition as you know the analogy they used was buying a Ferrari and then wanting to emphasize that if you're going to invest in a car of that caliber you you probably want to make sure that you're fueling it with premium gasoline and that you want to take care of it and that's through analytics and through smart quality training um maybe being separate from the training piece what is it that analytics right now offers to all sports that sports should start to apply or look into um as their organization \[00:44:06\] And their sport program grows it's at the end of the day it's objectivity um it's not uh like you see a lot of stupid movies like trouble with the curve and stuff like that that are like oh analytics are the devil they're they're taking away the old school scouts um I think like even like I I went into a long tangent to with this uh development of a metric to say which picture in baseball has the best stuff um that's not meant to be like oh let's uh let's get rid of the influence of scouts it's meant to like objectively state like okay you were right he does have really good stuff \[00:44:43\] Analytics should be used in place to uh to support and solidify what you know scouts are saying what coaches are seeing uh it should be evidence that's usable by coaches to help measure performance and evaluate uh players um numbers are your friend uh and I think what you're seeing a lot now in sports there's the people that are really against them are the ones that are falling the the wayside and they can get intimidated by them and I know there's been points in my career where like the the math and that can get pretty intimidating um but you have to embrace it and and realize \[00:45:22\] It's not that complicated at the end of the day and if it's a metric worth using uh typically it is relatively easy uh to understand if you put in the time to understand it so analytics in the sporting realm is meant to be a great complement for coaches and uh and scouts um to help them do their jobs at a higher level and that's you know I completely agree with you and I think that sometimes it's it's fearful for practitioners coaches positions to think that it's going to replace their position and it's really meant to complement and actually help them do their jobs better \[00:45:59\] And to give them the objective sort of feedback that what they're seeing and what they're perceiving is not just a bias but rather that it it's honing their coaches eye or their recruiting eye and solidifying what their subjective opinions are of an athlete or of a person or whatever against objective data I think that's that's fascinating um to me do you know especially when you know you have uh you have people like Elon Musk talk about AI and robots replacing jobs that it's I think it's reassuring to hear that you know the the your analytic department in your \[00:46:37\] MLB club is not not at an adverse of the front office trying to take recruiting and scouting uh positions away yeah it's not even like I don't think it should even be viewed as something that's threatening to the players like the players who embrace it uh I think they just put themselves in a better position I mean there's always like paralysis by analysis that you have to be careful with but uh you know really they they can be used by anyone involved in sport to uh to just kind of solidify what they uh what they're seeing out there yeah and you know and in top of that to \[00:47:13\] Kind of bridge you know like we see it so much in the NBA with the uh the woop bands and sort of uh um at Adam Silver's sort of uh band and wearable technology within the NBA games and you know there's been a number of players that sort of um purposely uh warned devices to monitor their own health and again I can't speak for any of the the people but as an athlete certainly as a coach furthermore you know I use that information in their very best decisions to affect their training load and their practice load and to help opinion to help uh shape our practice structures and I think \[00:47:54\] You know ultimately I know it it may seem invasive to an athlete to wear a uh monitoring device that that really objectifies all their game and positional movements um but the way I look at it is that it's in the athlete's health best interests to use the information objectively rather than having a coach subjectively just predispose you to whatever uh predispose practice plan was or a pitch count was especially when you know pitch velocity or or uh you know the uh um pitch velocity or anything like that uh affects you know UCLs differently than you know a number of other \[00:48:38\] Sort of metrics so um I'd love to get a couple opinions from you as you sort of uh continue to go down this rabbit hole a little bit but where you know do you think that sports on a larger scale will start to grow more of their analytic departments do you think that will start to see game time and again you're on the front lines and you know most of my job and most of my day-to-day interactions are with athletes on the floor in the training environment so I don't necessarily get to see uh behind the curtain like you do but do you start to to think that that we are close to seeing \[00:49:24\] Real-time information or analytics being used to affect real-time game uh decisions on the coaching or on the sidelines on the the coaches box wherever that coach might be I think that's a that's a challenging proposition to to look at and um I'm probably going to get this wrong but I know like the modus stuff was not available to the coaches uh in the dugouts um from from what I understood so right now I think there's a a blockade on that but realistically I guess it it starts to come down to uh you know you know the whole analysis and prowess this thing um it would obviously be \[00:50:05\] Helpful like if there was if there was some sort of uh great um device that was out there that did a really good job of saying oh this is uh somebody who's at risk of injury if they keep going for another five minutes and some light flashed on your bench um but uh I'm not sure if that's the way they work at this point in time it would it would be beneficial for sure to have access to these analytics and I think about it you know as a baseball player uh if you could you know get access to what your hit speed was after you hit and you know modus their uh their uh their device can actually \[00:50:41\] Be attached to your batting glove too and it can give you measures of swing speed and and launch angle on that um those things would just help the athlete and the the coaches so hopefully that is the direction that that they are going and one of the things too on top of that that you know like I I very much know what I know and know what I don't so I'm not going to even pretend to try to go down this route but someone with your experience uh I'd love to hear what your opinions are uh of the industry and where we're going in this but it seems like uh so far the big theme of \[00:51:21\] The Sloan Sports Analytics Conference is uh AI machine learning predictive analytics how how close is it to uh are we I guess from maybe removing the human element of analytics and allowing you know a machine based learning or AI to really start to make some of these uh predictable decision making uh decisions I guess and uh in these uh human sort of behaviors or human sort of movements I don't think we're that close to it um the the nice thing about those machine learning algorithms is that they just get your answer a lot faster uh then then you did in the in the past but really \[00:52:07\] You still need a person to interpret things at the end of the day and to determine whether or not that information is useful to you uh it's nice to try and paint all pictures with the same you know brushstroke but realistically there's a lot of different factors that go into determining you know is somebody at injury risk and I don't think you can get all of that from uh from the data that is currently available and as a result you can't really get uh that information uh into your machine learning algorithms so it it's really uh you know back to like the original \[00:52:42\] Concept of computers if you have garbage going in you get garbage coming out and I think we still have to work on a lot of those inputs uh just a quick story just in like our ergonomics field um there was uh there was a great uh paper done by an author named Bejo back in the 90s and he looked at all the different risk factors for injury in a big uh i was actually at Boeing and they you know they saw people lifting things they were uh that were really heavy they were at a risk of injury but almost double that risk factor was psychosocial things which were not currently being measured \[00:53:19\] And another great one um done at Ohio State and a study looked at how your lifting kinematics and kinetics changed uh if you were in a stressful versus a non stressful environment so that gets thrown into the mix as well so it's really challenging to just say that uh one computer algorithm or one machine learning approach can answer all the questions and my um my general experience with this so far is just interacting with the people on pitching twitter and and seeing you know where their arguments and their discussions take them and it's it's kind of funny because you have all these \[00:53:57\] Different camps where it's like uh velocity is the most important thing and commands the most important thing and never the two shall meet well realistically it's a blend of those and then at the the same time there's people that are saying it's velocity that's the only predictor of injury and then other people are saying it's the mechanics or the only thing that matter when getting hurt and then you totally ignore the fact that if you have perfect mechanics but you do it a million times you're still going to get hurt so uh it seems like right now um the current state \[00:54:29\] Of things is that people tend to pick their camp and uh it's viewed as oh we really shouldn't be crossing over um when realistically what we need is uh a lot of people were working together from different disciplines and trying to tie all these uh these problems together by looking at them through different lenses and i think that's really from a professional pursuit one of the things i've tried to do is to live on the fringe and live on the edge and realize how so similar a lot of these camps are and try to attempt to bridge different groups of people together to answer a common \[00:55:05\] Problem that we all have right like regardless of what camp that you're in i think all of them would would say that player health and preventing injuries from occurring is what they're trying to do at the end of the day and whether it is velocity or command or control or whatever we see the similar battle within physical preparation as far as the modalities and the tools that we use to optimally prepare athletes we see the same thing um from a sports science standpoint whether what metric from catapult or whatever sort of workload monitoring tool or technology you want to use is it is it \[00:55:44\] Top in speed is it sprints is it velocity is it total distance is it i am a rapid accelerations decelerations but ultimately i don't think it can be just one like you said i think it we have to take a 30 thousand foot view and realize that with human behavior and human uh people that it's not going to typically be just one singular method metric to to predict or to assess whether an athlete's at a higher rate of injury um yeah go ahead no i would it's it's totally true it's like you have to take a 30 thousand view and then also like the the six-foot view of the uh the person themselves \[00:56:31\] And realize that there's so much interpersonal difference between athletes uh one of one of one of the pieces i wrote on my blog was talking about how uh if you look at a football player you you can get a pretty decent idea as to what position they play just where i'm seeing their body type but then you have like Chris sale plays the same position as Bartola Cologne who plays the same position as Marcus Strowman and those are three extremely different body types but they all do the same job and they all have uh different risks of injury and they all have different uh you know \[00:57:04\] Ways of of performing the same job uh but they do it in very different ways so uh there are general trends that we can identify from research we can say like this is a risk factor this is a risk factor but when you're applying it to the person by person level um you really do have to count like uh account for those interpersonal differences yeah and that's what makes people unique and what makes somebody a star and somebody else uh not not able to perform at a high level and i think that's you know that was something similar that was uh presented at the Seattle Sounder sport science weekend \[00:57:38\] Last year was just asking their sport scientists and people that are you know in charge of sort of workload monitoring and a number of other facets to start to understand the human aspect of the information and the data that they're collecting and one of the the central themes was literally just being present and having you know conversations and developing a rapport with the athletes that they're working with to understand that they're not just there as subjects and they're not that it's just there as data scientists but they're trying to bridge the gap between them \[00:58:12\] Because without context of where those numbers are deriving it's hard to get hard to get an understanding of truly what those numbers actually mean when you're looking um just at a computer at MATLAB or you're pulling the information are scraping it from somewhere i think context is something that's sorely missed oh without a doubt and like that's the point that i've reached is like i have now like worked heavily with baseball data for like a year and a half and it's been purely with uh you know pitch effects databases and pulling things off the internet and uh i'd definitely \[00:58:48\] Hit my tipping point where it's like okay that was fun i need to get um get on the the ground and talk to people because uh that was fun uh i'd never been able to access a database that size before but where i have the most fun doing research is when i'm actually talking to people so um actually today is the the first time i'm going to work with the team uh to get uh to get my feet on the ground and understand what it is that actually pitching coaches want um to uh to help answer their questions because really if they they've got to know how to ask good the the right questions of us researchers \[00:59:22\] For us to get them the right answers but if we're not trying to figure out what questions they're asking then uh we're kind of lost yeah i you know that's the the maybe the second piece of advice i try to tell our staff here is that when they're going to meet and work with the coach for the first time that my first recommendation for them is to try to ask that coach what are the questions that they've always had that they wish they could have an answer for but don't have the time to do and for that you know a lot of the times it starts to spur this conversation of like i've always \[00:59:57\] Kind of wondered x and i wish i could figure that out or i've always thought that wire z uh leads us to this destination but man i'm just too busy to figure it out uh i wish i had that answer and that's a good sort of bridge for uh applied sports scientists to start uh to draw them in breadcrumb by breadcrumb of starting to use information in their daily coaching interactions and decisions so i'd be curious and you know like i would love to to touch base as you start this adventure this journey down this pathway of of understanding what you know and this is probably \[01:00:37\] Different from every organization to organization but what a pitching coach generally wants or what are the questions that plagues them that they never have the time do you have any sort of predictions if you were to make a hypothesis about you know and tough i know i'm putting you on the spot but tough what uh what the general thoughts that you might have that they you know have i'm playing inception a little bit but yeah i i really just think like ultimately pitching coaches are are trying to figure out how can my guys get hitters out and how can i keep them healthy doing it \[01:01:11\] And those are the big overarching questions that i think anyone who works in the field probably has um and then you know you you essentially have two different streams where you can get finer and finer questions you know uh how do we generate spin um on a ball how do we uh get more break how do we uh improve velocity while making players stay healthy and and giving them more endurance uh those are all the big questions that i i keep seeing uh you know and it's it's a totally different animal up here in canada we have uh we have a lot of kids that are you know 15-16 and their big focuses \[01:01:49\] Is hockey because you know it's canada so we see a different uh different types of athletes in in baseball here than you would in some of the southern states so that i i couldn't tell you what specific questions i'm gonna get when i once i head out there uh but uh i hope i get a lot of them so that it gives me a lot of uh a lot of room to work with and and to hopefully answer those at the best level i can't yeah you know like i i hear this and been a part of this and some capacities is that the worst the worst feeling you can have is when you go in there and you're like \[01:02:23\] You know hey coach i'm ready to do everything i'm you know like this is what i'm hoping for you know like what questions can i you know provide some answers for i'd love to provide some data for you and they're like we're good you know like oh well where do i start then you know yeah it seems like these guys are really excited to to have some of my input but uh man i'm i'm i'm just so excited to get uh you know back on on fields again because i actually like kind of bringing it full circle when i was in grade nine uh i uh i started as the the student trainer for the football team at the \[01:03:01\] High school i was at and they sent me to the university to learn how to tape ankles and and do hamstring wraps and get my first responder certification and i did that all through high school and then uh through undergrad i was the one of the student trainers for the football team at the university winzer made some of the best friends of my life there and uh you know and then i went into a different field altogether so totally different but now you know this is kind of coming back completely full circle bringing my passions with the the athletic therapy world together with my \[01:03:33\] Biomechanics and ergonomics world and then uh channeling them towards uh working in baseball so it's it's super exciting i love that journey where you know like you you divert off your pathway and then you go down a trail a little bit and then you find your way that it forks back into what is otherwise your calling or your essential purpose and i i find that i don't know maybe just cognitively rewarding for me when when i see and hear stories like that so that uh that gets me pumped up uh to hear that you're making that completion of that circle uh i i'd love to for a moment i you know especially \[01:04:15\] With your experience i'd love to know what you think the biggest mistakes are right now in analytics and statistics and using data informed or your objective data driven um analysis into making decision makings what what are the biggest maybe myths and mistakes and the biggest waste of times that you see other people or the general perception uh has when they're thinking about these uh i think reductionism is probably the biggest mistake that a lot of people make and that just means that they uh they see one um one thing that tweaks their interest and then they say that's \[01:05:01\] The only thing that matters and they put their blinders on to the rest of the world uh there's uh there's just no way that we can answer these questions at this point in time um by blinding ourselves to other possible answers or other possible opinions because uh if you if that was the case we would have solved all these problems a long time ago yeah that's that's a that's a an absolutely huge one um i think um from the analytic side it's forgetting that there's human beings on the the end effector of uh of what you're looking at so it's great to you know pull in a database of \[01:05:38\] Seven million data points with pitch fx data and think that that means you know uh who's the best pitcher in the world uh without knowing that there's a beating heart and a bunch of muscles and tendons and bones and uh personality on the other end uh so um you know it's the the ongoing battle that you always see on social media is the old school guys to talk about intangibles and the new school guys saying well let's measure everything uh and never the two shall meet well realistically uh things are only subjective until they can get measured and then they become \[01:06:12\] Objective so it's just a matter of finding the right tool to to measure those things yeah no doubt um i who do you when you think about this and i'll try to think of a maybe a better segue but you know i with with your experience and now coming maybe full circle and stepping back onto uh back into a pan or back into uh on the baseball field and just thinking of maybe a younger version of yourself right because it's where it's a different world that we're living in now especially like i just think of the tools like professional grade tools uh for me \[01:06:54\] Like as i'm going through adolescence in the nineties like i don't know if i had access to matlab or some of these pro grades sort of tools or if i could look like go on get hub and and scrape data off of it back then right like how i don't like i had aol little floppy disks like it was a big deal for me to log on and like you've got mail for me like i'm your mom would connect to the internet yeah right get off the phone exactly so like that the access to otherwise professional grade tools and information that a 13 year old kid could do in their basement in their free time \[01:07:35\] Right like so i i'm painting the picture because here i am like playing on line as a 13 year old kid on dial up you know 56k internet wasting time you know but like now we have stem we have these miniature scientists and technology enthusiasts you know literally like engineering math like people that are doing this in their free time and they're 13 years old and they're wondering they're they're watching their heroes are watching the Chicago Cubs whoever it might be like literally win the world series and we're starting to blend the two together yeah what would \[01:08:13\] What would be your advice for uh you know this 13 14 15 or whatever age you want to pin to it that you know as they're listening to this or someone's listening to this and they're like man you know like Mike is doing exactly what i want to do like he's in the numbers he's on the field he's starting to work with pitching coaches said that he he's making an influence what would be that advice that you would share to them uh just just get started um a lot of people get lost in the nuances of uh you know what it takes to just get moving in that direction but man uh there's so \[01:08:53\] Many free uh free training courses to teach people how to work with data and how to do some basic programming uh that if you want to go down that road go into it but uh even just websites like fan graphs like fan graphs has access to so much data and i've i've seen people online you know 16 17 that are writing little blog posts about uh you know their favorite players and that's awesome to see that people are learning how to make graphs and how you know they're learning to uh to to make a difference in uh in that world and uh there's no reason why uh you can't at a young age \[01:09:31\] Get into that that sort of thing um and all honestly i think like the best advice you can give somebody who's younger and looking to get into the field is just to tell them to if you think it's fun then do it uh because they ultimately you've got to have fun doing this because a lot of people and myself not included because i don't you know pay my bills working in sport uh but it is uh it's not a great pay um it's tough long hours like i'm sure you deal with all the time Adam and you've got to be in it for the right reasons and those right reasons are uh you truly \[01:10:07\] Love doing it yeah i think when you can sort of when you can mix a professional pursue with that passion like it's like i said early i can be a double edged sword but for me i i show up every day and i work with student athletes and it doesn't feel like work at all and uh yeah and and i say this and you know like a nearly every recruit i talk to uh or athlete probably heard it for me but like if they stop paying me i would probably still show up to work next day because i i love doing what i do and that's that's a part of finding something that is meaningful passion passion driven and smart um \[01:10:48\] Oh without a doubt that means that means the world to to everybody i i want to i want to be respectful for your time and i don't want to uh you know feel like i'm i'm preventing you from from doing the otherwise work that we all probably have on a weekend uh whether that's r and r if that's actually like diving deep into uh databases or anything else but uh i'd love to get maybe just a couple more things uh as we kind of get to get to this but what first of all what would be if you couldn't request something from this audience you know like uh anything that you know like if they could \[01:11:27\] Take away and apply one thing actionable from your experiences from your history from the things that's that's led you to the success that you've had or failures that you've made and that you would wish that they could uh jump over circumvent what what would be that request i'd say the the you know reaching out to that pitching twitter community if they're listening to it is find out whatever uh you believe the absolute most uh about how pictures get people out and now go read three four posts or papers on the exact opposite viewpoint and see how close to your you know the \[01:12:09\] Other side they actually are because uh a lot of what people are reading a lot of what people are doing um they're not so far apart and uh a lot of the times what ends up happening is that they they start fighting over something and then if they were to actually take a step back they're they're all saying the same thing so uh spend time reading the opposite viewpoint uh is probably the biggest piece of advice that i can give you you know and i think that i i hope that as you're saying that and certainly about uh pitching and pitching mechanics but i would hope that extends \[01:12:44\] So much further than just pitching right like and in almost every other discipline please please read uh the opposite viewpoint because i think that just provides so much humility and understanding of where the opposition or whatever if we want to call that the opposition but the counterpoint is and i think that brings us so much closer to a central agreeable uh position in stance and i think that's good for everybody yeah it can be uncomfortable but uh you you know you need to understand uh where the other side is coming from to to better understand your own side i think \[01:13:23\] In in the last couple years of your professional life is there anything to uh bridge that that sort of request is there anything that you've sort of flipped on like that you maybe approached and thought you know what i'm pretty uh i'm pretty close to this into the spectrum that after some analysis you're like you know what they might have had it better they might have had a better approach or i'm more on the other end of it is that anything come to mind that you maybe made a switch or a decision uh to go the other way um i would say there's anything that uh that has um been like \[01:14:03\] Anything that cut and dry uh i would say that the biggest change that i've had uh in recent memory is uh going from the the paradigm that the only research that's valuable is uh peer-reviewed published research uh and that uh it's great to have these social media accounts and blogs but realistically those should just be used to fuel you towards doing actual uh solid science that gets published uh i think there's a lot of people out there that do really good science and publish it online uh and i think a lot of those things uh can be uh just as important if not more important than \[01:14:41\] Some of the peer-reviewed research that's out there uh that being said um peer-reviewed research particularly in biomechanics and ergonomics is extremely important because uh going through that peer-reviewed process really does make your work that much better because it's being fetted by some of the most discerning eyes in the field uh you have to do that uh but at the same time i don't think every single piece of work that you put up uh has to get uh to get published uh through that realm because it takes forever um you know there's whole ethical concerns with uh the publishing industry \[01:15:17\] And how much money they make off the backs of free labor in academics uh but yeah publishing in journals at one point in time in my mind was the only way to convey your message but i've learned you know in the last year and a half just how important it is to to try and get your message out there in other ways uh be it through the internet uh on blog posts or be it through podcasts like day games or even these live shows like pitch talks that uh i've been really lucky to be a part of in Ontario here i have uh my brother lives out in uh silicon valley and out there i mean obviously the \[01:15:52\] The overwhelming sort of uh consensus is that they're sort of you know living in this sort of technology uh bubble and at that detect bubble at any point in time uh may pop and as a result you know many many jobs uh could certainly go and i i also kind of think that we're at that point from an academia standpoint or a peer review or a scholarly journal standpoint that we might be at a bubble there and i i'm looking for i'm curious what the next sort of disruptor of that industry potentially could be but i completely agree with you i think that there's you know a need for \[01:16:37\] Validated scholarly research um that's gone through the peer review process but that shouldn't also discount the work that applied sport scientists or applied positions are doing as long as it's you know in a controlled manner and uh and you know in in in that realm but i don't think that they're necessarily so mutually exclusive um so man at top what a what a great insight from you um hey i uh i want to do this as well i i would love for to hear i'd love for you to uh if someone was listening this and they wanted to reach out to you or they wanted to i know i i mentioned your your website \[01:17:22\] A couple different times or wanted to reach out to uh your podcast and subscribe to it on iTunes or elsewhere where can this listening audience find your materials what's the best way they can reach you uh probably through twitter uh at dr mike sahn so dr m i k e s o n n e uh or my website mike sahn dot c a uh both are are good places to get in contact with me and i've got links to the pod uh up on on both there oh wonderful man i uh dr i i appreciate mike i appreciate you coming on to our show um this whole idea of the Decoding Excellence Show is just to provide a a sort of view a sneak \[01:18:07\] Behind the curtain and and to understand what makes you tick and to try to provide maybe a narrative some stories that allows for the audience to get a better understanding of what people in this industry working within sports and working within athletics um go through their daily lives and how they got to the positions that they got in and and again i just can't thank you enough for the experiences and the wisdom that you shared as we've you know spent a little time and geeked out over over some information and and uh uh i certainly like i said this is a way for me to scratch my \[01:18:45\] Own itch and i i appreciate your time sir uh coming on and i look forward so much to continuing this conversation here in the future definitely Adam will have to touch base again in a year once i've had some time working with real people again and uh we can go from i don't know maybe decoding even more excellence at that point in time hey i appreciate it so much you sir have a great rest of your day appreciate it i want to thank today's guest dr mike san for coming on to the decoding excellence show and discussing everything baseball mechanics pitching muscular fatigue and analytics \[01:19:27\] Loan sports analytics conference i think this is a wide range in conversation that you should be able to take away just how important analytics and statistics are in the modern day era of sports i can't think dr mike san enough for participating to do this show and like always if you've taken anything away from the show if it resonates with you if it's made you think about doing something a little bit different in your high performance practice please go on to iTunes give us a review uh an honest review if there's things that we can continue to improve on on the show please let me know i would love \[01:20:03\] To make this show even better for you the purpose of this show was always to understand and decode excellence what makes a great coach what makes a great program the tools the tactics the techniques the intangibles that go into creating a highly successful program or becoming a master coach and practitioner like always if you enjoyed this please share it on your social media of choice and until next time thank you for tuning in to the decoding excellence show