#043 Monday Minutes: Communicating Testing and Reporting Results with Coaches

In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, we're returning to our Monday Minute theme and answering an audience submitted question regarding force plates. I reached out to my good friend, Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Newman University, Stryder Blackburn, to help me set the tone for the episode.

You can find Coach Blackburn on Twitter at @Stryder9090

As a reminder, our Monday Minutes shows are a quick 10-15 minute episode where I discuss current industry trends, research reads, current events, and occasionally offer my insights into the training process that we're undertaking each week. I believe with conviction, you'll take away something interesting from this show and I hope it delivers you a little bit of value in your day.

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Key Takeaways

• There is no single best way to report testing results. Start by learning how your coaching staff prefers to receive information: a printed report walked through top to bottom, a casual stand-up summary, a PDF in their inbox, or a live dashboard they can explore themselves.
• Match the depth to the staff. Some coaches only want to know who is getting better, who is getting worse, and who needs attention, while others want each athlete's rate-limiting factors, strengths, weaknesses, and the plan to address them.
• Choose your comparison deliberately: smallest worthwhile change, percentage change, z-scores, the group average, or the athlete against their own results from the same phase last season. Each tells a different story.
• Different roles need different reports. What matters to a positional coach in GPS data is not what matters to a coordinator or a head coach, so build the report and the conversation for the person receiving it.

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Episode Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.

[00:00:00] Sport science, strength and conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show.

[00:00:32] Hey everybody, this is your host Adam Ringler and welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show Monday Minutes. It is a brief 5 to 10 minute episode where we are catching up on everything that is happening in our industry. Things were reading, things were checking out, things that we are experimenting with, exploring and it is meant to just be a quick little summary, little tidbits, little breadcrumbs of things that are happening around our strength

[00:01:01] Conditioning and high performance industry. Like always, if you enjoy the show there's a couple ways that you can support it. The very first thing I would recommend is please head over to AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter. Pop in your email, I promise I won't spam you and occasionally about once a month. I'll send you an email. It will be things that I'm reading almost like a monthly recap of these Monday Minute episodes. I think you'll get a lot out of it.

[00:01:29] I explained to my friends that it is essentially the birch box of newsletters. You don't know what you're going to get, but you know whatever you receive is going to be chuckful of great information. So head over to AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter. Hey everybody, welcome to the Monday Minutes. I'm your host Adam Ringler and today we're going to do something a little bit different. Every week after I make a publication, I usually get flooded with Twitter or Instagram

[00:01:59] DMs asking some very specific questions about whatever we're talking about. Most of the times they are relevant to sports science or performance sciences and I thought rather than just discussing maybe the latest trends in our industry, we take a moment to address one question that I get from the audience every single week. So what I did was I went out and asked some of my favorite people in the world to ask some of these user-submitted, audience-submitted

[00:02:32] Questions and I'll take the remainder of the Monday Minutes time and try to provide some answers and provide some clarity and just flesh out some of the details for every question that I receive. So without further ado, here is my good friend coach Strider Blackburn. Head coach, strength conditioning, Newman University. Hey everybody, this is Strider Blackburn, head strength conditioning coach from Newman University. I'm joining the decoding

[00:03:04] Excellent show today to read some audience-submitted questions. What's the best or most efficient way to report physical data to your coaching staffs? Thanks again Strider for reading this week's audience-submitted question and I think this is a great one because we collect a strength conditioning professionals. We collect a lot of information anywhere from session RPE, to force plate, groin bar, Nordboard, VBT, GPS, you name it, right? We live in a

[00:03:33] Quantifiable era of sports performance and as of that nature, right? We have a lot of different data. We have a lot of different results and specifically when it comes to performance testing, we also have a lot of a lot of data to show upon. So didn't athlete get stronger? Did they get weaker? Did their vertical jump increase? Did they get faster? Right? So there's a number of different considerations we need to make when we start to dive down the rabbit hole of how

[00:04:01] Do we communicate that? Right? Are we going to look at the smallest, worthwhile change? Are we going to communicate it in percentage of growth, progressions or regressions from the group average, from the individual averages? Do we communicate it via z-score? There's a number of different ways that we can do it, right? And I won't get too in-depth with that but I want to start with the notion that you as a practitioner need to understand your coaching staff. You need

[00:04:31] To understand how they want and prefer to receive information. Is it best to walk in with a printed report and discuss from top to bottom? This athlete did this. This athlete did that. Is it better to host a small stand-up? And you're just almost in a very casual nature saying, hey, we perform performance test. As a summary, this athlete's improved that athlete didn't. Or is it better to send a digital report and allow the coach to go through it at their

[00:05:06] Leisure, at their discretion? Maybe is it better to allow them access to a digital dashboard where they can log on and at a click of a mouse or a click of a button, they can peruse through all the different data points and have customizable figures and graphs automatically load up on a dashboard. So these are all very valid ways of communicating your KPIs and demonstrating those KPIs to a coaching staff. So ultimately, I think what it really comes down to is

[00:05:39] Their preferred method, their preferred mode of receiving that information. I've worked with a number of different coaching staffs, some of which just like to know our athletes getting better and worse and who do we need to concentrate on. Others wanted a full detailed breakdown of each individual athlete, what the rate limiting factor is, what their strengths, what their weaknesses are, and the plan that you're going to undertake in order to improve on those rate

[00:06:07] Limiting factors. So a little bit of a deeper, more comprehensive report for those coaching staffs. Others just wanted a PDF file delivered to their inbox that they could look at that essentially showed what the group average is for each test. Let's say it's a 10-meter fly or it's a vertical jump or if it's a medicine ball throw. What's the average? And you know, where does this athlete stack up with the group average? Are they above or are they

[00:06:37] Below? Some coaching staffs like to look at things from a seasonal basis. So rather than saying, we want to rather than saying, what is this athlete's results compared to the group mean? I want to look at what is this athlete's results compared to their last results at a similar phase in time. So then we look back and we say okay, like at the time of the recording, right? We are in essentially our preseason build up into our in-season volleyball. So we're

[00:07:06] Performing a lie diagnostic testing, some benchmarking with their athletes on force plates and Nordboards and groin bars and performance, battery that includes everything from a vertical jump to vertical horizontal push pull strengths, power production, speeds and turns all that stuff. Where are they compared to their last preseason results? And what's the rate of change or the rate of progress on that? So again, we would refer back longitudinally, we'd look

[00:07:34] Historically back at preseason 2018 and start to say, wow, like in this phase of training, this is how the athletes improved. So again, it really just depends on your coaching staff. It depends on what their preferred style of receiving that information. But also understand that some people are visual learners. Some people want to, you know, auditoryly hear from you, like okay, I don't want to read charts. I don't want to read graphs. I don't want to read figures. I just

[00:08:05] Want you coach to tell me, are they better? Are they improving? And what do they need to work on? So again, it's, there's not a one style, one size fits all mentality to how you communicate your results, how you communicate your, your findings. What you really need to do is, is take a best oak approach, a flexible approach and really tailor it to each individual to each coaching staff. When it comes to something like GPS reports, right? What's important for your

[00:08:38] Positional coaches might not be as important for your coordinators, might not be important for as as your head coach. So at that level, especially when there's so many different positional breakdowns, you might need a different report and a different style of communication for your head coach, your coordinator positions or positional coaches and the positional coach GAs that you might potentially work for or work with. So again, you might have one team that has four, five, six, seven

[00:09:09] Different styles of reports of what KPIs, what metrics, what parameters are important and how those are actually visualized on those reports and how that information is communicated to each coach can differ wildly. And I've been a part of staffs I have done that. So Strider, that is a great question. I'm glad you pick that one from from all of them because I think it's such an important point as we start to approach this fall season in the collegiate world that we

[00:09:41] Need to pay attention to how we communicate our results, how we communicate our findings and we need to really go out of our way to really tailor it to each to each coach to each sport to each position to each person and really try to find the needle within that haystack of what's the most meaningful point of change, what's the most meaningful type of information that can be stilled from each graphic, each chart, each report, and each time that you go and you sit down in front of

[00:10:13] A coach and you can communicate what that latest test is. Hey, everybody, thanks for tuning in to this Monday Minute Show. I hope you took something away from it. And as always, there's a number of different ways that you can support the show, right? The first thing is I have a monthly newsletter that goes out. It is located at Adam Ringler dot com forward slash newsletter and like I said in the intro, it is chocked full of great articles, research papers, sort of daily

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[00:11:21] You'll get a lot out of it and check it out. I get questions every single time we publish either an article or the latest update to the Decoding Excellence show. And the question I often receive is how do I support this show? But we have a new way that the audience and the crowd and everybody else here can support the Decoding Excellence show. Head over to buymeacoffee.com forward slash Adam Ringler. It's actually not buying me a coffee. I know the name sounds sort of confusing or misleading if you will. But what it is is it's a platform,

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