#050 - Performance Titles: Do We Even Have a Clue?

In this episode of the Adam Ringler Show, I'm discussing Martin Buchheit's article "The Noble Ranks of Performance Roles - Who's a king - who's a duke?". In addition, I discuss what titles, roles, and responsibilities really mean within High Performance Athletics. Later in the show, I expand on where I think the direction of our industry is heading.

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Key Takeaways

• The episode works through Martin Buchheit's article "The Noble Ranks of Performance Roles," on who is a king and who is a duke in performance departments.
• Titles, roles, and responsibilities in high performance athletics often lack clarity, and the episode digs into what they should actually mean.
• It closes with a look at where the industry is heading.

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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] I'm Adam Ringler, and welcome to my show. Hello everyone, I want to remind you that I have opted not to have a sponsorship advertisement over the last 30 some shows here and the reason why is this rather than trying to sell you some latest gizmo, some performance technology, companies, newest, whatever, I would rather self sponsor this show by having you visit AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter. And let me tell you what this newsletter is.

[00:00:47] It is a random collection, almost a bullet point list of interesting articles, research, latest updates of what we're doing here from a sports performance, sports science standpoint. It's full with research articles, interesting blogs, things I'm reading, things I'm exploring. I think you're going to get a lot out of it. You'll get a lot of value for otherwise a small amount of email. I try to shoot you off an email about once a month and it is literally a small birch

[00:01:15] Box collection of interesting tidbits that I have found throughout my month. Check it out at AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter. Now without further delay, here's the show. Hey everybody, welcome to this week's show. I'm your host, as always, Adam Ringler. And today I thought on the Adam Ringler show, we would talk about some of the recent articles

[00:01:39] That I have read and one of which I thought we should draw a highlight to is Martin Boucher's, one of his newer articles, which is the noble ranks of performance roles, who's a king and who's a duke. This article is published on sports.com, so sportperformancescience.com, sports performance and science reports, however, it is sport, p-e-r-f-s-c-i.com, a sort of open source website where anybody within the sports science or sports performance, strength conditioning,

[00:02:17] Rehabilitation sciences, can submit their research to. It's one of the few, I think, really, really good sports science and research, open source. But what was really interesting about the article, as I'm navigating it right in front of me, is that different things, right? We have long had a very challenging, I'm, of really trying to understand essentially what to call ourselves within this industry, right?

[00:02:50] So whether we're ahead of medical, ahead of physio, we want to be strength conditioning coaches or sports scientists, ahead of performance, ahead of sports science, it is very confusing. I think if you are an outsider looking in and trying to determine the job response abilities that these people have. And so what Martin ended up trying to do was he submitted, asked the audience via Twitter and some other avenues to fill out a survey.

[00:03:22] And this survey went around and gathered almost, I think, 218 different practitioners eventually went ahead and sort of described their sort of responsibilities and how the titles and of the 218 some responses. Yeah, there's probably a selection bias to it. And there's always inherently some flaws of every study design. But it was really interesting to sort of shed light on Asian lines, surrounding physios

[00:03:53] And performance coaches and strengthening conditioning coaches and sports scientists, the sports medicine and athletic performance type roles and responsibilities. And nonetheless, I thought, let's draw some light to this paper. So just to give some ideas, as I walk through sort of verbally describing what this paper ended up saying is that, of the people that was reclassified in each row of the various 218 different responses, right?

[00:04:27] Little over 40 of them were sort of put into the sports science, strength conditioning coaches were a little over 20 high performance managers were existing between 40 and 60. And then the head of performance was actually above 60. Yeah, there was some medical and some R&D and psychology and physios and so much. But it was really sort of interesting when they looked at the number of responses and they looked at the reporting lines, what sort of responsibilities that they've had.

[00:04:54] So what I mean by that is they went ahead and talked a little bit further that, given the large variance in the titles and the associated roles and responsibilities, they went a little bit further and looked at did that role actually have any sort of management level, responsible for the management of a single department. Let's say, like a strength coach, you're managing the strength conditioning department that would be level two.

[00:05:20] If you had higher level of responsibility and management in the same department, so you're managing potentially two different departments with a close relationship to each other, that would be what they would classify level three. And then the management of at least two different departments in different domains, right? So think of your head of performance that might be managing not only the medical side of it, but also the strength conditioning or the rehabilitation or the sports science that

[00:05:46] Would be level four. And they went ahead through this and essentially looked at all of the titles, looked at all the responsibilities and really just sort of worked its way down and what they found throughout those 218 responses that a number of different things really is that as I read through this paper, essentially all the titles and all of the figures as we go through this, essentially though the head of medicine, head of a high performance manager, the head of performance,

[00:06:23] A lot of these guys were existing in that sort of level three classifications. So that was, again, like I said earlier, they had levels of management in the same department and at least maintained and managed other departments, right? So this is somewhat of an interesting paper and I thoroughly enjoyed it because we are at a point of our industry where I just generally think that we don't necessarily know what we're calling ourselves.

[00:06:51] So when we have players and we have all this beautiful support structures sitting around and assisting these phenomenal world class players and the support structure, whether it's physios or massage therapists or nutritionists, support scientists, head of performance, head of support science, that we really need to do a great job of outwardly communicating what the roles and responsibilities are within our domain because it's very easy to sort of misconstrued what my responsibilities are.

[00:07:28] Let's just say as a sort of scientist from a strengthening coach or strengthening coaches responsibilities from a head of rehabilitation. So I think as we move further, we have to first obviously define what each responsibility is, right? So if you are that physio, what are your responsibilities? What are your roles?

[00:07:48] What are you delegating to others? What are you, what's manager, you know in the collegiate system, it's a little bit different because we don't often have a director of performance and this is something that I think as we start to see you over the next five or so years that will start to have more director of performances that actually have a close daily operations working construct with the various teams that they serve.

[00:08:14] So what I mean by that is like obviously your ATs and your strength coaches and your sport scientists should all upwardly communicate to that manager, right? So when a GM, let's just say in professional sports organizations or when your head coach or you know sports supervisor in the collegiate setting comes to a coach and they have a pertinent question about the performance, about the health, about the rehabilitation, about the performance and return-to-play timelines, things like that, that they have a centralized person to go

[00:08:48] To. They know that they could go to the head of performance or the performance manager and sit down and say, hey, you know what's going on. So I think that's really important as we move through the next couple of years as more money continues to flow into strengthening and having a better understanding of the roles and responsibilities and then of those roles and responsibilities, making sure that we

[00:09:15] Equipped those people with the right things, right? With the right resources that they have, the capability and the knowledge to perform what those responsibilities are. So they aren't publishing this because you know as we go through it and just some key points to some, okay, this, an audio format, 218 different responses, clearly no consensus regarding job titles in the performance world.

[00:09:41] And honestly that doesn't shock me because as you go and you network or you're going to some of these conferences, we have director of sports sciences, we have head of sports sciences, we have coordinators of sports science, we have sports scientists, particular sort of domain, right? And then we start looking at strengthening, conditioning coaches, we as an industry don't know if we're a strength coach, if we're a weights coach, I've heard that before, certainly

[00:10:07] In America, hey I'm the weights coach, when you start looking at European models, we have fitness coaches as well, that does more of some of the conditioning and fitness and sort of the technical tactical, aren't field coordination in conjunction with the energetic demands of the sport. So you know, no real consensus regarding what job titles and what we're calling ourselves. And then even of that, if I'm calling myself a sports scientist and you are as well, there

[00:10:35] Can be really large variance in the roles and responsibilities of what we do. So even though we might be able to identify and label ourselves as the same thing, we don't necessarily perform the same actions. So you know, until we get better oversight and sort of, I'm not a big fan of more and more governance, but as we have more governance in what defines a sports scientist, a strength coach, a human performance manager, a performance manager, whatever, then we need to

[00:11:05] Orient those roles and responsibilities. With that said, we also need to continue to make sure that, you know, the strategies for us communicating between practitioner to practitioner from a practitioner to your technical staff or head coaches or GM, sports supervisors or head coaches that we do so in a way that fits the context of what the coaches understand. We talk a lot about that on the show and that we need to continue to make sure that

[00:11:30] Our communication style is within the same vernacular or within the same language that a sport coach can understand. So if I am talking about the bio-energetics demands of getting this aerobic block and we're going to focus on, yeah, they will put it in the language of what is layman's term that a coach can understand. And if we need to, we can go a little bit further into the nuance of what we're actually

[00:11:53] Trying to write in the way that we're improving the methodology of the improvement, the actual science and physiology of it, but I would start at a level one sort of approach of being very layman within the vernacular, within the language that we use, and then making sure that if pressed, that we can back that up with a little bit more of understanding of the physiology as well. So that was something I just wanted to get across is that this was a really, really good

[00:12:22] Article, and I would encourage you guys to double check that out on the website. You can find that, like I said, sportperfsi.com. So sport, p-e-r-f-s-c-i.com, it is probably one of my favorite resources when it comes to looking at sport science articles. So nonetheless, I'll turn this back over. I'll get away from this Martin Boucher and Dave Carolyn article.

[00:12:51] And I want to turn this back over to the audience of this show and start talking a little bit about, well, what do we call ourselves? What do you call yourself as a practitioner? And so, you know, when I've been pressed, you know, I've continued to call myself a sports performance coach because I think performance is more so than just what happens in the weight room.

[00:13:14] It's also not just about getting athletes stronger i.e. Strength and getting them conditioned. I, e, you know, what we call ourselves the strength and conditioning coaches. So I like to think that our roles and responsibilities exceed just getting athletes stronger and getting them in shape. I think it does at this level stressors. We are, you know, stress managers in some respects and stress can be anything from making

[00:13:39] Sure whether it's physiological stress or bio-demand stress, making sure that we are training of the sport. Like I said, once we understand what the bio demands are of a legia basketball that we start to train the body in that way, the bio energetics of, you know, the, I hate this term, but the sport specificity of the energy demands of that sport. So again, when we start to talk about, you know, a 94 foot basketball court and we're continuing

[00:14:09] To run athletes to three, four, five miles of long, steady, staking and there's so much more to that as well. So, you know, I think we have exceeded just the responsibilities of getting athletes stronger and in shape and that we do serve responsibility to the athlete to make sure that we are monitoring their workloads that we're assessing and evaluating risk factors for injuries that we're doing everything within our power to mitigate and try to reduce the likelihood or the probability

[00:14:38] Of those injuries. I'm not saying that we are going to employ a strategy that may become a panacea for injuries, but we should be trying to do our due diligence in the evaluation assessment and identification of risk factors or asymmetries or KPIs that may lead to a higher probability, not necessarily that they will, not a predictiveness of injury, but a probability increase of the likelihood of soft tissue and catastrophic injuries.

[00:15:10] So we owe that to a student athlete and we need to continue to make sure as an industry, as a professional, as a practitioner that we're doing those things. So I would ask you if you are now, you know, this far into this podcast, what do you call yourself? Please let me know. I think if you could go ahead and tweet at me at Adam Ringler or on Twitter or if you

[00:15:33] Want to pop this into a DM on Instagram, it's the same handle at Adam Ringler. And let me know what you call yourself. What is your title, which is right here? I'll throw that up there. There's all my info if you want to get on it. Assistant Director of Strength Conditioning for Women's Basketball and volleyball here, University

[00:15:54] Of Colorado Boulder. So I guess, you know, by that definition, what is the responsibilities of a Strength Conditioning Coach? Is it more so than just getting athletes stronger and in shape? And if so, should we be, you know, sports performance coaches? Should we call ourselves the language surrounding what we title ourselves and what we communicate

[00:16:14] Outwardly to administration, to the public, to our athletes, to the parents of athletes, should we call ourselves something more, or categorizes what our roles and responsibilities are. So I'd love to hear from you. Pop in, let me know, DM me, or just tweet at me, and we can have a discussion online about this various thing, because I would be very interested in hearing about what you think.

[00:16:42] So what do you believe? Do you believe that we have a responsibility? Like I believe much as a Strength Conditioning Coach, we have a responsibility to objectively monitoring the demands of our student athletes. We can start easily in the weight room by quantifying strain, right? We can look at things like intensities in the weight room, duration, that, but should

[00:17:04] We be monitoring total loads and total velocities through, you know, velocity based training, modalities and technologies? Should we be equipping athletes with wearable wearables to monitor the technical, tactical work that they're doing on a basketball court, a volleyball course, or elsewhere? Should we be assessing accelerations and distances and sprinting and change of directions and measuring that training adaptation, whether it's external workloads like it's covered

[00:17:34] Or looking at training in POS or speed zones, or time of different speed zones, or high speed running or things like that, the external outputs of a student athlete. But also should we be monitoring the internal response to those, that dose response. So if an athlete on a Monday performs, let's just say X outputs, objective KPI outputs, and on a Friday, they perform that same X output. But on Fridays, their internal response was much greater than on Monday.

[00:18:07] Should we be monitoring and sort of managing that internal aspect, why is heart rates continuing to rise, or if you're a believer of a follower and put a much stock and value and things like HRV is to doing that. Now, when I say, well, should we be performing and creating sophisticated modeling systems, and should we be doing POS season analysis and statistical correlations and running univariant, multivariant analysis and doing exploratory data analysis, I would say that

[00:18:39] Is probably outside of our responsibility, that's probably more and closer to a team or a director of sports science, or your analytics person within an organization should be doing, and they should be upward feeding that communication and that their reports and that their findings to the pertinent sports scientists or strengthening coaches or sports performance coaches so they can use that data in an applied setting to actually change and modify and advance the practices and modalities and the methodology of what we're employing and prescribing to improve

[00:19:16] Obviously the athletic performance. Those are just some of my thoughts as I go through today and I'm just thinking about this particular hat of Mingler's show and some of the things that are on the top of my mind that I think is important to discuss. There is that research paper talking about what we call ourselves and the roles, responsibilities and the titles and how we have a due diligence to make sure that we remain within our scope of

[00:19:45] Practice and that we can help encourage other practitioners and we can be sort of in this then diagram and be on the fringes of other roles and responsibilities but no win to delegate a practitioner, I think absolutely we should do these things. So addition, obviously later in this show I talked a lot about just now, but they internal and external monitoring and sort of our roles and whether it's a sports scientist role or a strength conditioning sports performance role in tracking and monitoring and managing

[00:20:15] Stress. I think we owe it to our student athletes to do these things because at the end of the day if we want to call ourselves something greater than just a strength conditioning coach if we want to be all encompassing of the elements and the domains of what goes into sports performance, whether it's technical, tactical, physiological, technological, whether it's recovery, whether it's some level of performance nutrition, at least from an applied basic

[00:20:42] Standpoint of it, if it's recovery, if it's all of these facets that go into high performance then we owe it to make sure that we're doing our due diligence in trying to prevent injuries from occurring or reduce the probability of those injuries from occurring and a large part of that it can be done. I say can be and not just should be, but can be done through appropriate and attentive management of internal and external factors that go into, we need to make sure that we're

[00:21:13] Managing the internal and external stressors as well as fatigue markers and other sort of this to the sport and the training adaptations that we're trying to drive to the training practices that we do, we should be managing all of those aspects for our student athletes and if we're not, then yeah, perhaps we call ourselves strength conditioning coaches and if we're not doing those things and perhaps we just focus on just being a strength coach or a weights coach, I'm cool with that and we want to outwardly communicate that we have

[00:21:42] More responsibilities that we are greater than just being a weight room's coach, then we also need to make sure that we're doing our responsibility of matching what those definitions are, what that terminology is and making sure that we're backing it up by our actions and not just giving ourselves false titles for things that aren't being done.

[00:22:09] Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in to this 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 AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter and like I said in the intro, it is chocked full of great articles, research papers, sort of daily notes things I'm finding fascinating and experimenting with and being a human guinea pig with to try to change my

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[00:22:59] That you'll get a lot out of it. Check it out. After every single time that I publish this show, I often get one to two questions from you guys listening to an audience about, hey Adam, how do I support the show? I love the material, I love some of the old interviews, I love the monologues you're doing, some of the sport science updates and the current state of the industry updates.

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[00:24:07] The sport science updates, head over to buymeacoffee.com forward slash Adam Ringler, enter your information in the website and that money will go directly to this show. And for the very last outro of this show, I have one favor, one request that I would ask for you. Do you like algorithms? Do you like robots taking over the world?

[00:24:30] If you like both, do the following. Whenever you are listening to this show, take a screenshot of your podcast player and post it to Instagram and please tag me in it. As always, my social handle is at Adam Ringler and I promise you that I will share that through every social avenue that I have, whether it's Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, geez, how many are there at this point.

[00:24:56] Nonetheless, I will share that and that will help again, visibility of this show and it will only help other practitioners, other sports scientists, other strength conditioning professionals, sport performance coaches, high performance managers, everyone be able to find the show and join in and our industry discussions. Thank you.