#062 - Sport Science != Smoke and Mirrors: Using Data Within Coaching
In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I'm discussing an issue I hear too often regarding sport science and it's applied nature within high performance sport.
In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I'm discussing an issue I hear too often regarding sport science and it's applied nature within high performance sport. I outline a typical day and the many touchpoints with sport science, data-led decision making, and the applied nature of scientific processes on sport outcomes. This was a fun episode to record because I get on a roll talking about this material.
As a reminder, our Random Shows shows are a quick 15-25 minute episode where I typically discuss current industry trends, research reads, current events, and occasionally offer my insights into the training process that we're undertaking each week. This episode ran longer because sport science and it's applied usage is an area I'm incredibly passionate about. i go into these random shows without notes but full of passion, insights, and opinions. 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
- Sport science is not smoke and mirrors when it is applied: the episode walks through a typical day of touchpoints where data-led decision making meets the actual training process.
- The applied nature of scientific process on sport outcomes is the whole point; data earns its keep only when it changes a coaching decision.
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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 conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show. Hey everybody, I'm going to pause the show real quick and announce something brand new to the Decoding Excellence Show. We've created an online community that has an exclusive content that you will not be able to get just by navigating to the site alone.
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[00:01:03] And here we go. We have a great Decoding Excellence Show for you today. Man, I really just go crazy on this and not in like a weird bad way, like I'm, but I just kind of get on a soapbox talking about a particular theme that I hear within sport science, which is that there's a disconnect between the research and what people are doing in the field in the applied setting.
[00:01:24] So I thought while I was listening to this podcast, not my own, a different one. I was going through it and I was like, I should just talk about what I do on a daily basis, what I do from a collection, from a reporting, from a communication, from a planning process of our training and practice planning and how I report this. And that's what I do for the next, I don't know, 60 minutes or so of this episode where I just kind of get into the weeds, I nerd out a little bit, and I talk about sport science,
[00:01:50] Applied sports science and strength conditioning and how we use data and I get a little bit on a tangent. I will admit that. A little bit verbose. I don't know. Maybe I've had too much caffeine.
[00:02:00] I'm a little wired, whatever it might be. So I'm a little long-winded, hence the longer episode. So nonetheless, guys, I have a great show for you today where I kind of get into the weeds talking about sport science and the applied nature and data analysis and data collection of any relevant KPIs that we would collect. So stay tuned.
[00:02:18] Everybody, welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show. I'm your host. As always, Adam Ringler, and thanks for tuning in. This is a fun one. Today, I wanted to have a random episode. I was listening to a couple of podcasts walking into the facility today at an early morning
[00:02:35] And had a set up for a couple of lifts for our morning teams here at the CU Event Center in Boulder, Colorado. And I thought as well as listening to this conversation between a couple of respected practitioners within the field, I thought it would be important for me to share a little of my own processes. So within these podcasts that I was listening to, they were talking particularly about sport
[00:03:01] Science, about some of the, not only the fallacies of sport science, common best practices, but where this whole thing breaks down. And I thought while I was listening to this, I said, you know what I should do? I should try to narrate a little of my own day what I do on a daily basis. Maybe there might be something in there that you as a listening audience, if you're new to sport science or you're a budding practitioner, or even if you're a veteran of the field, there
[00:03:33] Might be something in this that makes you pause and think about, okay, maybe the refinement of my own practice. Maybe there's something I can do better or a different viewpoint, a different perspective, a different take on a practice or a way of doing things. And maybe you listen and you're thinking to yourself, you know what I have, I'm doing everything better than that.
[00:03:57] And if that's the case, please reach out to me because I want to learn from you. This is the Decoding Excellence Show, even though I'm behind the microphone. It's not about what I am doing. It's about cultivating an audience and cultivating a collective community of high performance practitioners and leveraging all of our collective experiences and best practices within sport science and high performance coaching.
[00:04:21] So with that said, I thought I would start with my day, right? So to preface this sort of rundown of what I do, I, again, I am athlete management system agnostic. So you don't necessarily need to have the same resources or tools or technologies that I do, right? You're talking about Kippman Labs or we're talking about Coach Me Plus or we're talking
[00:04:50] About Train Heroic or Bridge or push or whatever. Just recognize that these are all just resources and your resources may differ a little bit for my own. And that's okay, right? Because this is just to give you ideas of what I'm doing. I want to be authentic and want to be vulnerable in some respects about talking about the
[00:05:10] Good, the bad, what I do, and maybe my own gaps within our practices. But again, it's not solely dependent on a particular technology. What's more important than the actual what we use is how and why, right? So let's, let's start with that. It's less about the what tool, what tech, what system, what technology, what performance assessment, what diagnostic and more about, okay, when do we use it?
[00:05:40] How do we use it? How do we act upon the information in a meaningful way that drives actionable change, okay? So let's set that as as paramount, okay? So beginning at the start of the day, the very first thing that I like to do when I wake up in the morning, depending on the session, if it's afternoon session or morning session, I like to get our questionnaires out as soon as possible.
[00:06:02] Now, I want our athletes to be able to wake up, you know, if they drink coffee, have their coffee, have their prep or drink their water, have breakfast. And in a sound mind, in a piece of mind, in a sound body, fill out those morning questionnaires pretty early. And we ask, you know, a very common battery of questions that you would anticipate are in any type of athlete readiness questionnaire, right?
[00:06:26] And you can find a lot of this, I want to say PubMed or elsewhere, it was quite well documented online. So we'll ask a series of questions to our athletes. And that will populate a dashboard immediately when they fill those responses out. And we get some ideas as a performance staff, as a medical staff of everything from body sorenesses on an anterior posterior map, what areas are stiff or sore.
[00:06:53] We receive a general sort of a lichert scale of sleep quality, sleep duration, soreness, fatigue, energy levels, mood. And we, again, we assess a lot of these things, we look at those things. We want to make sure that our calculations are driven, not necessarily by an arbitrary absolute threshold, right? So let's just say if an athlete fills out a two, or in a questionnaire, let's say, you
[00:07:21] Know, one being more indicative of high amounts of soreness and five is low, or whatever reasons, your skills might be flipped, right? So I use that as an analogy, right? Like if they constantly fill out a two, then if we set a threshold at, let's just say, anything below three, we want an alarming mechanism to go off to our practitioners, our strength conditioning coach, our athletic medicine professional.
[00:07:46] If we do that, and they constantly fill out a two, okay, well, like we're going to receive a lot of potential, like false positives, right? You'll check in with the athlete, hey, that's how you feel, yeah, you've filled out a two house, your, how's your soreness in your body? I saw on the stiffness map that your right hamstring was a little sore, you know, and we'll have to actually reach out, have a conversation, have a dialogue with an athlete, and be able
[00:08:12] To assess, you know, both verbally, and we might channel them to come in a little bit early, so we can actually do our athletic trainers can get, you know, hands on and start sort of palpating and feeling, and getting some better sort of diagnostics on these guys. One of the things that we like to do is try to create some calculations for a z-score, right? So that we can start to have this bespoke to the athlete's responses and see if there's
[00:08:36] Any large deviations away from what their normal value is. So if an athlete always fills out a two, and for whatever reason they fill out a four, that is, that's a pretty big jump for them, that's pretty significant. If they always fill out a two and they fill out a one, that might flag a alarming mechanism because it's, it's a little outside of their, they're, essentially, their standard deviation. And we could start to see as they go through those alarming mechanisms and those questionnaires
[00:09:04] That they might have a little bit of soreness. So again, all of the morning questionnaires are really centered around reaching out to the athlete and asking them a very simple question. And that question, despite the fact that it's actually physically not our questionnaire, is, are you prepared to train today? Are you prepared to absorb and adapt to stress, as Charlie Wang would say, right?
[00:09:28] And that's what our morning questionnaires are there to assess, sleep quality and fatigue and soreness and, and energy levels. And we want to make sure that if we see something, this sounds lame, right? But if we see something, say something, I think that's a slogan for, wow, this got dark. I think domestic terrorism, which is random. But if we see something, say something, if you see something, a deviation on their sort
[00:09:53] Of well-being questionnaires, then we need to say something. We need to reach out to that athlete, acknowledge that soreness, acknowledge that sleep disturbance, acknowledge that low energy level, acknowledge whatever they're alarming and try to intervene. Now, in some cases, it might just be sort of that pat on the back and say, hey, you know, we really hope you get better sleep tomorrow. If we start to see a trend, let's, let's intervene.
[00:10:16] Perhaps we reach out to a sleep specialist or we reach out and to, to our PT or Cairo or whatever it might be, reach out to the specialist that specializes in those domains, each of those, and, uh, and refer out. But not always, right? Sometimes it's just about acknowledging the, the simple fact that an athlete is reporting something in.
[00:10:35] So, early in the morning, I like to get those questionnaires out. Now, they don't do any good if you're not reading them, which is the, the large part of, uh, of what I hear as a criticism of sort of science is that we're collecting data to collect data. No, wrong. Now, data is nice to have in a data set for future, sort of analysis, multivariant analysis,
[00:10:58] Or regressions, or, you know, any type of statistical, uh, a, a, a analogy that we might want to run on our data sets. That's great. We need data. We need, and we need large. We need clean, pretty tight data with well controlled methodology of collection.
[00:11:11] That's really, really important because, again, messy methodology and messy data garbage in equals garbage out. So we want to make sure that we're getting very clean data into the system. But again, it's, it's not just for analysis. Yes, that's, that's a secondary, that's might even a, um, a tertiary aspect of data collection is the potential analysis that you can do later.
[00:11:36] But again, we don't want to see data or have data come in and not act upon it, right? And again, I get, this is the, this is the challenge of applied sport science is that we aren't necessarily running and we've have and we certainly do, uh, run studies within not only our academic departments, but also in conjunction with them and conjunction with grants, with, you know, member and conference institutions, things like that. But internally, we want to act upon the information and affect it and change and tweak the system
[00:12:10] Because rather than a nice, tidy study and a white paper or that, you know, a paper that we could present at a conference, the, the single most important thing is positioning our athletes in an opportunity to compete for and win championships. That's what we want to do. So it's nice to have a, like, I, I, I could barely fathom the idea of having a control group and recognizing that there's a superior methodology to training or recovery or nutritional intervention
[00:12:37] Or whatever it might be and not offering that to the control group. Now, listen, what that potentially muddy our analysis, could we say that this is statistically better than the control group? It would be hard to tell. But again, you know, when you're, when you're having that control group within an internal team, you know, half the team is, uh, receiving intervention, uh, and the other is not.
[00:13:01] And that, to me, as a practitioner in the applied setting is not cool in, uh, quote, Rick and Morty in my world, that's not cool, censored version of it. So nonetheless, uh, we want to actually read the data. We want to intervene on the data and we want to start reaching out. And that can start immediately. A lot of the times I do that, either at my computer desk at work when I am reviewing the data
[00:13:25] As it's starting to trickle in. Again, a good common touch point and I know our athletic trainers probably absolutely despise this. And hopefully not. I say that sarcastically, but I guess, you know, I could see the, um, the encroachment of territory and domain.
[00:13:42] But I like to be around the team. I like to be around our athletes. I like to be around our athletic trainers because so much of training, right? Training equals rehab, rehab equals training. Charlie Winegraf, again, the second plug in one random show episode. But so much of what we do as strength conditioning professionals is just a continuation of
[00:14:01] The continuum of rehab. So I want to have an interface with our athletes in a common place. And a lot of times as athletes are getting taped or athletes are coming in and doing rehab, that's a nice common place to sort of bridge the gap between things they're working on within their own health, within their own wellness within their own rehab to ultimately the team goals, right?
[00:14:25] Jumping higher, playing faster, being, uh, being having greater agility or repeat sprinability or reaction. Oh, you know, greater contact or whatever, it might be whatever physical output that we want from the system, right? So that's also a great opportunity for me to say to, uh, to catch, uh, lagging individuals from those that didn't fill out their well-being and just sort of strike up a conversation with
[00:14:51] An athlete. So if somebody did, uh, report low sleep, uh, I might reach out to him over text. I might wait until they get into the athletic training room and, and have a quick conversation. Just like, hey, yo, I saw you sleep was a little down like anything I could do to help. And a lot of the times we'll refer athletes out and we'll get them the help that they need. Um, and I think that's just being agile with our practice, with our ability to channel
[00:15:15] People through the system to the right resources. Um, so again, that is, uh, that's a common place where I like to sort of hang out, um, if I'm not in the weight room, I'm probably in the athletic training room and if I'm not there, then I'm probably at practice. And I do that again, like I said, to bridge the gap between rehab and our physical training, our strength conditioning or sports performance training that we do, um, but also to show
[00:15:40] You unity because I like to collaborate, I like to think I like to talk out loud. I like to create plans and, and share information with our athletic trainers. I think that relationship is a critical one to nail within any sport performance and successful organization is to make sure that there's an alignment between your athletic trainer and your strength conditioning professional is absolutely critical. I think to health and well-being and performance and make no mistake, you know, your athlete
[00:16:09] Wellness, athlete health is the foundation of athletic performance because without it, it is very, very difficult to actually build any level of a robustness, but be, you know, for them a performance potential up to the performance potential of physical outputs manifested through the sport that they practice, um, or in compete within. So, so again, we talked about the questionnaires. Now, in addition to that, right, as we're starting to go through, athletes are going, you
[00:16:38] Know, perhaps are getting rehab, we're creating notes within our athlete management system about different treatments that we're doing, what duration, what modality, the area of the anatomy that this treatment is, right, hamstring, left hamstring, bilateral hamstring, and calf, what type of treatment is it, is it cupping, is it kneeling, is it, uh, is it soft tissue, is it instrument soft tissue, whatever it might be, it's band stretch. You name it, right?
[00:17:03] There's thousands of different modalities that a practitioner's could choose, right? We're documenting that so that we have a data point, we have a something that we can statistically run analysis on. So, if it is a return to play or rehab progression that we have those modalities that we could point back to and say, wow, you know, like this modality for 20 minutes elisted at a return to play three weeks faster than this secondary or tertiary modality or, you know, other things.
[00:17:31] So, again, by documenting, we, we, we were creating data, which is important because that data then feeds future analysis. So, I start with, uh, starting with that, right, as we're starting to go through treatments and we're doing rehabs, documentation is a huge important thing to nail down. So let's just pretend at this point in the day that they are finishing up with, um, whatever sort of pre-practice treatment and they're ushering off to practice for whatever sport that
[00:17:59] We might be talking about in this hypothetical analogy. We're at sport, we're leading dynamic warmups, we're trying to bespoke the warmup to the athlete or at least bucket it a little bit. So the team's a little bit sore, a little bit fatigued, maybe we're going to change the warm-up a little bit. We're going to maybe swap out different, you know, like reactive neuromuscular sort of
[00:18:22] Banding instruments and we'll say, hey, you know, like, maybe instead of many bands, we're not going to do that. Maybe we'll spend a little bit more time doing static stretching or dynamic stretching or foam rolling pre-practice or if everybody's feeling good, maybe we can actually return some practice time back to the coach by only taking five minutes for a set, ten minute warmup.
[00:18:40] We'll give them extra time to work on skill development. So yeah, again, I like to use that wellness questionnaire and those conversations to really individualize the warmup with athletes. And there's times as well as I'm starting to see things coming in from that morning questionnaire. Again, it doesn't always have to be reactive. That way it's not like the tail is wagging the dog but we can bespoke that warmup process
[00:19:05] To each athlete through conversation. Hey, when we get to this segment of the warmup, I want you to do X, Y and Z instead of AB and C. Cool. Got it. That level of individualization that occurs and that's driven at least through collaboration
[00:19:18] And through that conversation with our athletic trainer and myself, but also through the data and through the athlete and it all is centered around the athlete contributing and feeding information into us and that's crucial and that's important. So we are now working our way through a dynamic warmup or through practice or whatever we're documenting, obviously duration of practice and if you want to get really individual and granular, you're documenting drills through any type of practice planner type software so
[00:19:50] That we can start to classify different drills and when it comes to technical tactical periodization, we can really start to lay out a groundwork of, okay, here we are. It's game day minus two, right? What drills are we're doing today? And how does that differ from game day minus three versus a game day plus one, right? Like our recovery day.
[00:20:13] So again, like, or install day as well, I mean, it depends on what we're actually trying to nail down on that. So again, this allows us an opportunity to really have be granular in the practice planning in the periodization models that we have both technically, tactically, physically. Now comes the actual sort of fun part. And the reason why we talk about logging and documenting practice duration or training
[00:20:40] Duration is because we now have our PEs that we want to push out. So depending on the team, we outfit some of our athletes with wearable technologies. It could be anything from catapult to polar pro, always looking at different sort of wearable technologies and obviously running our own sort of validation of these products, but then also leveraging some of their third party validation for some of the technologies that we utilize as well.
[00:21:05] So I start with that because there's something very simple that anybody could do, duration of practice or training and then some type of exertion scale in depending on your preference, I suppose, right? So we will collect our PEs and we try to keep the standardization, the methodology of that pretty consistent. So we will collect those after any training session, anything physical that our athlete does.
[00:21:29] This is a rehabilitation session, document it. It's a aerobic conditioning away. We'll document it. It's aerobic conditioning at home. We'll document it. It's a strength lift, a power lift, a endurance lift, a hypertrophy lift.
[00:21:42] You know, we'll have a broad spectrum of session identification labels so that we can be really granular in the analysis through our RPE collection. Is it practice? Is it walk through? Is it a captain run practice? Is it practice away?
[00:21:57] Is it practice at a neutral site? So there's a lot of instances where we can be very granular in the analysis that we do. And that way that we can look at all of our, you know, RPEs or durations and our intensities are triumphant and end up looking at it and saying, wow, you know, when, when we're on the road, we train less or in this case, when we're on the road, we actually train at
[00:22:18] A higher end in intensity or at least self-reported exertion and a higher exertion of our athletes. Is that related to fatigue associated with, you know, east to west travel or west to east, you know, in time zone differences. These are all the type of questions that we can start to answer through data, but it's important to be granular and think broad spectrum, 30,000 foot view of the data. And then also zoom in and be very, very precise and detailed so that it allows for the analysis
[00:22:47] You want to do down the road. So the RPE part of it is quite critical. Now we will also look at, you know, catapult, outputs, open field that may be APIed over to an athlete management system where we might have some dashboards and some longitudinal analysis and visualizations, you know, broken up by position group or by key contributors or by, you know, rosters or sides, first team, second team reserves, you know, it can
[00:23:15] Really be slice and dice, however, practitioner see fit. But it's important then, as you would imagine, as most of this podcast has already talked about, that if you're collecting, we should be reviewing, right, like, come on industry, come on people, I cannot hear one more story about technology that's being bought purely for recruiting purposes. Like if you're going to invest in expensive technology, then we should do the technology
[00:23:42] Of service. We should do the athlete a service and review the information. We owe it to the athlete to do this. I'll get off my soapbox here. Okay. So we should review the open field data.
[00:23:53] We should look at our charts, our durations, our intensities, our player load, our excels, decels, whatever metrics that you find relevant to your sport. I've talked about that in previous Decoding Excellence Shows, but we should be reviewing it, documenting it, and then, you know, again, we don't need to necessarily make changes on its session by session basis, but we should at least deliver that information to key stakeholders, i.e. Those in charge of practice planning or training.
[00:24:21] And so, you know, as a sports scientist, I would look at that information and relay that to the relevant people. You know, in many cases, I would be assessing that information, kicking out a report to our head coach, assistant coaches, and they would then be, you know, utilizing in conjunction with some facilitation and assistance, perhaps some of those workloads or those excels, those decels, those high velocity, high threshold, high sprint, high velocity spring into their
[00:24:50] Practice planning so that we can start to really refine the sort of technical, tactical periodization models so that we get the physical outputs that they, that we need for physical adaptation for getting stronger and faster and developing robustness, but also the skill acquisition that the team needs to go out and compete and win. So a lot of that can be facilitated through data and should, through wearable technologies, but you can do the same sort of, you know, work output or workload through an RPE, and
[00:25:24] At least start to talk about, hey, this is the trends I'm seeing at bare minimum, this is what I'm seeing. I'm seeing, you know, here we are, we're game day minus two, and this is our common workload and it's 25% greater than subsequent, you know, game day minus two's ranging back the last, you know, five weeks, let's just say, and that might, that might give some information to a coach that says, hey, maybe I need to, you know, try to make tomorrow's walk through
[00:25:48] A little bit easier, game day minus one, or maybe we need to focus a little bit more on some recovery or rejuvenation on our minus one or maybe we have a morning, or we have practice on that day. I'm going to cut the volume and we're going to do some cold tubs or recovery treatments or whatever it might be, right, but at least it gives them, it's, they're armed with information that's somewhat objective, whether it's wearable technology or whether it's more subjectively
[00:26:10] Driven through RPE, they're armed with information, and they can use that information through the lens that they see the world, i.e., being, you know, masterful coach and affecting the next training session. So again, so there's a little bit of responsibility of the practitioner utilizing the data that we collect in a meaningful way, generating a report, providing said report to the key stakeholders, i.e., those responsible for practice planning or training planning, training
[00:26:38] Plans, i.e., maybe a string coach, and facilitating that, that sort of handoff of that information. So that is, that if I'm following along in my timeline, a lot of, again, I don't have any notes for this show, right, it's a random show, literally trying to get these thoughts out of my head from this podcast I heard this morning. That brings us to end of practice, we've collected RPE, we've now collected our wearable technology, we've synced it to the cloud, it's now synchronized over to our athlete management system.
[00:27:08] In this, again, hypothetical analogy, at some point in time, we're going to have a training session. I would imagine whether it's immediately after practice, whether that, you know, I know for this case, it's not in chronological order, so maybe we lifted before practice, and that would change what we do from a warm up perspective, yes, yes, yes. I get that.
[00:27:26] In this simple analogy, we're now lifting after practice, so now our athletes are coming into the weight room. Now, if we've done it correctly, perhaps we've way, like if it's an outdoor sport and hydration and the sweat analysis and the risk of dehydration is a factor, maybe we've done a pre-participation weigh-in. And now our athletes are coming to the weight room and we're starting to do essentially
[00:27:48] A post-practice weigh-in or we're getting an idea of maybe this fluid loss or the sweat rate that they were, you know, had an outdoor field, so we're collecting some body weights and we're then starting to push some fluids, hydration, waters. If it is electrolyte mix or something that's a little bit less sugary, but again, right, that's all dependent on maybe the rate of change, the delta, from a pre-way into post-way end.
[00:28:15] So we're collecting that. We're collecting it to see long-term longitudinal growth, from freshman to sophomore to junior to senior, from season to season, from month to month, from week to week, and make sure that we can intervene when necessary, we can refer when we should, right, to our, you know, register dieticians that are on staff or anybody else, any resources that might be. So we have that, right?
[00:28:38] So that's sort of step one, we'll go through, again, perhaps a prep series or any type of dynamic warm-up or development preparatory type of series, so depending on your flavor of the month, depending on your style of weight room periodization, depending of your which hitch that you hitch your wagon to, I'm a hit guy, I'm an Olympic guy, I'm a functional, it doesn't matter, right? I'm not, I'm not, that's not the scope of what this podcast is about.
[00:29:08] Depending on the way that you like to train your athletes, and I have my own opinions and I have my own practices, and I think that I like to say that hopefully my practices are evidence led and at least evidence informed and that we're looking at the literature and the research and science and trying to adopt those methodologies in a way that's applicable in our environment, in the collegiate environment, which isn't like a nice, tidy white coat lab where everything is completely sterile and standardized, so I say that we'll go through
[00:29:45] A developmental series, and then usually we'll have some type of intra-training testing. I'm not, again, there's, I've seen a lot of dialogue over this sort of weird COVID world that we've lived in through, and then obviously all of the webinars that's popped up and coaches versus COVID, and a bunch of great resources, and one of the things I've heard a lot of people talk about is, you know, like we don't test, like we don't have test days, we just test every day, every day is a test, and I think at Dan Palfe a little bit, like I don't
[00:30:15] Need a movement screen to say, I'm butchering his words, so Dan, I apologize wholeheartedly if you hear this. The expert practitioners can literally look at an athlete and know if something's off. I love that. Like that's built in testing through years and years and years of experience, essentially having a PhD in coaching, and we can't discredit that educational, experiential education
[00:30:41] That comes from it. I'm sort of the same way, like I want to build testing into our training. I don't want to have just, okay, we're going to do a six week wave or an eight week periodization model, and the culmination of this is a test day on that eighth week, and no, like every day is an opportunity to test. So now one of the things I will try to do is I will try to rotate our assessments in
[00:31:06] What I think is the most meaningful way of periodizing through our week our testing strategies. So what I mean by this is, let's say we've come off a game, game day, it's now game day plus one, which maybe is an off day. Sometimes we've actually lifted, because we'll have our off day, aren't essentially a game day plus two, so our plus one might be a recovery day, it might be a top up day for low-minute athletes and a recovery day for our high-minute contributors, train
[00:31:35] A little bit, but it's generally a lighter session and an opportunity to really get rehab and treatment and everything that we need to. Now on a typical day, like let's just say if we weren't in season, like we'll build in our testing. Like if I knew that we are the furthest away out from the next competition, I want to have our most invasive and down producing testing that the farthest away from the next competition.
[00:31:59] The moment we play, you know, we're obviously trying to return to homeostasis and get joint integrities and joint range of motion, inflammation out of our body, and we can do that through recovery strategies. Yes, totally get that, but the next available opportunity that we train, I want to make sure that we're testing what we deem necessary. So at least in my environment, I can only speak to the things that I'm exposed to.
[00:32:22] And some of the resources that I have, like if it was an endless non-finance, like if I won the mega million, let's just say I just saw it. Clearly, I think this morning I did a math and it was lump sum payout was like $700 million. I told my buddy is that if I ended up winning it, which I understand, which would never happen because I don't play, I never do lottery, right, because I don't believe in them necessarily. So, but hey, $700 billion lump sum payout, that's amazing.
[00:32:51] You put that in a decent index fund, a Vanguard, a mutual fund, whatever with a 5% return. Your annual interest off of that, if you've never touched the principal, would be like $35 million annually, yeah, there's taxes and things like that, but that's crazy, right? If I had $35 million coming in to my budget, our strength and conditioning budget, maybe my resources might change, right, but I don't live in fancy land. I'm not playing the mega millions lottery, I'm not trying to go out and get the billy payout.
[00:33:22] So I will keep it within the facet of my own reality, which is what I have access to. Back to where I was, right, we are testing the most invasive testing strategy or modality. So a lot of it will be like any type of strength testing. So it might be Nordboard, it might be a force frame, it might be hip adduction, a biduction, a type of a razor or Nordic, usually I just keep it at a Nordic hamstring curl on the Nordboard.
[00:33:46] This might be where you build in like a mid-thigh isometric pull on that day. Something where it's a little bit more intensive because now a mid-thigh isometric pull, the cool thing about that is like there's just, yeah, there's a lot of tension. You are driving tension through that body, but there's a lot less delayed onset muscle soreness with that than a Nordic curl, it's the least. I mean, all of our athletes train Nordic, so doing a maximum effort Nordic on the Nordboard
[00:34:15] Isn't really too laborious, but nonetheless, that's where we'll have that testing. Build into the training session, so we'll go through that dynamic warm-up, that prep series, depending on your periodization strategies, the ways, the methodology for training in the weight room, but we'll build that test in, and then we'll train, right? And then wow, our athletes are going through maybe their primary block,
[00:34:40] Their secondary block, they're getting into their tertiary sort of hypertrophy, accessory, unilateral work, wherever it might be. We are using the data from that test to salt or to bespoke out the individual nature of our training program. So as an example, even yesterday, we've done our Nordboard, and we're going through it, and we start to see, oh, these two athletes, while they had a nice Nordboard for our female population,
[00:35:07] Really, really cool, strong, and if you are listening to this and you use the Nordboard, I'd love to refer just general numbers with you. So please, at me, at Twitter, or DM me, Instagram, or Twitter, and let's talk a little bit, and we can keep everything anonymized and everything de-identified, but we can talk about trends, right? I'd love to know what is good on the Nordboard. And I don't know if Vaughn does a great job of pushing out information as well,
[00:35:30] And giving back to the clients, but nonetheless, but while we were in this training session, I noticed, ooh, these two athletes had an asymmetry that actually exceeded the threshold of what we deemed, you know, comfortable risk for us from an injury probability standpoint. So what do we do? We start to individualize our training now. In that particular day, our diagnostic strength test was Nordic on the Nordboard, but hey, you know what we're going to do right afterwards?
[00:35:56] We have three sets of X periodization, X amount of reps, and instead of doing bilateral Nordics, we're going to do unilateral, SORNEX, LEG, eccentric, focused, eccentrics, right, or rollouts. Earn your weaker side. Now look, strength and dysfunction and asymmetry isn't always a strength issue. Sometimes it's a postural issue.
[00:36:16] Sometimes it's a setup issue, a methodology issue, but in some cases, we want to try to give as much individualization within a reasonable expectation to try to drive great results. So if I see an athlete is weaker on one side, maybe it's there a little bit sore on that side, which we should have deemed from the morning questionnaire.
[00:36:35] Maybe they have a weakness in that, and we can diagnostically test that, and it will be identified on the Nordboard or the force frame or elsewhere. But again, we want to use our training intervention of the time that we have with the athlete to try to fix problems where we see them. And if it's an asymmetry issue, we're going to try to fix that through strength. Now, if it doesn't get better,
[00:36:53] Then we will explore athletic medicine intervention, we'll go to PT, we'll go to Cairo's, we'll go to our referral group. But let's try to fix issues where we can. And this allows us to, you know, be agile with our periodization, our training process, which I think we owe it to the athletes.
[00:37:11] Now, that is particularly aren't like a game day minus four, or plus one really is not often on a plus one where we do a Nordic. But we may come to now like a minus three. And this might be where, okay, we got a couple days until the next competition, and now we want to check it's the next training, right? And just just picture this in your in your mind as you're listening to this random show,
[00:37:34] Right? Like a lot of the same processes will remain the same, the RPEs, the wearable tech, the interventions, the reports, the morning questionnaires, all of these things generally run day-to-day or in any training training day, right? Try to respect, I try to turn a lot off a lot of these things on their off day. In season, it might be a little bit different where we keep the questionnaires on, just to respond, just to see the response.
[00:37:57] Let's just say like we compete, I'm trying to think of volleyball, right, where they might compete Friday, Saturday, or Friday, practice, Saturday, compete, Sunday, have Monday off. Like we might want to keep it on Monday, just so that we can see how athletes, bodies are adapting and tolerating the stressors from the weekend, right, from the competition.
[00:38:16] So it might be important to keep those aren't at those cases. But back to the story, back to my process, back to my thinking, is that the next day we come in, we might want to see, okay, we got a couple of days, we got a little bit of runway, we're minus three days out. Let's check biomechanics. And this is where like,
[00:38:31] Markerless motion, sort of biomechanical analysis is really, really cool. And we can use video cameras, and there's a lot of systems out there now, and they're getting really, really intuitive and pretty cool. So we utilize the system, and it will go through a pretty standardized, again, as we go through the warm-up, we build it into our training sessions. So the training, sort of warm-up, is universal across our athletes,
[00:38:56] You know, in some respects, or across our sample size, which would be that particular team. And then we test, and we'll go through a battery of testing screens. So it might be an overhead squat, an overhead lunge, it might be counter-movement, jump, hand on hips. It might be shoulder, internal rotation, external rotation.
[00:39:15] You know, there's a number of hip external rotation. We have a Y balance screen that we do some ankle mobility. But again, through all of this, the motion capture system is collecting information on every joint. So, you know, the knee flexion, ankle flexion, we get to see thoracic spine, extension, we get to see range of motion, internal range, internal shoulder range of motion,
[00:39:37] External range of motion, total shoulder range of motion through the arc. So we get a lot of information coming in of that system. And we want, again, we want to, like I said, earlier in this podcast, if we collect, we must review. If we collect, we must take the time to look at the information and report back. So, you know, from that, like at the, we're going through it,
[00:39:59] It will populate a dashboard. And as we're getting towards the end of the session, a quick glance will look, if there's alarming mechanisms, aren't any sort of 10% range of motion increase, or for us, like a 10% range of motion decrease, it will alarm differently from week to week,
[00:40:14] From session to session, from the motion capture, mocap. And then at the end of that session, we'll individualize or at least bucket the commonalities across the group. If we see, you know, like a knee, flexion, range of motion, loss, like we might program a little bit more stretching through our quads. Or we might do some more ankle mobility exercises during the warm-up
[00:40:35] Or during the cool-known session. We might focus on doing some thoracic spine rotation work at the end of the session. And again, that's all driven through data. And again, it's very hard. It's difficult. I don't discount the idea that it is challenging
[00:40:55] To bespoke and individualize IE, a bond or chuck sort of methodology to every single athlete under team. But what we can do is we can at least individualize it in some respect to the large majority of dysfunctions and common trends that we see across the team.
[00:41:13] We'll do that at the end of that session. That's like a game day minus three, maybe a minus two depending on if you're following along. Again, minus two minus one, that's where we want to utilize our force plates or any type of power output.
[00:41:25] So typically if in sort of the puretization model that I utilize a lot in season, which is important when you're trying to, you know, peak every week for your competition essentially, is I want to make sure that we're springy, we're powerful, we're maybe using, you know,
[00:41:39] In that session it's more of a power output or a speed day, dynamic effort type of day. So we're using velocity-based training methodologies within our training session. So we might be tracking bar speeds and making sure we stay in a particular velocity,
[00:41:53] Velocity range. We are cutting sets at thresholds if they drop below just a, you know, intervene before central nervous system fatigue really sets in. We bury them deeper one day out from a game or whatever two days out from a game.
[00:42:09] So we will use a lot of the bar tracking methodologies prior, or at least I will use those prior to a minus two. And then, but yeah, that's where we'll build in our force plate testing. And we'll look at, you know, eccentric duration and see if there's disturbances there
[00:42:26] For if their counter movement is a little bit slower, they're adopting a different strategy on that counter movement jump. They're trying to muscle out of the bottom rather than being, you know, generating that great eccentric power out of it
[00:42:39] And they're rebounding out of the power and using that elasticity of that counter movement to really be springy and create a great impulse. So we'll look at, you know, RSI mod. And you know, we'll go through and utilize the force plate. But again, we want to put this back in the context
[00:42:54] That an athlete can understand. So again, we don't want to necessarily be always reactive to what the force plate kicks out for us. But we do want to look at what the metrics are. We want to start to intervene when we start to see a trend.
[00:43:07] Maybe it's, you know, we're seeing, you know, like knee flexion decrease on the mocap day. So they range emotions a little bit less and we're seeing a greater eccentric duration on the force plate minus two days out. And we can start to say, oh, man,
[00:43:19] Maybe there's some knee pain that they're not reporting in. And let's check the more inquestionnaires and the knee pain may be just skewed up slightly. Maybe on the stiffness map, they have a little bit more pain. And then we can start a tendonitis rehabilitation or a rehab program early before they even knew it
[00:43:35] Or intervened through supplementation, collagen, vitamin C or things. Like we can really get ahead of issues rather than waiting for the train to derail completely off the tracks. And that's what data does.
[00:43:48] At least that's what I, in my opinion, applied sports science should be. It's about using, you know, best practices and using your own laboratory and your own subjects, i.e. Your team, but not really necessarily having a control group.
[00:44:04] Your control group is when things don't go right. And you can do post-mortems and look at your practices and look at your own training. And you can look at your own systems and do so with an authentic scientific rigor to understand, like, this isn't good.
[00:44:19] And I have data to show that it didn't elicit the response that I wanted it to elicit. We didn't get powerful. We didn't get faster. We didn't get stronger or injuries went up. Whatever it is, right?
[00:44:30] That's when you're looking at your methodology and you're recognizing it didn't deliver the results that you were looking for. That's your science experiments. That's your sports science experiment. Now, on the counteract of it,
[00:44:41] Like, your sample size might be quite low, right? Like, let's call a spade a spade. Like, your team might only have 15 athletes or your volleyball team might only have 19 or 20. Your lacrosse or soccer team might only have 30. Your football team might only have 100 or whatever.
[00:44:56] So the sample size might be a little bit low. But again, understanding that, like, we should try to use a scientific rigor and apply it in a way to be very methodical about how we assess whether or not we're getting what we want out of the athletes,
[00:45:14] Which is positioning them in a greater opportunity to not only absorb and adapt to stress, but to realize performance potential that they already possess while gaining the necessary skill acquisition that their technical, tactical coaches are developing
[00:45:30] All while falling on top of developing a greater robustness to their system through their health. So that is a long-winded response. But I wanted to talk about this because I wanted to walk through some of this. Now, again, all of this, the last thing I'll leave
[00:45:50] This Decoding Excellence Show, random episode, aren't, is that all of this is also built into the data sets, right? So again, why it's important? We want to intervene, we want to make changes. We want to intervene before the train derails off the tracks.
[00:46:07] But if it does, or if it doesn't, that still becomes part of your data set. And we should be regularly, whether quarterly or semi-annually or an annually, or through that the end of the season, conducting what I already caught in the show
[00:46:21] At Postmortem, but some type of injury audit or seasonal multivariant analysis or some type of analysis, statistical analysis, through our, through Python, through your statistical instrumentation or software of choice, whatever you might prescribe to and like
[00:46:38] Or whatever language you code in, you data science geeks out there. I'm lumping myself in that category as well as I'm literally looking at my stickers that says, tidy verse and get and Python and hand us, yeah, nonetheless, I'm well aware, full geek with this.
[00:46:55] But we should be conducting some type of analysis on this and determining what are our key performance indicators. I hear this KPIs, KPIs, KPIs, what are our KPIs? Well, you don't know what your KPIs are until you expose it to whether it's an injury audit or performance audit, some type of talent identification audit,
[00:47:17] Maybe that's driven through physical outputs or anthropometrics or selection metrics or quantitative, subjective, player ratings or coach ratings, whatever that might be. But you should expose your data sets to those things so that we can better understand what our real KPIs are.
[00:47:37] And once we fully understand what our real KPIs are, then we can only refine the process. If we know I'm gonna make this up, we go through a full season and we don't even know, it's really hard to make up a new body part, but let's just say like, I don't even know,
[00:47:52] Not even Enkel Dorsiflexion or Enkel range of motion. Let's just say we grew an appendage out of our shoulder. I totally need to edit this out, but I'm gonna probably leave it in the show just because it's a random show. We started collecting that like, wow,
[00:48:08] This third arm that's growing out of our shoulder is it's giving us an advantage. We're getting more offensive boards because we have three arms up in the air and we're pulling down more rebounds. That'd be cool.
[00:48:20] We're out there and we have an extra arm pulling down rebounds, but nonetheless like, we are measuring something about that. We might not even know that that's important. Like we have our coaches eye, we have our own biases, we have our own thoughts, our own heuristics
[00:48:33] That we all prescribed to, knowingly or unknowingly, but we might not even know that until we start to assess injuries or performance outputs against maybe that metric and that's where like regression analysis really comes in. And we can start to look and run these correlations
[00:48:52] Off of metrics that we're collecting and we might find that there's an association, there's a correlation with that. And if so, we might not have even had it on a radar. Like we might have not even set up alarming mechanism. We might not have even known that it was important,
[00:49:06] But I think it's pretty well known like from the importance of high speed running. Well, I don't know if we didn't think that high speed running was important or we didn't have ways of measuring even speed. Now that's crazy.
[00:49:19] We got stopwatches, we got timing gates, we got ways of measuring speed, but like if it's not even on our radar, then we'll miss the boat, right? Like we won't even, if we're not even collecting it, we won't even have it available
[00:49:31] For a data set to run analysis aren't. So that's why I think the notion wrongly, or maybe not wrongly, but like a strong word to say, but like, we'll just collect data and we'll see what it tells us. That's kind of a flawed attempt at doing it.
[00:49:46] Now don't get me wrong. We shouldn't just collect and scrape all the available mine, all the available data possible. Like we should be very strategic and deliberate with the data that we're asking our athletes and our coaches and our programs
[00:50:01] And our departments and our practitioners to contribute. But if we're not collecting it, we might not even know that it's important. So again, nonetheless, I know that's an aside. I do want to say that if we're collecting it, we owe it to assess it.
[00:50:16] We owe it to review it. We owe it to communicate it and share it with the relevant people that can help make meaningful decisions off of it. So this is a long random show. Probably one of my longer ones,
[00:50:29] But hopefully you've tuned in and listened. And if you didn't, I don't blame you. But if you did make it this far, I congratulate you because hey, it's like a four hour almost. But I appreciate you guys for listening to this. I wanted to get it off my chest
[00:50:43] Or out of my mind listening to some of these sports science podcasts and just hearing that practitioners aren't using this data and that there's a gigantic disconnect and it just resonates with me
[00:50:55] And it resonates in a way where I'm like, no, there are people out there using data in a way to make actionable decisions. And if we're not, we owe it to our industry, at least applied sports scientists owe it to make and use information that they have
[00:51:10] To try to better their athletes. And if we're collecting to collect, we're doing the program, our organizations, our institutions, our athletes, our peers that are working their tails off, we're doing them all a disservice
[00:51:25] By using it as a recruiting tool and not truly what it can be, which is a very, very powerful way of affecting change. Hey everybody, that's going to be it for this random show
[00:51:44] Of the Decoding Excellence Show. I hope you took something away from this and to be honest, I don't know what you would have taken away from this. It is truly random. It was more of a soapbox episode
[00:51:57] Where I talk about my sort of methodology with collection, with assessments, building, testing into the training session, how we communicate it, what we physically do on game day, minus four, minus three, minus two, minus one,
[00:52:12] On game days. I didn't even talk about game day primers and post game workouts and top ups. And there's a full list that can go on and on about scientific interventions that we do. You're an analysis, you're in specific gravity
[00:52:28] And hydration testing and physiological testing from a force plates and things like that on game days. You know, creating kinase, testing, we go on and on and on, but I didn't even get into this. Today was truly just a random show
[00:52:44] Where I talked about game day plus one, minus four, through about minus one, didn't really talk about game days. But hopefully you took something away from this show and I congratulate you for staying this long. If you're listening to the end of the show,
[00:53:00] You are a true hero in the sense of that you can really tolerate a lot of pain and a lot of disconjointed thoughts from my head. So congratulations for making it this long. Hopefully I haven't turned you off the decoding excellence show,
[00:53:16] But if anything, I appreciate you. As always, there's a number of different ways that you can support the decoding excellence show. The newest way you can support is by heading over to AdamRingler.com and joining the high performance insiders.
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