#063 - Science of Sport Vs. Artistry of Coaching
In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I'm discussing the all too common debate between sport science and performance coaching. To be fair, it is a common debate I hear often between the pure academic sport scientists and strength and conditioning coaches "in the field".
In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I'm discussing the all too common debate between sport science and performance coaching. To be fair, it is a common debate I hear often between the pure academic sport scientists and strength and conditioning coaches "in the field". In this Random Episode, I dive into this debate between an evidence-led, sport science, data-driven decision model versus the applied nature of strength and conditioning or sport coaching.
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Key Takeaways
- The debate between evidence-led, data-driven sport science and the applied artistry of strength and conditioning coaching is one of the most common tensions in the field.
- The question is not which side wins, but how an evidence-led decision model fits the realities of coaching athletes in the field day to day.
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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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[00:01:02] Hey everybody, we have a great random episode of the Decoding Excellence Show. In it, I'm really just doing a monologue. I'm sharing some of my thoughts at a great conversation. I'll get into it in the actual show. But I am sharing sort of the dichotomy and the paradoxical relationship of sport science and sport coaching or sport performance.
[00:01:30] I talk about how it's not necessarily binary. It's not, are you this side or that side, right? This feels very strength conditioning, late 90s, 2000s. Are you hit or are you functional training? Are you an old school or are you new school? That is sort of where I get into this conversation.
[00:01:50] We talk about sport science and we talk about the art of coaching. If you want to hear more tune in to the rest of this random Decoding Excellence Show. Hey everybody, we have a great show for you today. I want to just jump right into it and get straight to the point. I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine that I greatly respect. We were talking, we were conversating, we were debating.
[00:02:20] Debate is not quite the right word, right? Debate sort of implies that I take a viewpoint, perhaps he takes a different viewpoint. That was in the case. We were just rifting back and forth. What we were chatting about was sort of the dichotomy between sport science and sport coaching. I love this conversation.
[00:02:43] Among this conversation, we were talking about a lot of different things, right? Contrary tricks and KPIs and measurements, assessments, e-vows, but also relationships, connections, trust, buy-in, belief systems. It was just a really fun conversation to have. I'm going to summarize some of it in this random episode of the Decoding Excellence Show. But ultimately, one of the common themes was that sport science can measure the blood,
[00:03:12] But can sport science measure the heart? What I love about this, the distinction between measuring the biomarkers of the blood, i.e. A little bit more of a scientific analytical approach, verse measuring the heart, the drive, the competitiveness, the connection, the effort aspect of sport performance. I think this is a very interesting distinction between the two, because really, it's very much a binary sort of debate, it's a binary problem.
[00:03:48] Are you this or that? Is it sport science or is it sport performance? And in my viewpoint, it's both. We have to have both, right? We have to have evidence-based approaches so that we can take a very methodical and analytical approach in planning to get to a desired outcome, i.e. Sport performance or what elite
[00:04:15] Performance looks like, right? And the process of taking at least providing evidence, which entails documentation, it takes recording, it takes planning, but more so, leaving a trail of evidence or data to suggest what you've done so that we can analyze that moving forward to determine whether or not we're in a position where we can be successful, right? And that's leaving evidence so that one could either follow that trail in a historical
[00:04:49] Sense, or to look upon, published or peer-reviewed level of evidence to support a common methodology of practice, of the strength game, if you will, or latest performance technologies, right? And ways to measure and assess muscular output, readiness testing, or wearable devices to measure, you know, athletes' accelerations, or high speed distance, or heart rates, or trims' scores, right? So the list can go on and on in that facet, but evidence, right?
[00:05:27] And that is at the chief sort of conversation of what it means to either use an evidence letter, an evidence-based approach to sport performance training. And that is, if we hold that on one hand, and we just kind of hold that idea, let it simmer in one side, and we'll come back to that. The other aspect is to look at relationship building, to look at communication styles, to look at and explore the way that we tap into motivation and drive, and belief systems,
[00:06:04] And the way that we can harness the artistry of coaching and building buy-in, and building a program, and building that trust between an athlete and a coach, a coach and another coach, a coach and a program, right? The argument, I suppose, or the conversation then becomes, well, is it one or the other? And really, in this era, it needs to be both. And now, whether or not you move among that continuum to be more evidence-based, or more
[00:06:40] Performance coach-based, if that's what we're calling it, at least within this analogy, I will, right? And we really need to use a hybrid model, a hybrid approach to allowing the evidence, to help us make better decisions, to empower the communication and the relationships, to fuel the motivation and the effort required to achieve a certain task-specific outcome or goal for an athlete.
[00:07:11] So what I mean by this is that it's not one or the other. This is not a binary sort of conversation or a debate that we should be having, right? There is times when we need to look at the objective outputs of an athlete, right? And it could be subjective if you're using like RPEs or wellness questionnaires or anything that might be being pulled from the athlete's perspective, right, from their opinion, from their subjective experience within sport.
[00:07:41] So whether it's a self-evaluation or a self-perception type of scale, right? We should be, there's times where we might look at that information and knowing the full picture of what the plan entails, we might have to go against the evidence and make decisions that might be counter to what the evidence is showing. And that is, it's okay to train when athletes are a little fatigued. It's okay to train during times when stress is high.
[00:08:12] It's okay to do things when we've achieved, you know, the within a standard deviation above maybe an athlete's high-speed running or strain or monotony, right? Let's just say. But we have to take calculated risks and make decisions among those calculated risks. And I think that's an okay thing to do. And I think sometimes the objection that I hear regarding sports science is that it's
[00:08:41] Often restrictive that you have these lab quote unquote lab coat nerds dictating workloads or dictating when and an athlete can train and their level of participation availability within a training session. And while that is a component of what sports science can sometimes inform practitioners that an athlete might be, you know, an area or have achieved a level of high-speed running or play or load or distance or whatever metric we might want to use within this analogy,
[00:09:17] That is certainly not what the true outcome or objective of what sports scientists are looking to do. Rather, paradoxically, we are actually wanting to optimize training. We want to find those windows of trainability where we can push harder, when we can run more, when we can sprint more, when we can find those opportunities to do more training, more intense under the right conditions where the athletes are able to adapt and absorb
[00:09:48] Those stressors in a physiological way to promote positive adaptation for whatever physiological sort of biomotor quality that we're trying to optimize or train, right? And sometimes I think that using an evidence led approach and employing standard common best practices within sports science, that that is viewed upon or at least perceived by industry that that might be weak, right? That's a that's a software approach because we're being restrictive.
[00:10:23] We're not necessarily preparing the athlete for the demands of life, the chaotic nature, right? And I truly think that's not the truth. I think that could be, could possibly be the furthest away from the truth. What we're trying to do is understand the conditions in which an athlete or a subject or whatever we might want to be calling an individual in this case, we want to better
[00:10:50] Understand their current state of readiness, their current state of physiological homeostasis where that might be and the deviations away from that homeostasis and better understand what the demands are of practice or their sport or their training or their position that they are in so that we can better prepare them for those demands. We can exceed those demands so that we're quite possibly preparing them for the worst possible outcome.
[00:11:22] We talk about that within sport, it's like, look, if we just prepare for the average, then we're under preparing for the worst optimal outcome, right? The worst possible outcome, i.e., when the game goes into double overtime, are we ever preparing for that? So there needs to be times when we are looking at the bio demands of the game and then working to supersede those through the training that we're doing to promote some level of functional
[00:11:50] Overreaching, but to allow them to be better prepared for those worst possible outcomes. In reality, we should be using methods of training that is promoting the idea of doing more, of working harder, of pushing the envelope, of making sure that we're getting into the red zone from a heart rate zone five perspective, let's just say, that we're actually really cooking the system a little bit, but also allowing the evidence and allowing the bodies and physiology to take a balanced approach to stressing the system and then resting the system and allowing
[00:12:34] The body to adapt and allowing the body to go through a period of time of rejuvenation and that is fundamentally, I think, not a bad approach. I think that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to work harder, but also work smarter. And I think sometimes the conversation surrounding the sort of binary approach, it very quickly makes something black and white. When in reality, everything is just shades of gray and you could look at it and say, that's a darker shade of gray. My opinion could be that it's a little bit lighter. I wanted to share this thought with this
[00:13:17] Community, with this audience, because obviously, I'm fascinated by performance technology. I love the physiology aspect and the sports science and the analytical approach to monitoring and testing and evaluating athletes and going through periodic assessments and making sure that our KPIs are trending in the right direction. But at the same time, let's not forget that just because we take a very methodical approach to training so that it can be repeatable and that it could be scalable so that we can be predictable in where we should be at different
[00:14:00] Phases of training during different phases months or of the season of the weeks of the competitive year, so that we can predict in some fashion the levels of soreness so that we can not create more volatility in an otherwise chaotic sports system that we're actually creating less volatility and more predictiveness of how bodies will be stressed, how they will rest, how they will respond, and how they will return back and maybe even positively adapt to those stressors, i.e. Training and player development, what we want. But how we can use that evidence to really better push and
[00:14:38] Tap into the motivations and tap into the efforts that are needed to prepare athletes, not just for the bio demands of the average game, but the demands of what the worst possible outcome would be. Double over time, triple over time, those demands back-to-back games, a back-to-back-to-back game, why it possibly could happen, right? Like we're talking about tournament time, we're talking about COVID, there's a lot of things that we cannot predict during this sort of otherwise chaotic era and we need to be able to push the envelope, so I think it takes both. It takes the savviness
[00:15:14] Of knowing how to relate to people in the communication skills, the program building, the trust, the buy-in, the artistry of art of coaching, lug for you, Brett. But it also takes, I think, if we're doing it right, to create that level of predictableness. It takes a methodical approach, documentation, monitoring assessments, evaluation, and what I would otherwise umbrella as sports science, right? We want to be able to look at the questions that we have to ask questions to explore possible ways that we can seek those solutions, that we can design,
[00:15:55] Quote-unquote, applied studies, if you will, right? And that just means while we're not subsetting our athletic population into multiple groups and a control group, but taking our numbers and referring back and looking objectively at the information, the data, and the documentation that we've had, and the testing numbers, and using that to inform what has actually happened, did we make the positive outputs and the outcomes that we were hoping for, did we achieve the level of success that we were hoping for, in what domain of physicality
[00:16:27] From a physiological perspective, did we over-achieve, under-achieve, or just, you know, nearly hit the mark? That is taking a sports science approach to our training, to our physical development, to our player development, and really making sure that it's not restrictive, always, but rather allows the coach, and allows the practitioner to do what they love to do, and to push the envelope, and push the intensity and the effort needed to be able to perform at their very best.
[00:17:03] Hey everybody, that's going to be it for this random show 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 where I talk about my sort of methodology with collection, with assessments, with building, testing, and do the training session. 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
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