#064 - Mini-Episode: Updates from Colorful Colorado
In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I'm discussing some of the new things we're doing around University of Colorado Boulder.
In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I'm discussing some of the new things we're doing around University of Colorado Boulder. It's been some time since I've been behind the microphone and I'm just dusting off the thing. We talk about some of the new technologies we're utilizing within our athletic department, some of the new pre-participation athlete benchmarking we're conducting, and a general run-down of our summer staff. It was a fun show where I break out the microphone and headphones and get rapping about what's on my mind. If your a fan of sports performance technologies, it's usage within high performance sport organizations, I think you'll get A LOT out of this show.
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Key Takeaways
- Pre-participation athlete benchmarking gives the performance staff a baseline to work from before training ramps up, rather than guessing where athletes stand.
- New sports performance technologies are only useful insofar as they fit inside a department's existing workflow and answer questions coaches are actually asking.
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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. 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 exclusive content that you will not be able to get just by navigating to the site alone. If you subscribe today, you will have access to our private podcast online video lecture series brand new digital
[00:00:44] Content that we are creating to help support you as a strength conditioning coach. A new practitioner in the high performance field. You do not want to miss this material. It's going to help you in every facet of your career. Head over to admringler.com and join the insiders today. Hey everybody. Welcome to the decoding excellence show. In this episode it is me. It is the microphone. It is the new season of the decoding excellence show. And as always I'm starting off the
[00:01:15] First episode with a monologue. I catch up a review of everything that we've done since the very last episode of last season. Don't want to miss it. We talk about some of the new technologies. What we're doing in our sports science department. Some of the new staff that's joined us in a small little teaser towards the end. If you want to know what Colorado is up to, this is the episode for you. Welcome back to the decoding excellence show. I am excited to bring this
[00:01:43] New season to us. It's been a while since I've been behind the microphone and talking about our sports science department and our sports performance world and what we're doing here at University of Colorado Boulder. So if you are a first-time listener, welcome to the decoding excellence show. And if you're a repeat listener, then welcome back. Let's get right to it. I think a lot of the audience here, as you guys have wrote in in the past, have talked about adm. Let's discuss a
[00:02:13] Little bit about the testing that you're doing. Talk about some of the technologies that you're utilizing or what are you doing with the data? What protocols are you rolling out? So I think we'll start there. It's been a while since I've done a decoding excellence show. And I thought we would just talk about what's new within our department, within our world. I don't have any notes in front of me. This is just me going off the top of my mind. First thing I think I will start about is the athlete player profiling
[00:02:40] That we're doing. So one of the new things that we've wrote out during this last year and hey, I recognize I haven't been on the microphone for probably easily over a year. So this might be almost 12 months ago when we started to do some of this, but we started a standardized process of athlete pre-participation benchmarking. So what this looks like is we will utilize our force platforms, right? We are fortunate enough to have a number of them across our departments and facilities. And we have standardized a routine that allows us to have our athletes do an
[00:03:14] Isometric mid thigh pull, counter movement jump, a hop jump, utilize the Nordboard and force frame to get a pretty all encompassing picture of, you know, force production, right? Not only RFD, but also peak forces, asymmetries, left rights, you know, lateral, sort of limb asymmetries. We in addition to that for overhead population will do the athletic shoulder test or the ash test on both the dominant and non-dominant arms. So now we get this big picture prior to even starting any participation. We're not starting practices. We're not training yet. We do this big profile.
[00:03:51] And we get a pretty good idea of any of the rate limiting factors that might go into performance. The second benefit of it is that we have pre-surgical benchmarks from force production and rate of power development, rate of force development for the lower extremities and the upper extremities, right? We have an idea of, you know, pre-hamstring strain, what their max force capabilities are in that post-year chain from the Nordic exercise have the force frame for a groin squeeze and hip AB duction. So, you know, pending if we have a groin strain or a groin injury or a hip injury,
[00:04:27] We have pre-surgical benchmarks for that as well. Obviously with the overhead population, like volleyball and throwing dominant sports, we have things that will look at that shoulder labrum and force production in both that sort of IYMT position. We have capabilities of, you know, peak landing forces with the counter movement jump. We have ankle stiffness and ankle qualities with the hop test or the 10-5 hop test. So, there's just a lot that we can get from otherwise a few diagnostics, a few evaluations with the various technologies that we have through
[00:05:03] VOD performance, that we have, you know, a wealth of information that we can act upon if we need to. Even if we don't, right, if athletes are completely healthy, that becomes a, you know, a sort of pre-participation benchmark to say, how much stronger can we get within that Nordic hamstring exercise? How much stronger can we get in that force production of a groin squeeze, a hip AB reduction, an IYT on the shoulder test? How much peak power or relative peak power can we get on a counter movement jump? What is our, you know, initial RSI on a 10-5 hop test? What sort of
[00:05:41] Peak vertical forces can we get or net forces can we get on a isometric mid-thigh pull? Being able to calculate a dynamic strength index or a DSI, looking between, you know, that sort of slower strength movement of that isometric mid-thigh pull compared to more of a ballistic CMJ. And now we have, you know, obviously an idea of what type of training does that student athlete need to need to begin? Is it more bias towards, you know, strength or is it more bias towards, you know, velocity in that sort of force velocity curve? That's one thing that
[00:06:15] We've done, haven't really talked a lot about that well, shoot, man, I really haven't talked about much behind this microphone and on this podcast. It's been a while. It's been crazy. So yeah, yeah, that's fun. And what else is new? What else is new? Let's talk. A couple other key technologies. I mean, I don't know if I've talked much about ConnectSign sports in the last podcast that we've been on together here. Our Mints and Women's Basketball team has partnered with ConnectSign and they are indoor wearable accelerometry based IMU device that we utilize for workload monitoring
[00:06:48] Across both court sports. That's been, we've 12 months now. So a full year cycle working with ConnectSign and pulling workloads and tying that information into our athlete management system and utilizing that sort of centralization of our workload data with wellness data with our PE data and with other various technologies all within a centralized platform. That's cool. We've long continued to use polar for our internal load monitoring, polar team pro for a Mints basketball team. However, our women's team did partner with first-speed sports. So we are pulling in internal load monitoring
[00:07:26] Versus our external workload monitoring. And that's been a fun little adventure of looking at the relationships between outputs on the court and what from a musculoskeletal standpoint is actually occurring with that external load monitoring and how those loads and accelerations and velocities all sort of factor into our drain to what actually how the body responds to that from an internal standpoint with that cardiovascular heart system. What else? What else? I'm just going off the top of my mind of different technologies. Still continuing to use velocity-based training
[00:07:59] Technologies, trained with push as our VBT component within our weight rooms and our strength conditioning programs, continue to experiment with other S and C sort of program deployments. So things like bridge athletics, bridge tracker, continuing with that. But it's been fun. It's been it's been a good year to be honest. Now it's time for a coffee drink real quick.
[00:08:26] Oh yeah, yeah, that's good. What else? VOD performance made the dynamo device. That's commercially available for any sports performance department to go out and acquire. We have one. It's pretty awesome. We're using it primarily right now for sort of hand grip. We're looking at trying to do some things with hamstring quad testing. Obviously we have the Nordboard. So that's quite easy setup from a posterior chain strength testing standpoint, eccentricly. But looking at relationships between knee extension, knee flexion with that dynamo device, tethering it to
[00:09:05] Non-movable sort of object and doing a maximum isometric knee extension on it and being able to tease out maybe differences within that knee extension capabilities and force production there. So I think that would be kind of cool. Maybe looking at rate limiting factors or asymmetries across limbs and see if we need to do any more targeting programming with some of that quadriceps sort of strengthening. I think that might have some implications when we start looking at squat mechanics or IMTPs or just risk assessments if you will. We've acquired a couple new crados.
[00:09:39] The kabuki strength crados is a fly wheel device much like the K-Box manufacturer in the United States by obviously, was it Chris Duffin? Why am I spacing our names? Duffin. It's dead air. This isn't good. Chris Duffin. I don't think that's what it is. Chris Duffin. Yes, dude. Of course I got it. Yeah. The CEO of kabuki strength. However, we've got a couple of those which is awesome and we've been deploying those out within our strength conditioning program for a while now and that's been a really cool way of increasing that eccentric force impulse or eccentric impulse
[00:10:18] With our force plates on our CMJ and our hop test. Yeah, it's a pretty versatile. We have the crossbar bolted into our back wall. So now we can do some horizontal fly wheel rows and some lunge patterns and some different things there. Obviously, like any classical meathead we can do eccentric triceps or fly wheel triceps and biceps. I absolutely obliterated my biceps the other day with the fly wheel. I don't know what I did, but why I know what I did. I was super-setting some safety bar squats, compliments of the mad scientist Chris Duffin and his
[00:11:00] Safety bar squat available through kabuki. Super-setting those with just some bicep curls, a barbell bicep curls, and then I wanted to really overload it. So then I did some fly wheel bicep curls. It was something simple too. I think I was like doing, well, I was doing like a 531 wendler sort of I think we're on week two. So it was essentially sets of threes of safety bar squat and then it was just super-setting it with 10 bicep curls and I think I was doing five eccentric fly wheel curls. And two days later I should have known better, barely could straighten out my
[00:11:35] Elbows. Still sore. Absolutely still sore. So credit to that fly wheel. E-centric overload is absolutely crushed, crushed those biceps and the doms are unreal. What else is new around here in beautiful border Colorado? Well, we've hired a new sport scientist to actually help us out and she's been absolutely incredible. So that's what Mendoza has joined University of Colorado. Boulder, so you buff, she was one of our sport scientists, our summer intensive sport scientists, joined us for our volunteers, sport science internship that we offer throughout the summertime.
[00:12:16] It's been a while since number one. Let's go back to that. Let's revisit that. It's been a while since we've done that, right? COVID, 2019, 2020 to 2021. So in 2022, this last summer we actually brought it back, did national search of budding junior sport scientists that wanted to come out to Boulder for a three-month intensive brought out to incredible sport scientists. I really haven't talked about this. I haven't really posted much online too. All of this sort of coincided when I was doing a social media detox via count new ports digital minimalism, which is a book I read this summer,
[00:12:53] Which was kind of cool. Good book, but nonetheless I decided I needed to take a step back from online, internet, social media, browsing, doom scrolling if you will. So we ran this internship and at the same time I took a step back from socials, because I think we all probably need to, because let's just be honest, they're not the most healthiest thing to do. So did that and had two incredible sport scientists come out. Brian Neff, he's now at unfortunately, pack 12, big 10, whatever we're talking about there. He's now a graduate student at University
[00:13:30] Of Southern California, USC, and by he came out and that was awesome. What an incredibly smart and talented sport scientist there. And then Tessa also came out, joined us. We all started an amazing, I'm pausing for a second. We had an amazing strengthening crew this summer. JJ came out, he was a strengthening coach that worked with Steve Engelhart and myself. We had Sam who came from overseas through a partnership with IUSCA. IUSCA, is that it? Let me just double check right here at the computer. IUSCA. Yeah, yeah, International University is the Strength
[00:14:14] Conditioning Association. Came out over here. We are a IUSCA partner organization institution. So we do sort of a foreign exchange type of program with strength conditioning professionals from other countries and they come up to Boulder. We provide them, obviously some assisted living help and they come out here and we do a heck of a job trying to upskill them. And we had Sam come out. He was an amazing young strengthening coach. We'll do amazing things in the future. We also had Holly. Holly was awesome. Holly was another strengthening coach from the Colorado area that
[00:14:54] Assisted with our program and just a really solid crew between Tessa, Brian, Holly, JJ, Sam, Steve Engelhart, right? Myself. We had Don White, who is now IUSCA. Let's see the head strength conditioning coach at UC Irvine, Mins Basketball. So just a solid crew made for a really fun summer. This last June. So Mins Basketball, Rockin' and Rollin' and June, Women's Basketball, volleyball in July, soccer in July. I mean, it's just crazy times. It's always crazy times, it's athletics. That's how it works. Yeah, so I have no idea what we were talking about. We were talking about
[00:15:32] Brian and Tessa. So we hired Tessa. She's amazing. She's a we stole her away from Iowa State Football. I had a good friend that's coaching there and had a heck of a recommendation from him, regarding Brian's sort of experience and expertise of what she brings through the table, from Catapult, from data processing, from coding and programming. So we were fortunate enough to pick her brains across this summertime. And she just fit like the glove within our sports science department and what we're trying to build out here. And so we brought her back
[00:16:05] For another year. So I'm excited about her contribution to our sports science program and what she's going to bring across our sport programs. And yeah, let's keep thinking, what else is new? What else is new? So many things. I mean, maybe not if I'm stumbling this much about trying to think of other other developments. We talked about the Kratos, talked about the Dynamo, talked about our pre-participation, benchmarking, player testing. We have talked about, yeah, maybe that's it. Maybe that's the show. Right there. That's that's the 20-minute show at this rate.
[00:16:41] Talked about connects on sports. Women's soccer team continuing to utilize catapult sports vector system. So I think now that brings us if I'm just trying to do the numbers. Maybe probably over 100 some vector to easily, easily over 100 vector units across our athletic department. Looking at 30 some connects on units. We're looking at probably over 60 different polar team pro systems across our men's basketball team who utilizes it purely just for the internal load monitoring, but our women's lacrosse programs that does both GPS, accelerometry, and then internal
[00:17:19] Load monitoring with the heart rate. Yeah, it's a lot of technologies, right? And it's a lot of managing those data sources and those streams and then trying to compile it into a into an AMS system. We had the gang from Kipman Labs come out here in this last summer, right? So if you've been living under a rock and really haven't heard much about the developments with what Kipman Labs has done, right? They have acquired a EMR company called Persagia Sports over the last year or so in Persagia. They are a medical record system that worked with the PAC-12 conference as the
[00:17:55] Medical sort of EMR provider. Because of the acquisition, now Kipman Labs have rolled in their EMR. So those guys came out incredible crew that joined us for a couple days out here in Boulder, met with various departments. Once again, we value that partnership with Kipman and came out here and talked with their sports performance professionals. They talked with our trying to think of performance nutrition department, our psychological health and performance department, academics, our executive teams, our sport coaches, our athletic trainers, our physicians, our PT's. So
[00:18:33] It was a really multidisciplinary team of CU representatives that had an opportunity to interface with their staff and learn a little bit about how we can leverage the system a little bit better talked about some of the data analysis that we were performing regularly but also some of the things that we want to investigate moving forward when it comes to the underpinnings of what drive performance and winning. It's been a really fun summer. It's been a productive summer. It's been a busy summer, right? Women's basketball team went over to Spain, competed for their foreign
[00:19:08] Trip over there. So we've had teams travel, we've had teams stay in back and border, we're continuing to develop systems and protocols that will help protect the longevity, the health, the well-being of our student athletes. We've grown different sort of systems to help enhance their performance and their development while they're here and they're training, keep them safe, keep them strong, keep them capable, keep them available. And now here we are, we're in a couple weeks into fall and we're playing football games, we're playing volleyball matches, soccer's competing. We got our distance
[00:19:42] Runners are out there like we're you know golf programs are competing. It's busy time. You're in Boulder and if you're a sport professional and you're you know a strengthening coach or you work within this sort of high-performance space you know that it's you give us too much available time and we don't know what to do with it. So it's it's good to be busy, it's good to be active, it's good to see our student athletes competing and having fun and doing what brought them out here to Boulder, Colorado in the first place. And we're excited to continue to grow. We're excited to
[00:20:11] Continue to keep pushing the envelope and do some new things. There's there's a couple things that my colleagues and I are working on will hopefully bring some some cool value to this space, the performance space and this industry. And I am hopeful that we can continue to develop that and be able to you know present or at least announce something in the future. But that's you know like anybody that's worked behind the scenes it takes a lot of things to go right before you're in a good place to announce anything. So that's my small little teaser about what's coming down the
[00:20:43] Pipeline. But hopefully we can announce that here in the next couple a couple months here. But yeah, I think that's going to be it for this show. Why not, right? This is a this is the first one. This is what my wife would call the bad pancake, right? If you've ever cooked breakfast for your kids or nieces or nephews or whomever it might be, right. The first pancake is always the bad one, right? And then then you sort of settle into your routine, the skill skill it's warmed up or the use of pancake. I mean, I guess if you're making it you're you're using a stovetop, but
[00:21:17] You don't really make pancakes. We make waffles in this house more often than pancakes. But nonetheless the analogy still stands, right? It's a bad pancake. You got to get it out of the way, right? And you'll get back back on the horse in the saddle used to podcasting and use longer monologues of you and no notes and just riffing off the top of your head about what you're doing and some of the areas of growth of you're trying to make within a sports science department sports performance department. And hey, you know, like that's the nature of this beast. You just talk.
[00:21:56] Hey, everybody, I hope to you enjoyed this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show where we got into the weeds about what we're doing within our sports science department. Some of the pre participation technologies that we're utilizing some of the new updates around our facility and what we're rolling out across our strength conditioning physical preparation departments here at University of Colorado, Boulder. 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
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