#080 - Building Trust, Rethinking Recovery, and the Future of Tech in S&C
In this Decoding Excellence ‘Cardio Talk,’ I explore building trust with sport coaches, rethinking athlete recovery beyond ice baths, and the future of strength & conditioning tech. Raw, practical insights for coaches and performance pros.
In this Cardio Talk episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I take you along for a 45-minute ruck walk where I dive into three big themes that have been on my mind lately: building trust with sport coaches, rethinking recovery in college athletics, and the future of technology in strength and conditioning.
No studio, no edits,just raw, unfiltered thoughts on the direction of our field and how we can better serve our athletes.
1️⃣ Building Trust with Sport Coaches , How we can better align with head coaches by speaking their language, framing data around outcomes, and respecting practice priorities.
2️⃣ Rethinking Recovery in College Athletics , Why recovery is more than ice baths and Normatecs, and how sleep, stress, and academics all play a critical role in athlete performance.
3️⃣ The Future of Tech in S&C , From VBT to wearables, I break down where technology is headed, what’s actually useful, and how to separate game-changers from distractions.
This 45-minute ruck walk conversation is raw, unedited, and unscripted,just me, sharing what’s on my mind in the world of performance and coaching.
During the Cardio Talk
I comprehensively break down the following topics:
Building Trust with Sport Coaches
Preseason is a delicate balance,athletes are returning from summer break, practices are ramping up, and the temptation is to overload conditioning to “get them in shape.” But true preseason training goes beyond just running athletes into the ground. For women’s basketball, this phase should prioritize building durability in the joints, re-establishing movement quality, and gradually layering in power development. That means focusing on controlled strength work, mobility patterns, and foundational plyometrics that strengthen tissues before the demands of a long season hit.
At the same time, preseason is about managing practice loads. Athletes don’t need maximal weight room stress when they’re already ramping up high-intensity practices. Instead, programming should emphasize “minimum effective dose” strategies,loading athletes just enough to spark adaptation while keeping them fresh for on-court work. This way, the weight room complements practice rather than competing with it.
The Hidden Role of Microdosing Strength Work During the Season
One of the most important, yet often overlooked, roles of a strength and conditioning coach is building trust with sport coaches. At the end of the day, your expertise in sets, reps, and periodization only matters if your sport coach sees the value and buys in. Too often, strength coaches speak in a language filled with force plates, jump profiles, and heart-rate variability. While the data is powerful, the key is in translation,framing your findings in terms of performance outcomes that directly impact the head coach’s goals. If you can explain how training adjustments improve game-day readiness, reduce practice drop-off, or extend an athlete’s availability through the season, you move from “weight room person” to trusted performance partner.
Respecting practice priorities is just as critical. Sport coaches live in the world of X’s and O’s, film breakdowns, and practice execution. If you’re constantly fighting for weight room time without acknowledging the demands of practice, you risk being seen as working against,not with,the team. The real alignment happens when you approach the relationship with humility and collaboration, showing that the weight room exists to serve practice and performance, not compete with it. Trust isn’t built overnight, but through consistent communication, shared language, and framing your role around the team’s goals, you set the foundation for a true performance partnership.
Rethinking Recovery in College Athletics
Recovery in college athletics is often oversimplified and commercialized into ice baths, compression boots, and massage guns. While these tools have a place, true recovery goes much deeper. For student-athletes, the real recovery bottlenecks are rarely physiological,they’re lifestyle-driven. Sleep debt, poor nutrition, academic stress, and social pressures often outweigh any benefit gained from sitting in a tub of ice water. As strength coaches, it’s our job to educate athletes on prioritizing the basics: consistent sleep routines, fueling properly, managing stress, and carving out space for genuine downtime.
Recovery isn’t just about resetting the body,it’s about restoring the whole person. When athletes feel overwhelmed with classes, relationships, and performance demands, their nervous system is constantly in fight-or-flight mode. That chronic stress erodes their ability to adapt to training, no matter how well designed your program is. Helping athletes establish healthy habits, build structure around their schedules, and find balance between sport and life is the kind of recovery that moves the needle. In other words, the best recovery isn’t always the newest gadget,it’s often the simplest discipline.
The Future of Tech in Strength & Conditioning
As an elder millennial in the field, I’ve seen the evolution of performance technology firsthand,from simple jump mats to advanced GPS tracking and velocity-based training systems. The rapid pace of innovation is exciting, but it also creates noise. Every year, new tools hit the market promising to “revolutionize” training, yet many of them end up being distractions that collect dust on the shelf. The real question coaches need to ask isn’t, “What’s the newest tech?” but rather, “Does this tool provide actionable insights that improve decision-making?” If it doesn’t change how you train, recover, or prepare athletes, it’s just data for data’s sake.
The future of technology in S&C will be defined less by flashy gadgets and more by integration and simplicity. Coaches don’t need 20 different dashboards,they need tools that fit seamlessly into their workflow and save time rather than create it. Velocity-based training, wearables, and wellness monitoring all have real potential, but only if they help answer practical questions: How ready is this athlete to train today? Are we overloading or underloading? How can we adjust in real-time to maximize performance while minimizing risk? The best tech empowers coaches and athletes alike, but it should always serve the program, not the other way around.
Closing Thoughts
This episode is all about stepping back and challenging the way we think as strength and conditioning professionals. Building trust, redefining recovery, and filtering technology are three very different topics, but they all tie into the same mission,helping athletes perform at their best, consistently and sustainably.
If you want to hear the full, unfiltered conversation, check out this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show,part of my Cardio Talk series where I take you behind the scenes of my thoughts during long ruck walks here in Boulder, Colorado.
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Key Takeaways
- Trust with sport coaches is built by speaking their language: frame findings around game-day readiness, practice drop-off, and season-long availability, not force plates and HRV jargon.
- The weight room exists to serve practice, not compete with it; in preseason, program a minimum effective dose so lifting complements on-court work instead of fighting it.
- Recovery is bigger than ice baths and Normatecs; sleep, stress, and academics all play a critical role in athlete performance.
- On technology, from VBT to wearables, separate game-changers from distractions by asking whether a tool actually improves 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 and conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Decoding Excellence show. Hey everybody, it is Adam Ringler and welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show. In this show, we are once again engaging with the Cardio Talk. I'm up here on the trail during the steepest part of the incline right now, and I am recording our walk-in talk episode for the Decoding Excellence Show. So without further ado, let's get into it. Hey everybody, welcome
[00:00:51] Back to the Decoding Excellence Show. As always, I'm your host, Adam Ringler, and we are doing a Ruck Walk. Right now, under the moon, somewhat dark out here, out here in Boulder, Colorado, and I'm recording this Cardio session, this walk-in talk. Today, from my phone, again, it's raw. It's unedited. There may be dogs barking in the background. Bikes wasn't by cars going, but we have a longer Ruck today. So I thought I would jump on the podcast and share a little of
[00:01:25] What we're doing, and some of the things that are top of mind are in this Tuesday Ruck Walk here, out here in Boulder. So without further ado, I think we just jump into the episode. Now, if you're wondering, Adam, you sound labored right now and hear the breathing behind your microphone. I'm on the steepest part of this incline right now. I got 45 pounds on my back in my 5-11 pack, and your voice tired. So now, my BPMs are not the greatest, although my watch is not
[00:02:01] Super tight, so maybe I just type a strap a little bit. Make sure we get some decent heart rate data. But I have several topics I kind of want to jump into today, and there's somewhat wide ranging for not overly specific to one topic. I want to talk a little bit about building trust, right, or buy-in with sport coaches, because I think that's incredibly important when I lean a little bit on breath or thalamus, book and resources, building buy-in. However, I do want to
[00:02:38] Transition from there, talk a little bit about rethinking recovery. I want to get into leadership development for student athletes, and then maybe the future of technology and strength conditioning. So those are the big things I want to kind of bite off today in this decoding excellence show podcast. So that's it. Let's jump into it. Building trust, right, right from the get-go, right from the start of this show. How do we build trust with sport coaches? Well, that's a complicated
[00:03:12] Answer or question that is certainly not going to be a sound bite answer. What I would say is that how strength coaches can better align with coaches, regardless of sport. Now, the lens or perspective that I speak in and I work in and operate within is certainly women's basketball, right? I'm not naive to that. However, if you're a volleyball, strength conditioning coach, if you're a soccer strength conditioning coach, a large part of building, let's just say
[00:03:50] Alignment first is through language, right? Now, not speaking technically English or Portuguese or Spanish, I'm talking the language of sport. So do you know your coach's offensive and defensive schemes? Do you know what's important to the coaching staffs, right? The principals, their ideologies, their standards, what they say, what their core slogans are, their core standards are. Do you continue to pair it those standards? Because I think when
[00:04:33] You do, you start to signal and you start to sort of demonstrate that we have a shared language between us, right? The things that are important to you are important to me, right? And anytime as a strength conditioning coach, you can translate what you're doing in the weight room and how it applies to the basketball court, or the soccer pitch, or the baseball diamond, I think only strengthens that alignment, strengthens that relationship, right? When you
[00:05:04] Connect the dots, not only for the players, but for the coaches, how particular conditioning or agility drill will transfer to a defensive staff, or how this rotational metabolic exercise translates to increase bat velocity, or how this power clean, let's just say transfers to a middle blockers block jump, right? All of those things are so critically important, right? And I think that's where we sometimes lose coaches is that they feel that there's a disconnect between what
[00:05:42] Is being done in the weight room and how it actually applies, or transfers, or what the implications are for the competitive surface. Now, moving past that, right? I think it is, it is the non-negotiable, so it's the intangible, so it's the language, right? So if toughness is really important to your sport coach, then where are you developing toughness in the weight room, right? And I'm not saying it has to be physical toughness, right? But mental toughness, discipline toughness,
[00:06:15] Standards, accountability toughness, right? All of those things, if you said you're going to stand on the line, you're standing ten toes on the line, if you said that, you're going to be no matter what, no excuses five minutes early for every session, or you five minutes early for every session, right? These are the types of things I think that can help build alignment between strength conditioning and sport coaches, right? So having that shared language, having
[00:06:42] That shared ideology, and then continuously reinforcing those standards and those themes, those concepts, help build a bridge between one department to what the sport coach is looking for. If we want to put our sports scientists data geek hat on, which listen, I've comfortably lived that life before, right? So I feel well versed to talk about this thing is another avenue of building that buy it is simply through framing any data source that you collect around
[00:07:21] Performance outcomes. Okay, Adam, what do you mean by that? Well, I mean that the vaude performance Nordboard eccentric Nordic lean Russian lean, right? The Nordic curl, if you will, right? That looks very abstract to a basketball coach, right? Get him on. Well, okay, why is my six foot nine post player on this foam padded thing with their ankles locked in and they're on their knees? That's, I never see that on a basketball court, they're never going to be in that position coach when
[00:08:00] They're playing defense or having to body other big sound. Yeah, you know what? You're absolutely right. However, what this does, so allows me to measure their posterior chain and we know through normative data that, you know, a weaker posterior chain may lead to, you know, a knee injury because that hamstring can effectively fire to reduce the anterior posterior to anterior translation or or movement of that femur and mainly to an ACO. And now that post player is
[00:08:34] Actually sitting on the sideline with me. Oh, well, I didn't know that. Well, yeah, I didn't expect you to know that. Just like I might not expect you to expect from me that I know the most intricacies of clay design, right? I know our, I know our systems and I can go super deep into it because I've been a part of this coaching staffer for years now, right? I'm kind of feel part of fundamentally understanding what we're trying to implement on each play. I am by no nature
[00:09:08] A basketball coach or I understand basketball. That's part of my job, right? But I think it's also part of our jobs as string conditioning coaches to frame what we collect and what we do in the context of basketball because so much of what we collect from a data standpoint doesn't look like basketball. Nice metric mid-Thyple where an athlete's holding onto a bar or an R case when we use an isometric belt squat. I don't see that on a basketball court. Or does it important to basketball? You betcha, right? Being able to generate max all
[00:09:48] Amount of force intention through their legs bilaterally, utilizing dual force plates to better understand unilateral force development from left to right right to left. Identifying which limb is weaker so that we can have targeted approaches on the weight room to work on that weight limiting factor. Why? Because weaker limb over time, over across the seven-month season, it may lead to compensation or might lead to compensatory patterning that may lead to potential injury. Is that important? So when we frame things through the lens of injury prevention
[00:10:28] Or performance outcomes, hey, so that when the balls pop it off of the backboard, we're off of the rim and it's going to the left and they now need to push off the right leg to explode up. But the right legs, actually, they're rate of power developments weaker than the left leg so they won't ever be able to jump up and grab that board first when it pops off the hoop and goes through the right, right? Like that means something. That's real. That's a performance outcome. That's grabbing an extra board and getting a put back on an offensive board. So
[00:11:03] When we can frame data less like a scientist and more like a sport coach, I think the language and the alignment is going to be way stronger, right? So my thought process is always to try to put the data in the language or wrap the data or package the data in the language of a sport coach. Now, this analogy might not play out, but I'm going to attempt it because I'm midway through my walk right now. I'm already a little fatigued. I think of, listen, I don't own a dog, right? I grew up with dogs and I'm not equating
[00:11:49] Coaches to dogs. So let's go ahead and just hit that in the bud right away. But I'm just thinking like, you know, I had a golden retriever when I was growing up that would not take pills. So what did my father do? Well, put the pill and some peanut butter and that golden retriever loved eating that pill at that point, right? Because it was wrapped up in peanut butter. So nobody likes numbers really. I mean, unless you're a quant and you're the scientists, more scientists and you're data driven and you love that aspect. But let's be honest, that's not
[00:12:27] Most of our sport coaches. Our sport coaches got into coaching because they love the game, they love basketball, they love baseball, they love softball, they love volleyball, whatever it is. They didn't fall in love with the numbers, they fell in love with the game. So again, the medicine is important. You have to take this antibiotic or otherwise, the infection is going to continue to spread through the dog's joint or through this last ration that the dog has. You got to take the antibiotics. Well, I'm not going to take it by
[00:12:58] Itself. But if we wrap it or package it or smother it with peanut butter or in this instance, the sporting performance outcome, context, then that pill is much more easily digestible and easier to take. All right, so I think we get the picture on that. So let's move on from this topic. I know there's a couple other things I want to kind of get off the top of my head today as we're you know halfway through this Ruck Walk. Listen, last week I recorded almost a 75 minute Ruck Walk. I did it from the very start to the very end of my long cardio day, which is today. Now
[00:13:46] Quite frankly, I didn't I set out on this walk listening to a podcast. It's actually a YouTube video recap, but I was listening to this YouTube and I said, you know, I should probably record a show here. Make the use of the time that I have rather than consuming content. I should create some content. It gets my ideas out of my head. And a lot of people I think from the first from that episode because there was a section in it that I talked about utilizing dead time, right? They're like, Adam, how do you find time around being
[00:14:19] A full-time strengthening coach to make YouTube videos, to make podcasts, to write articles, to do a newsletter, to do actually two newsletters, right? To break down scientific research and send that out on Instagram, right? And I talked a lot about utilizing dead periods, right? My cardio. This is one. Listen, I was going to do this 75 minute walk one way or another. I could consume Netflix, watch a show while I do it. No, granted. I'm outside during this part of my season, rather than being in facility, but there's there's going to be a point where I'll be in facility,
[00:14:57] Doing all this fasted cardio state because I have to be in early. And during those moments, I'll probably be, you know, laptop or iPad or Microsoft Surface or something watching shows, right? Or or I could be doing something or conducive to creating content. And being what I would call. And it's not just for the social media sake, just saying, for what I'm trying to publish and get out to the masses, how I would like to contribute to the field of strength conditioning through articles, audio and video. I could do something
[00:15:39] More conducive, something more productive. And that's kind of how I utilize these rock walks. I also, you know, as I said last week, I'll take the city bus end to work because it's 10 minutes down the road. I've paid for parking. I can discontinue my parking pass, which is sort of an astronomical fee for our parking facilities. I won't even get into that. And I can save some money and reinvest that back into my children family. However, because of that, I'm on the bus for 15 minutes day, two ways, 30 minutes right there, I could be creating content that way, right? There's
[00:16:13] So many opportunities. If you're looking for dead time, where we're otherwise fiddling or doom scrolling on our phones, that if you can find that wasted time and turn it into productive time, you can actually, you can actually do a lot of great quality work if you're smart, strategic about it. So let's move on. Okay. I want to kind of move into this idea of rethinking recovery. And I know I said that at that intro or the start of the show of several topics I wanted to talk about, but I want to talk about rethinking recovery, right? Because
[00:16:54] It is so prevalent on social media, right? Like, hey, what are we going to do to recover, to recover, recover? And listen, I'm guilty of the same thought process as well. I say it every single time that we go into recruiting pitches, when we talk to our current athletes, we talk to prospective athletes about this piece of recovery. And I say it in this way that we train brutally hard here at Colorado, but we recover harder, right?
[00:17:28] So what do I mean by recover harder? Well, in that extreme, what I mean is that we don't pull back on our ability to produce work, right? We're going to work. And we have classically have done that at Colorado and universities that I work with. From a strictly auditioning perspective, we train hard, right? And
[00:17:53] We just also have to be strategic though, right? There's times to push, there's times to pull back. But if there is phases where we push, we push. We've got to get adaptation, right? I think this is the thing I share a lot with young coaches getting into this field, particularly surrounding women's basketball is that the game of women's basketball is underdeveloped. Uh-oh, here we go. Strength coach being old, strength coach. No, I'm just saying that I don't think we push and develop our athletes hard enough. And so,
[00:18:32] Like nature, we have underdeveloped boys, basketball athletes who are more injury prone, and we see this play out year after year with injury statistics through normative NCAA surveillance data year after year after year. So it's upon us, like we talk about what we do, innovative research and to exploring, you know, menstrual cycle and hormonal fluctuations as it relates to women's athletes, like, you know, how this contributes to injury, right? One of the leading dialogues is, do you want to start somewhere? Well, we look at strength conditioning,
[00:19:06] What we research efficacious strength conditioning for women's athletes, right? Because I would suggest that if we start there, we might better understand what good practices in strength conditioning looks like for the female athletes that we serve, right? So long diatribe aside, I'll move on from that. And I'll just say that when we look at recovery and we look at the big piece of this sort of work to recovery ratio, obviously we need to have the adaptation, we need to have the work side, we need to have the stimulus side. Otherwise,
[00:19:48] What are we recovering from, right? We're just, we're being in a potential state of readiness, right? I talk about this all the time. So I'm sorry if I bore you guys with this conversation, right? This ratio or equilibrium between preparedness on one side and readiness on the other and how we're trying to arrive at our competitive destination, equally prepared for it. And equally ready for it, right? If anything, maybe we were slightly more ready than prepared, but there's times and instances where you may be more prepared than ready, right?
[00:20:29] Based on the level of competitive nature of it, right? So what I say by that is that, you know, there is times where you may be competing against less talented teams, where you may diode up as a strength coach and be more prepared. I use it as a moment to build some strength, tissue tolerance, the power development or force development. You're really training part and that equilibrium or that teeter totter between preparedness and readiness. IE, you're readiness from a central nervous system to go out and perform and play
[00:21:07] And to feel fresh and to feel ready cognitively physically, spiritually, emotionally, all those things, right? You might tip the skill a little bit harder in the preparedness, because you just know that you're going to go out and it's you're more talented team, right? Even though your legs are heavy, even though you might have lost a little pop on your legs, even though you might be a half a step slower, you still go out and win by 25, right? That's what I'm talking about with tipping the scale one round. Now, all right, you're going into NCAA,
[00:21:44] You're a playing game, you're an underdog, right? The work has been done, right? You've trained all season long or let's say it's your your first game, right? You're going in through October, November, you're playing in a showcase, Hall of Fame, sort of game, when you're going up against the defending national champions. Maybe in that instance, you pull back a week or so. You say, this is a moment for us. I want to make sure that we're overly ready. Our central nervous system feels great, we're fresh. We have all of our performance potential at 100 percent.
[00:22:25] Potential performance potential at 100 percent. So maybe we back off of the training a little bit to allow us to be in an enhanced state of readiness, at least if this was like a video game, our health bar is at 100 percent. We don't want to go into the final boss battle with the health bar that's 75 percent. We know we're going to need all of those health points when we're competing against an opponent of that style on where you might want to have increased states of readiness and maybe a less optical state of preparedness for it, right? But ideally, in most situations,
[00:23:06] Want that that equilibrium to be pretty balanced, equally prepared. You've done your work, you're strong, you've got strength work, you've built strict tolerance, tissue tolerance, rate of forced development, rate of power development, tissue tolerance and forced production and you are equally ready, ready from a central nervous system perspective, right? Now, what I see often is that we have this over-reliance need to feel like we're doing some, I don't even know, like performance theater when it comes to recovery, right? So this is where
[00:23:50] I'm seeing everything from. And don't get me wrong, we use this, we just use this to teach it, right? This is not a, not dashing recovery, right? But if it's July and we're breaking out self-cuffing devices and meddling and dormitact boots and cryo and hot cold tubs and every device under the sun, it's July or supposed to feel some of this fatigue. If anything, most of the emerging research is saying we're blunting the adaptation, we want that response to allow our body to do what it naturally does, do about it this way. You go to the gym,
[00:24:43] And you do, let's just pretend, German volume training, you do 10 sets of 10, I actually did 10 sets of 10, be a far lightweight wedge squats, 20 degree wedge squats the other day. Now, I say lightweight, I was literally using 15 pounds and I was doing it on every 30 seconds, those 22nd work period followed by a 10-second peer recovery period. So every 30 seconds on the 30 seconds, I was doing 10 squats with essentially 15 pounds in my hand, both sides, so 30 pounds extra allowed with heavy VFR on my legs. Now, my legs are sore, right? But that's what I want. I purposely induce this
[00:25:29] Violence on my legs deliberately, right? So now, I could have left that wakeroom and said, what a tough training session, you know what I should do? I should take three IV profit. Why? Why would I take some sort of non-sterrorial anti-inflammatory drug for something I resolved that I want. Sorry, y'all, this is the busiest stretch of this 75-minute rock walk that I'm on, walking down a really hot little cliff. So like I said, these cardio tops, they are unedited, they are raw, dogs, planes, birds, and cars, all by us. So it's kind of crazy. Now,
[00:26:15] I could do exactly what I said. I could do German volume training, 10 sets of 10. I could then take three IV profit afterwards. Well, what am I doing? Why would I do that? Right? It is essentially blocking the signaling message of our body to say, hey, physiology, hey, why don't we adapt stronger or lay down more muscle mass or block this sort of chemical cascade and the natural healing effect of our body to adapt to that violent stimulus of 10 by 10. Right? You would say, yeah, that makes sense. Sure. Yeah, we go out in early, early
[00:27:08] Pre-season, or what I might even consider July, like late-aw season. And we do a script workout, and you're immediately jumping into the cold tub right there afterwards. Quite frankly, what the hell are we doing? We're doing the exact same thing. We jump into the norm attack boots. We're using the nomadic compression to flush out our lay. What the hell are we doing? Why? We want that feeling. We need to sit with a little discomfort in our body so that our body learns how to handle this on its own. You know, I was just thinking the other
[00:27:47] Day, we've gotten to a really good point here in Boulder where we really haven't utilized a lot of some of the cool stuff that we have. And some of that is very deliberate. Some of it is that it's also intentional. Hey, we haven't brought it out. And it's like, okay, I'm excited because here we are. And we're going to be able to deploy some of this stuff when we're really sore, we're really fatigued, we're really wiped out. And it's like, if we bring out the big guns early in July, then what the hell are we going to deploy and utilize when it's January? Right? So
[00:28:28] I got some of these novel devices and things that we haven't even dropped out yet. And it's like, this is going to be really rad to use when we need it. But right now, in tree season, we need to sit with the discomfort that we have and just allow our bodies to learn how to self-organize, how to deal with some of these things. So yeah, I think performance recovery is largely the atrix in some respects, right? Other clubs or soccer organizations or teams are utilizing snow rooms and things like that. It's like, okay, that's great. But let's make sure we're
[00:29:08] Utilizing it when we need those things. Not always. Otherwise, what novel stimuli do we break out when we actually really need it? And we're in a code red situation. Let's move on from this topic. I got one more that I wanted to discuss on this much shorter Ruck Walk episode. The actual workout, not shorter, right? It's actually the same duration. Now, it's been most of every half of it, if you will. Listening to that YouTube video, essentially, um, instead of recording a full 75-minute Ruck Walk cardio talk episodes for the coding excellent show. However, last topic,
[00:29:47] Final one of the day, keep this content a little bit more digestible, something you can listen to in your car. And I feel like it's a, you know, an Andrew Fuberman, Peter Atia, three-hour long-form episode. Those have its value, those have its place, but listen, I know the attention spans of a strength conditioning coach essentially myself. An episode like that, it takes me, it takes me a week to watch it, just because I only have 20, 30-minute chunks of time here and there in between deliverables. So, if I don't think I want to talk about, and I alluded to it at the beginning
[00:30:23] Of the show, and this is maybe the future of technology and strength conditioning. No, I'll be honest, right? I am a technologist and optimist when it comes to technology and sports performance. I've said this in a lot of podcasts that I've been on, or a guest, or you know me well, I'm an analog 1980s kid. I grew up in that analog era. At the same injunction point that the personal computing revolution and Bill Gates' vision and Steve Jobs' vision of putting a personal computer in every home started to emerge. My mother brought home, I want to say the Apple
[00:31:06] Too. We got a faster dial-up internet through my mother's education system. And so, I lived through this analog to digital world. So, I've had this fascination with technology all of my life, which has really led me down the career path that I met, right? Should I went to Microsoft or Google or anything technology company I guess should probably should have. However, where I found myself was staying within coaching. No. That said, the future of technology, I think, has a still a really large fat tail in that the upside of this thing is still going to be net beneficial.
[00:31:58] I still think there's going to be some novel things coming out with our ability to quantify what we do. Both on the football field, on the basketball courts, on the soccer pitch, on the baseball assignment, wherever it might be, the ability to quantify every movement, velocity, momentum, change of direction, amplitude of change from acceleration to deceleration. Now, where we will struggle as a industry, if you will, will be our level or ability to interpret that data point or the multitude of millions of data point in the actionable decisions. Now, where I think
[00:32:51] The industry will go is to leverage AI into helping practitioners make better decisions, right? Now, we've already seen the rise of, you know, jet GPT and other artificial intelligence, whether it's trying to think of off other, you know, Google Gemini or what is it? Google's newest language model, something bananas, right? But nonetheless, there's, when you think of organizations that leverage AI to help reveal the trends within the data points that we see based on the common decisions that one could make, I think we'll start to see a rise in that side.
[00:33:50] So it's not so much equipping more accelerometers to devices, bodies, baseball bats, football pads, basketball, it's like shot tracker, right? But it will be on the other side of it in the software systems that allows coaches to leverage AI to make better coaching decisions. Do I push? Do I pull back? Do I make roster changes? Do I make personal changes? Do I adapt for one athlete while adapting for a position group and another? Do we increase hydration? Do we decrease hydration? I don't know why we were decreased hydration, but, you know, you get the idea. It's empowering the practitioner
[00:34:36] To make better decisions. Now, because that's where this thing all breaks down. It breaks down, not in the objective equipment from the technology hardware perspective. It breaks down at the human level. And we've seen this organization, the organization is that it's easier, I won't say it's easy, I won't say it's easier to justify mind or investing in a particular technology or hardware equipment. That's an easier sell to a booster, to a donor, because they can see that they're getting some, right? My dollars and my investment in X University has enabled them to go out and buy
[00:35:31] The very best X. Now when they go to the facility as a booster donor, they can see tangibly where their dollars went. Wow, that's where my money is going. That's where I invest. That's cool, right? You can get the pamphlet, you can get the booklet and see, that's amazing. You know, I invested X amount of money and this is what it's doing at this university, and this is what it's leveraging often. Where it's a harder justification is to roll that back into increasing staff or increasing salaries or increasing that financial aspect that allows practitioners to do a better
[00:36:15] Job. You know, I talked to other organizations, practitioners that power forward division one level for scientists, head of sports science, head of departments, they're seeing their staff cut, they're seeing that workload reallocated to the same or less number of staffers. They're seeing things piling up on their desk as far as more responsibility for equal amount of pay, which then essentially lowers their per hour, you know, investment in them as a as a human capital standpoint. And because of that leads to burnout because of that, it leads to overwork situations and because of
[00:36:55] That, it leads to, it leads to maybe data trends that don't get recognized because they don't get the attention they deserve. And that is where if we're not going to invest in the human side, which I did listen, I don't think we're going to see that in the next five years unless something seismic happens within the NCAA, whether it's as an organization itself or in conference realignment into a big three or a big two, or unless we see something where, you know, private capital comes in or VC money comes in. I don't know, right, but I say I don't, I don't
[00:37:37] Think it's going to get better right away, at least from the financial and human perspective. But where I do see things getting better and where we've seen this play out. Now, you could argue, chat GPT's, you know, 5.0 model or whatever they just released is arguably not much better than the 4.0 or whatever they had, right. There's a little bit of some debate of that online. We are seeing rapid developments in AI. So I'm looking, I'm optimistic. I'm a gambling man, which I'm not, because listening to a strength or salary doesn't afford you to, you know, make
[00:38:16] Hedge investment bets, right? Let's just say. But if I was a gambling man, let's say the area that's going to move the needle within the next several years for sport organizations is going to be the leveraging of AI on the accounts of the software, the data that they collect. Because that's an easy lift, right? The technology has already exists. We just need to enable it to work with the data sources or the databases that the athlete organization or the sporting organization already asked where I could see this playing out is a technology company that has a large repository
[00:39:02] Or database of normative data, number one, and then athlete or client data, number two. Maybe it requires the organization to opt in to contributing their data into this, you know, language model. However, let's say the organization voluntarily opts in that they would then receive the data analytics, you know, the AI leverage data-driven decision recommendations off the AI model. Now, companies would be in a really great position for that. Well, it's probably your big support organizations that work within technology. So your AMS
[00:39:45] Software is something like, you work AMS that could pull in data from all of their, you know, potential clients. It could be your catapult sports or connects on or our SAT sports. That could aggregate that data source, normalize it, de-identify it, and leverage the AI models for that. It could be your VOD performance who's already collecting normative data, de-identified normative data, pulling that into their VOD hub, but to be able to say, whoa, so-and-so athlete just decreased 15% on their Nordboard or their asymmetry increased 6%, that based on our data sources,
[00:40:30] XYZ may be considered doing ABC. You know, like, that's where now instead of a young coach sitting in front of the VOD hub saying, wow, I just tested 35 of my lacrosse athletes. Heck, do I do now? Now it could maybe bucket them. Hey, these 10 need more Nordic hamstring curls. Maybe these five could leverage the Nordic isometric training mode on the Nordboard. These six athletes need more hip abduction work. So they could use a force frame and do isometric training mode. These five athletes need more hip ABduction, so you could have them do.
[00:41:14] And now you have intelligence that works for the coach, not just confuse the coach. I think I'm going to wrap up the show. Again, about three five-ish minutes or so by the time we get everything cut and trimmed and edited and intro and outro and advertisement, all that stuff. So as always, I want to say this. If you listen to these cardio talks where I'm out here breathing heavy out here on the, the Ruck Trail in beautiful border colorado number one. I just want to start off by saying, thank you. Thank you for engaging. Thank you for leaning in. Thank you for listening.
[00:41:51] Thank you for spreading the word about the decoding excellence show and this performance podcast because I truly love contributing to it. And hopefully, within the last whatever, 45 minutes, maybe it got us thinking about how we can build trust with our sport coaches, how we can share a common language, how we can rethink recovery and not throw the kitchen sink all at once. Actually, utilize recovery strategies more strategically and then ultimately me being somewhat bullish or where AI is heading and how the future of technology within strength
[00:42:30] Addition is only going to help us with strength coaches. Appreciate you. Thank you. Take care. Hey, everybody, that's going to be it for this podcast. As always, if you missed any of the episodes here in the decoding excellence show, you can go and explore the back catalog. I host all of our episodes, not only on every sort of podcast hosting site, whether it's Spotify or whether it's a YouTube or anywhere else, but you can go to my website. It is AdamRingler.com forward slash podcasts from there. You can listen to all of the interviews, whether it's other sport professionals,
[00:43:11] Whether it's the monologues, whether it's the basketball discussions, or the sport science intake. Go to the website, check it out, listen to the podcast. I'm telling you, you will take something away from the back catalog of the decoding excellence show. Now, one of the ways that you can support this show. Now, there's two, really. You could go to AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter. You can sign up for my newsletter and in this, you're going to get access to everything, the cool things that I discover from a monthly basis, new books I'm reading, things I'm discovering, articles
[00:43:51] That I found related to sport science. That's really cool and coaching. So pop in your email there and that is just an easy way of supporting the show and you'll get free behind the scenes access to all the cool things I'm discovering. If you took anything away from this episode, I would encourage you. No, I would beg you to share it with any of your friends, your co-workers, your family members, share it with somebody that could get a little bit of value from hearing what we discussed today. And as always, I appreciate you. I thank you. Until next time, stay strong, stay
[00:44:24] Healthy, keep pushing on.