(Not so) Random Thoughts - November 2013
End of the season – Good bye and thanks to Hammarby IF
The season 2013 ended with the last game on the home stadium
Tele2 Arena on November 2nd
with a win against Östersunds FK.
It was a pretty rough ride this season with a coach change,
new stadium and new training ground (currently in the making process).
Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to qualify to play highest division in Sweden
(Allsvenskan) this year, and I feel very sorry for this to all club supporters
and players themselves. I wish all the best to the club and to the players,
along with the great supporters in the upcoming seasons. Hammarby deserves to
play in Allsvenskan, and Allsvenskan needs Hammarby and their supporters.
Unfortunately, it is time for me to move on. After the
November, during which I will help the coaching staff with 4 week training
block, I will head back to Serbia. I don’t have much in plan, but I am thinking
about pursuing PhD and I have applied for two potential PhD positions in
Australia and New Zealand. In the mean time I plan catching up with missed time
with family and friends (everyone who works/lives outside of their homeland
knows what I am talking about), training, reading, skiing and re-evaluating
what could have been done differently and better.
Last two years were amazing and I am more than thankful to
Hammarby, players, coaching staff and supporters for providing me opportunity
and trust to work as head physical preparation coach. Will miss you all!
New article on Velocity-based strength training
Together with a friend of mine and a co-author Eamonn
Flanagan, strength and conditioning coach for the Irish Rugby Football Union,
we have wrote the review paper entitled “Researched
applications of velocity based strength training” and got accepted for publication in Journal of Australian
Strength and Conditioning.
The paper will cover topics such as
load/velocity profile, minimal velocity threshold, novel velocity/exertion
profile, daily 1RM estimates, and using velocity start and velocity stops to
prescribe strength training. All this with how-to in Excel. In short it should
be very applicable for coaches utilizing linear position transducers (LPTs)
like GymAware and Tendo
unit. Hopefully it will provide great reference and a starting point for
velocity-based strength training.
Pragmatic or sport-specific approach in exercise testing and evaluation?
I urge everyone to read the recent opinion and
point-counterpoint article by Alberto Mendez-Villanueva
and Martin Buchheit in Journal of Sport Sciences: Football-specific
fitness testing: adding value or confirming the evidence?, and great paper
by Chris Carling (see the interview
with Chris HERE)
in Sports Medicine: Interpreting
Physical Performance in Professional Soccer Match-Play: Should We be More
Pragmatic in Our Approach?
I believe that the sport
specific approach to testing and training has finally started to show its
flaws, overseen by its supporters. It has also been a great selling point, for
both books and job vacancies, pushed way too far. What about concepts such as human specific or training specific?
As a complementarist,
I believe in importance of both sport
specific and human specific
approach, where one needs to understand details and nuances of the sport and its
demands and culture, but also need not to forget how humans in general move,
adapt, learn, behave. To be completely honest, I believe that 50% of physical training
is human specific, 30% is sport specific and 20% is individual specific. Just don’t put the
cart before the horse and remember the Big
Rocks story.
Taking this discussion to testing and evaluation field, a
lot of coaches and researchers ask what is the sport specific test for a certain factor of success in a given sport? Without going into the
discussion what, in this case physical factor is related to success (and how do
you describe and quantify success), for example is VO2max related to distance covered
and is distance covered to game outcome and season outcome (see the paper by
Carling on this), there is the issue are these tests getting anything new on
the table to be pragmatically used in training?
I cannot agree more on this with Mendez-Villanueva and
Martin Buchheit. What we see is a bunch of testing batteries that only
describes (quantitatively) what coaches already know intuitively. Who is the
fastest guy, who is the most endurant, who is strongest etc.
This is absolutely not an opinion against testing in
general, but against testing (and monitoring) that doesn't have any pragmatic
value and provide only descriptive quantification. For example, YoYo test is
one of the most researched sport specific
test in soccer, simulates the game, change of direction, short rests, and
all that yada yada yada. But it gives you a distance that you cannot use in any
prescriptive way at all. Ok, I know
that one player increased from 2,400m to 2,600m in two months in YoYo test, but
what type of actionable information does this gives me or any other coach
except for comparing athletes (i.e. descriptive analysis)?
Again, this is not against YoYo testing overall, which can
have great importance and value in descriptive roles (e.g. comparing teams,
athletes or league levels), but against tests that don’t bring anything usable
and actionable (pragmatic) on the table.
A lot of coaches ask me for advice what should be tested
with their team. My first reaction is “How do you plan using that number”. My
answer depends on their use of that number. I would say that if you don’t plan
to use testing scores in any meaningful, actionable and pragmatic way, it might
be just a waste of time, money and energy.
Taking this discussion one step further – we tend to focus
on outcome or performance tests too much for both testing and monitoring. For
example 40m time, vertical jump. Some of those can be used to prescribe
training (MAS, 1RMs, etc), but we might miss the process underlying them that was responsible for a performance
outcome. For example, different power output between legs in vertical jump, dip
in vertical jump, etc.
Yes – we need specialized and expensive equipment for these,
but they might tell us more about HOW certain performance is achieved.
Human body is famous for system degeneracy.
“Degeneracy is a property of complex systems in which structurally different
components of the system interact to provide distinct ways to achieve the same
performance outcome” -- from Sports Med. 2013
Jan;43(1):1-7.
In other words, especially for monitoring of training readiness,
adaptation and overtraining, having an insight HOW are things achieved, can be more informative than only how much
someone run, jumped, lifted or throw. Besides they can give PRAGMATICAL information about what should/can be done to improve
performance (prescriptive vs. descriptive).
In terms of monitoring for neuromuscular fatigue (NMF), a
lot of coaches use jump assessment. They track jump height over period of time
to see any meaningful drops in performance. What might happen and it might be
very meaningful, is that even without change in performance (vertical height)
athletes might use different process to achieve same score – using smaller dip,
longer contraction time, etc that could be very meaningful in NMF assessment and
even injury prevention.
I hope that this random though raised some questions – and that
was the whole point of it. One more time I am not bashing testing in general,
but testing without purpose and pragmatic value. Sometimes this pragmatic value
is only descriptive, sometimes, and we should aim toward this, is more prescriptive.
It should also give us some information that we don’t already know about the
athletes and something that we can use to break the performance plateaus and
prevent injuries.
Inferential statistics for coaches? Naaaah!
One example might be if cold baths improve recovery in
soccer players. Since the question involves all soccer players, and researchers
cannot test all of them, the take a random sample and create experiment
research. One group (experimental group) get the cold bath treatment and other
group (control group) don’t do it. Then they measure some performance estimate
(e.g. vertical jump) or subjective feeling (rating of how sore or tire you are)
and compare between groups. For an example, both groups had mean vertical jump
of 44cm before treatment (cold bath). After treatment, experimental group improved
to 50cm while control group to 46cm.
Most of the researchers are not interested
in practical meaningfulness or significance of such effect (luckily with Will
Hopkins and magnitude based inferences this is changing), but rather into
something that is called statistical
significance. In the case of cold bath, researchers want to see if the
effect is significant in the population.
Using null hypothesis testing (null
hypothesis being no effect of cold batch treatment) they estimate how probable occurrence
of the effect is if the null hypothesis is true. This is called P Value (for more info check statistics
books). Everything under P<0.05 has effect and usually gets published. There
is no talk of magnitude of this effect – only if it is statistically
significant (and that is VERY influenced by number of subjects – more money,
more subjects, higher chance of seeing an effect and getting published and
getting your research score).
All of this inferential statistic for researchers is interested
whether there is an effect (on average) in the population. Even if there is an
effect, the range of that effect might differ a lot. Remember the story behind
averages? “Having my feet in the oven, head in the freezer, on average I am
just fine”.
Coaches on the other hand are not interested into
making inferences to a population. They are interested in the SINGLE athletes, not averages. No
wonder they don’t understand inferential data analysis, because they don’t need
it.
It is beyond me, why the sport scientists still present
analysis and figures to the coaches using inferential statistics and figures
(averages), along with using normality assumptions that are usually violated. Besides,
inferential statistics is afraid of
outliers, while in sport outliers and their discovery are of utmost importance.
Coaches are not interested does altitude training have an effect
on average in the population of elite athletes, but rather will it work for
John, Mickey and Sarah. Single case studies. Ranges in single case studies.
What I had in mind is to write a practical paper outlining
the best methods for simple descriptive analysis and visualization techniques
that coaches can use from day one. Using Smallest Worthwhile Effect (SWE),
Typical Error (TE) and how to visualize them to get the idea of practical
significance of the effect. I am currently in the process of collecting good
visualization practices for this purpose and trying to put them to either Excel
or R/ggplot2 (I believe R is going to be the choice) and write a review paper.
Anyone who might provide any help, or is interested in contributing is welcome
to contact me.
Setting goals and stoicism
Take any psychology book or training book and it will talk about setting goals and goals classification to (1) outcome, (2) performance and (3) process goals.
Outcome goals are related to competition results, like "I want to be first in competition", "We want to get over 50 point in the league", etc.
Performance goals are related to, well performance improvements that could increase chances of acquiring outcome goals - "I want to improve my shooting percentage", "I want to improve my 1RM for 2,5%", "I want to improve my minutes per mile for 10 seconds", etc.
Process goals are related to the journey and training. "I want to give my best effort, sleep well, and get that training done", "I want to accumulate over 100 TSS units daily on a bike", "I want to get to the gym 5 times a week"
I believe that we are too focused on performance goals and neglect the journey or process goals. Outcome and performance goals give us direction, but sometimes we cannot control reaching of them and can lead to a frustration, burnout, even if they give us purpose and direction.
Biology of adaptation is complex - we can vary in our reactions to training and adaptations. We can't control a lot of things, beyond training hard and smart, sleeping extra, eating well, etc. If we focus on end-points, especially the end-points we cannot control it might lead to a burnout and disappointments.
Last year I was reading a lot about stoicism (one great book to consider is A Guide to Good Life by William Irvine) and it really influenced me, although it is guide hard to practice and fight the "inner Chimp", but it a great philosophy.
Anyway, the following picture is a pure gold and based on stoic principles of control. I believe we should spend more time on setting process goals and actions we can control and which we enjoy (the journey) instead of tunnel-vision approach to training goals.
Set the important process goals (aimed at achieving certain outcomes/performance) and get to action. That is your control. You can't control your opponent, how is your body going to react, referees, etc. It is beyond your control and thus not worth of worrying.
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