Sport-Specific or “Culture-Specific”?

Sport-Specific or “Culture-Specific”?

Recently a friend of mine and a fellow physical preparation coach, who was working with futsal and was preparing Olympic level Judokas, got an offer to take care of a pro basketball team. Since I was the one recommending him to the agent, I was questioned would he be a good fit, taking into account his lack of experience working in basketball. 

This is very common issue for physical preparation coaches because each sport is totally different and represents totally different needs and specifics. Right? Wrong!

Sport coaches believe that their sport is special and have special physical needs not shared with any other sport. That is because they were most likely never involved in working with other sports. Things are not black and white.

I believe that, when it comes to physical preparation, most sports are more similar than different. This might be a blasphemy to sport-specific movement/community out there, but I will take the risks and provide my rationale.

The shared commonalities are dynamic ~ they tend to be bigger or smaller between sports. I am NOT saying that all sports should approach physical preparation the same way, NOR I am saying that they should be approached in completely specific and different way. Physical preparation is multifaceted and involves different component that could be shared between sports in higher or lover degree (e.g. strength vs aerobic capacity). Truth is in the shades of grey.

Those who cannot understand this ‘complementary’ approach are better off reading some other blogs which are more black and white, dogmatic and ruled by beliefs and selling points and tricks. Here we (try to) use our brains.

Going back to aforementioned friend of mine ~ I reassured the agent, and he did the same with the head coach, that my friend is a great pick, but he will need some time to get into the basketball CULTURE along with getting into the specific needs of the basketball players (positions, physical demands & needs, injury tendencies, etc). I was pretty sure he was already versed in making HUMANS stronger, faster, more powerful, mobile, endurant and resilient and it will be matter of short time until he gets the feel of the basketball culture and specific needs. I hope one understands the message here: a lot of shared needs because we are training humans and humans need to run, jump and throw with some specifics of a given sport and culture.

Sometimes sport coaches (head coaches and managers) make the following mistake: since they believe that their sport is the same regardless of the country where it is being played, they fail miserably when they take the vacancy in abroad due completely different CULTURES.  Sport is the same, but the cultures are different. Cultures demand different approaches. One cannot put the square peg in the round hole even if the objects are built of the same color and material (i.e. same sport).

Sometimes I wonder whether the sports differ (in physical preparation aspect) based on the movement patterns involved and specific needs, or based on the CULTURE involved. Soccer coaches keep whining how their sport is being special flower and is demanding special treatment/approach (not far off from athletes involved, with the couple of exceptions of course) called soccer-specific training while keep hammering leg extensions, balance/bosu board, ab curls and partial bench presses. Strength and conditioning coaches coming into sport like soccer, most likely need to get a feel for a soccer culture rather than a soccer-specific demands. This is the thing that differ the most and the thing that one needs adapting to.

I am not saying here that sport physical preparation should resemble preparation of powerlifters, weightlifters, sprinters, marathoners, crossfitters, gymnasts, throwers and others. This is on the completely other extreme of the problem spectrum and it is also worth mentioning for the sake of having a full and clear picture of the issues.

In some sports, like (American) football, the physical preparation went to the completely other extreme ~ disregarding of the sport specifics and it’s needs, and pursuing strength numbers and basically making footballers a powerlifters.

Make sure to remember the goal of physical preparation for sports: TRANSFER. Transfer to the field performance and injury reduction and resilience (anti-fragility). Steve Maxwell wonderfully outlined in the recent article that the goal is not demonstrating strength (exercise as an end unto itself), but building strength (exercise as a mean to an end).

Powerlifters, weightlifters, gymnasts are strength specialists ~ they need feats of strength in specific movements. (Team) Sport athletes are strength generalists ~ they need general strength in movement patterns that build up general organism strength and resilience and provide performance transfer to the field and most notably to improve run, jump and throw (add maybe carry, tackle, throw down, kick, punch) – in other words also general movement patterns, and here comes the drums, which are common to most humans and hence sports. Nothing extremely special in the sprint, jump and throw (and other patterns) between sports that is not already being taken cared of by practicing one’s sport anyway.

Going back to strength specialists vs. generalists. Strength specialists approach strength training as either (1) skill training and skill acquisition, or as (2) ‘biomotor quality’ training or some combo solution between the two. The former train their lifts frequently and approach it as a ‘form’ (skill). The latter approach strength training as a ‘substance’ – these usually train specific lifts less frequently and try to increase strength as a ‘biomotor ability’ rather than as a specific skill. Think of this as Sheiko vs. Westside. This is what I call “The Root Problem: Substance vs. Form” and I actually did the whole presentation on it (click HERE and HERE).

A lot of sports ‘suffer’ from the similar problem: for example throwers in certain schools (or should I say CULTURES?) did ‘substance’ training to increase strength and only used actual throwing to ‘realize’ that substance into competitive form; others, with the prime example being Anatoly Bondarchuk did throws to improve ‘special strength’ and skills and put ‘substance’ training on hold after certain level is reached. I have also tried to explain my rationale for inclusion of running-based conditioning (‘substance’) alongside with play practices (‘form’) in team sports HERE.

It is important to realize that even strength specialists differ in their approach and philosophy (in how they solved the Root Problem). Anyway, strength generalists should always have transfer and injury resilience as a main objective and not pursuing strength feats number, although they do provide certain guidelines, possible thresholds and motivating goals.

Hence there is no need to split the hair whether front squats are better than back squats or trap bar deadlift/squat as long as we provide progressive overload and variety in double led squat pattern with our athletes without making them injured in the process. Some coaches differ on the dogmatic scale regarding how much they fall in love in certain exercises and how much they defend their “Precious” exercises. Their athletes buy in into those and hence we have a culture developed. And cultures differ, not the reality.

In team sports physical performance’ relationship to either game outcome or physical qualities of the players, is simply more complex, as Martin Buchheit would say. Things are not linear ~ they are complexly moderated and mediated between a lot of factors. Some coaches and researches would love us to believe that things are simple and linear: increase your aerobic power, which will increase your running/physical performance in a game (run more), which will make you dominate over the opponents, which will make you win. Unfortunately reality is far, far more complex than that. 

To summarize this before it becomes too long:

• Sometimes it is the culture that differs between sports the most, not physical needs. Culture specific vs. sport specific needs and differences.

• We are dealing with humans in most of the sports (if you didn’t realized this statement has some joke elements) ~ humans need to run, jump, throw, kick, punch, tackle, carry, throw down. They need to perform these tasks in their respectable sports. Improving these is the goal of physical preparation – there are some sport-specific differences, but things are more similar than they are different.

• The aim of physical preparation is not to make powerlifters of our athletes, nor to cuddle them with ‘sport-specific’ strength training (read: crap training involving some circus tricks while balancing on bosu ball, because, hey! sport  movements are done on a single leg in unstable environment). There is also no point in falling in love with certain exercises. Take care of movement patterns ~ create safe, progressive and variable training environment. Also make sure do to what NEEDS to be done, not only what CAN be done. This is often the problem, so we need to balance the two and find the best solution.

• There are no clear linear causal links between physical attributes, physical game performance and game outcome which make this more complex, but also more interesting. Some elements are more linked, some are not. Some links are moderated and mediated. Don’t be dogmatic – understand and appreciate the complexity

• Physical preparation in my opinion is 50% human specific (we need to improve the general movement patterns: run, jump, throw and others), 30% sport/culture specific (how are these movements performed in a sport and how much; how are they “modulated” taking into account skill related factors; positional demands and injury tendencies; what are cultural differences of the sport; what are sport view how these should be developed and approached) and 20% individual specific (individual player motivation and characteristics, preferences, injury history and tendencies)

(Not so) Random Thoughts - November 2013

(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 2^nd 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!

 There is HUGE discrepancy between analysis and visualization for coaches and clubs and researchers and journals. What researchers and journals are interested about are is that “is there effect in the population (usually on average)”. Since researchers can’t measure the whole population (this is no Earth population, but certain population involved in research question, like elite rugby player, elder lifters, etc) they pick up smaller samples. Using inferential (inferential means providing estimates to population based on samples) statistics, researcher look if the effect in the sample have any statistical significance to a population. This is usually expressed with P<0.05 or confidence intervals using Null hypothesis testing (null hypothesis is that there is no effect in the population).

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.  

Periodization confusion – Slides from WindSprint 2013

I had a pleasure to be one of the lectures at WindSprint 2013 held in Sundsvall, Sweden. I have finally met French sprint coach Pierre Jean Vazel who I know for years from Charlie Francis forum.

Among other presenters were Aki Salo (great presentation on relays), Takanori Suyibiashi (Japanese sprint methods), Roland Lööv (his presentation was on Swedish, so I didn’t understand much).

My presentation was probably too meta-physical, but I have tried to cover some theoretical/philosophical aspects of periodization. This was the first time I was presenting, and I did it on English language, so I was a bit nervous (plus being on stage form me is everything  but walk in the park). Anyway, I was pleased by the reception even if could definitely done it better. Maybe next time J

I have covered a lot of topics/concepts and it was hard to go into details on each. The goal was to present the bigger picture and to provide different framework to think about things.

Here are the slides

[Guest Article] Moneyball Madness by Carl Valle

Moneyball Madness 

by Carl Valle

“IMA, Inertial Movement Analysis, will triple the amount of basketball relevant data... that kind of tool is going to make a real difference.”

-Catapult Sports

Data is now the new currency for medical and performance staff, and the real question is - are we really doing what we think we are?  As the social media landscape paints a distorted view of reality, the hard truth is where are we now before we ask where are we going. Like any honest reflection, it's better to look back years before Moneyball and ask if we are being truthful with what we are doing now first before adding more responsibility of training and medical data. Every week a new online article or interview of a sports team creates a facade of utopian training environments and medical staff that are brighter than Dr. Gregory House. If we are to truly evolve, the most important starting process is creating transparency with what is happening at this moment. Before we can start claiming to create proprietary metrics and innovative algorithms, are we doing a good job with the basics? With pop culture clamoring for kindle or iPad versions of the Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, we should likely be reading how the muscular system signals adaptation before thinking outside the box and being cute.  Global warming and predicting who the next president is going to be is brain candy for professionals, but we must master the core concepts of what we are responsible for directly before expanding to other fields for radical solutions.

Dr. House

I would argue the real problem with data is not the data itself, it's who is filtering the information and retelling the story of what is happening. It's far more interesting to talk about the left ventricle and hypertrophy with "cardiac" output rather than share the pains of soccer players having an allergy to iron and avoid the weight room.  Even if one was increasing thickness of the heart, how much is going to really change with a professional athlete that is 30 years old? Now that the GPS craze is a pandemic in the US with every team lined up to get a catapult system, how many of the teams are doing the basics well, such as making sure full range pull-ups are enforced, running through the line during conditioning runs, and doing warm-ups with a purpose? Of course all of us are not having problems with athletes eating poorly and not stretching with gusto, it's just the other teams that are not doing it right.

When the basics become boring, training must be reinvented or bastardized with new equipment and rather boarderline methods. Professional teams are buying 30,000  dollar force plates but for what reason? Half the time most teams are on the road and barely any of them are training besides foam rolling and clamshells exercises to activate glutes that sleepy . Speaking of shells, the professional has become a  shell game or gypsy ploy of equipment and methodologies to hide from the inconvenient truth with working with athletes. Sometimes they act human and don't do things we want them to do. Athletes are not race horses. Everyone is afraid of being the fall guy for injuries, teams are training like senior citizen "Sliver Sneakers" programs to avoid getting hurt. Yet most the injuries at the pro level are from being out of shape and weak from forgetting what got them there. Ironically several professional teams claim to have force plates to "crack the code" with movement patterns but injuries are not decreasing. The display of power by large purchases comes with the demands of keeping athletes healthy and performing, and looking at the physioroom updates online , hamstrings still get pulled.  No matter if the team is using  individualized thresholds with IBM smarter planet software or teams cracking the gode with special ratios of acceleration and deceleration during practice, people are still tearing ACLs.

Put the "Big Rocks" first - back to the basics

Much of the innovation is crippled now because every start-up company  wants the minimum viable product (MVP) to pitch funding to investors, not sell an actual product to teams looking for real tools and solutions. With coaches wanting to appear like they are doing something or ahead of the curve, they just "thin slice" a brief pilot study to create an illusion of evidence based approaches. Add in some nice data visualization practices and now everyone is getting subjective ratings, sleep data, and recovery profiles with their team. Of course this is only one week out of the year, as everything looses it's luster and the next big thing comes along.The real question is how much daily data teams are really getting that is meaningful. Random practices that are prepared for only tactical purposes collect heart rate data then summarize players with "technicolor dream coat " palettes with magical zones. The problem is that interventions should be good leg training, but somehow mutate to  TRX rows and breathing exercises versus finding more collaborative ways to work with team coaches so something is left to train the lower body. The only vocal complaints about products are the small minority  of people who train or collect data for extended time periods but are party poppers because they share the limits with the real world. With the next biomarker being tweeted by the gurus, the problem repeats with glorious failure, especially when players have season ending injuries making us wonder how the movement screen or core stability DVD is working.

Solving the problem with ornamental data is going to be hard and require widely adopted standards and a lot of transparency. What are people really doing objectively and is it working? Data can be exchanged for the word evidence, as numbers are not the only way to share what is going on. Video a practice session and the gut wrenching reality of so much being missed during the session is a reminder how much we need to do and can do as performance specialists. An overzealous team coach acting like a tyrant is the elephant in the room, as it forces strength coaches to play therapist, the the therapists play ER doctor. Yet nobody talks about it in a way that sounds like change will happen because job security is number one and this is understandable. Of course does it matter if an athlete's HRV is on a cartoony stoplight dashboard when the true problem is the athlete was out at the local night club during the playoffs?  Does it matter that the Apollo AMS system warned like a mayan prophet about the doom that could occur playing too many games a week when David Stern fines a team for resting players? Restgate!!!? Of course the short sided decision to sanction the Spurs was an example of doing the right thing doesn't fit the mindset of those that run the asylum of professional sports. What if the stars got hurt playing the Miami Heat?,  how would that help the next few games with tickets and TV ratings with Duncan and Parker out for 6-8 weeks?

If you want to kill the snake, make sure to cut the head first...

The first step is getting back to fundamentals and reading timeless texts on sport science and training theory. Reading about strength and conditioning or sports medicine? Too easy! Show me the next book on how the world is flat and everyone is an outlier.  It seems what is en vogue is reading a pop culture book that have very little to do what the core needs of coaching or medical demands of sport. The further away it is from our field, the more intelligent the blogger is to see the connections! Reading outside the box material does prevent inbreeding and I suggest it, but ironically everyone is reading the same book trying to appear creative or innovative but the act only exacerbates the issue of free thinking.  Many professionals are doing the same things because everyone is in the same ponzi scheme because of the all mighty dollar. Internet stardom is seductive and empowering, but being honest is not the best path to popularity. Classic works such as the Mechanics of Athletics from Dyson is 10 American dollars and have passed the test of time, but the new ebook on Quadratic Neuro Block Training is 49.99 (with bonuses for a limited time ) are pushed by every  website because of affiliate code back room deals all timed perfectly like a west coast offense.

Trendy vs. evergreen sources of info... 

The second step should be the first, admitting that a problem exists. I am guilty of the above and have had a hard time getting out of the intellectual brain candy and get back to the less exciting demands of doing attendance and setting up equipment before the athletes arrive, versus reading about parasympathetic balance and magic of fascia or manual therapy. It's hard to make sure athletes bring water bottles to practice or do exercises with passion versus letting things slide and hope one wins the talent lottery with next year's recruiting class or draft. It's not popular to do correct technique when the athlete doesn't care and have that  risky talk about the importance of training when nobody wants to be the bad guy. Most hope for a trade or final retirement of a diva because the athlete is producing and we all want to be popular with the athletes. While none of this is data management or analytics, any data coming from a bad culture or poor training environment is tainted and artificially cleaned up without the context of what is happening. It's not honest. It's convenient to list verticals because athletes are talented, but emotionally unsettling to know only 1 of 5 guys can squat to parallel with a decent load so we focus on the convenient and cherry picked positives.

The third step is likely to be boring and not enlightening , but the average coach is blinded by the obvious because of the glare of the glamorous. Getting player weight and body fat is tedious and not exciting, but after several high profile firings of team strength coaches we still have a problem there. The basics are not transparent. Attendance is a start, and basic fitness and power tests can measure simple adaptations or decay of abilities over time. No need for consulting the firms in the UK for the latest Athlete Management System when the data is similar to farming. Nobody stares at the pumpkin patch right after they water it, nor should people have that same approach to hypertrophy and other adaptations with training and rehabilitation. On the other hand many don't record anything of importance and use white boards like a cross fit WOD (workout of the day) yet claim random 8.8% gains in strength during NSCA conference powerpoint presentations?  I choose 5-8 key performance indicators before drilling down to more granular data points if needed.  Now the rise of big data from all the sensors and mobile devices is creating another fallacy that more is better and it's going to reveal the secrets of training.  With all of the sport sensors and video cameras collecting terabytes of data, it looks like we must hire experts in data warehousing to handle the "mounds of data" one is collecting during the season. I am wondering if we will see record boards of how much data we have next to the 400 pound bench club plaques.  Yet the problem Stephen Few has alluded to is not that we have too much data, it's the ability to distinguish what is the signal and noise.  With the New York Knicks having an extensive budget, internet pundits are collectively right with asking is this "Manhattan Lab" working with publicly reported injuries like three season ending knee injuries.  I don't follow the NBA closely enough to know the answer, but every claim of success should be reviewed with a fine toothed comb as it's always told by a biased voice. Even the best coaches are handcuffed to bad situations and can't fix problems that a good parent deals with on a daily basis.

The final step is having a elegant approach to data collecting and intervention strategies. I have the 4 S rule with sports data. Simple, Speed, Sexy,  and Sticky are the four basic needs that teams have with data. Simple is perhaps the hardest as most needs are complex, but adding complexity can spell doom. To stay simple without being too crude is very difficult as well, because convenience of simple sometimes will distill things too much and loose out on the precious baby in the bathwater. Speed is vital, as time is the only commodity we can't reproduce. With a finite and tight schedule, wasting time with extensive set-ups and cumbersome hardware and software. Speed means essential, not just velocity. Sexy sounds like unnecessary, but engaging athletes requires great style and design to sell the program. Athletes are not always fascinated with training or even naturally hardworking, so creative approaches of doing smart hard work is the core of what we do. Lousy User interfaces, bra like GPS shirts, dated wired technologies all create poor sex appeal to equipment as well as poor compliance. Collecting data from an athlete is very unnerving as nobody wants to be probed by aliens, never mind coaches, sport scientists, or medical professionals. It's always good to share what data you collected and come back to the athlete to have them involved. Collecting HRV is repetitive and boring, so education may not be enough to keep athletes inspired to be compliant and consistently getting morning wake data.  Getting cortisol from saliva is an experience that nobody wants to repeat unless it's a game changing process or very convincing to the athlete. Having them shove a large cotton tube in their mouth repeatedly is like eating saltine crackers in the desert, something I have experienced first hand and I am happy I am using smart shirts. Remember what it's like to be the athlete or end user. Finally sticky is sort of a combination of of the first three needs of collecting and analyzing data. Is it sustainable over time? The current dashboard or AMS system may be great to a neophyte, but the experienced coach knows that they need other less common demands like a solid API to passively collect data. What about the ability to have offline data when cellular coverage or wifi is unavailable or poor? It's amazing how teams worry about "military grade" security when iPads have no pin codes or when athletes are tweeting X-Rays after games! What are the real challenges? Hackers finding out FMS scores or reducing our dependance to pain killers?

The needs of technology today is to reduce unnecessary use of equipment and get to the heart of the matter. Working with people. Technology can be a simple as a good notebook and pen, or as advanced as a full wireless weight room with iPads and Gymaware units. It doesn't matter so long as the culture respects the process and buys into the program. Every year the same challenges of eating right and getting good sleep, showing up on time, and focusing on doing the tried and true is the biggest impact to getting athletes better.