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For me, 2018 ended on a surprising note: One of the sports coaches I work with came down to my office and asked how I utilize sports science while working with his team. To help you appreciate how stunned I was by this inquiry, this coach really doesn’t like using technology. As a matter of fact, each fall I still get passed the team roster with positions, hometowns, and school ID numbers in a handwritten note. When I’d previously suggested the coach could use the same Excel document all the other teams use, I was essentially told that Excel was too difficult to figure out. Now, don’t get me wrong, this coach runs a successful program; still, the mindset is very “old school,” so being asked about how I use sport science was a major happening.

As happy as I am to have deeper conversations with sports coaches about what we do with our athletes, to have a person who struggles with basic computer programs like Excel turn around and ask about sport science left me with more questions than answers. What inspired the coach to suddenly ask about sports science? What sort of answer was he expecting from me? Was this conversation based in some sort of trivial curiosity, or was there a genuine interest in discovering better information?

When I think of sports science, there is a very specific scene from Rocky 4 that pops into my head: Russian boxer Ivan Drago strapped into machines that measure all sorts of kinematic data from his movements, under the watchful eye of scientists in white lab coats. Maybe this is what the sports coach had in mind when he asked about how we use sports science.

At its core, sports science is collecting information and objectively coming up with decisions. Share on X

I think the reality of what sports science is would have really come as a surprise, since at its core sports science is just collecting information and objectively coming up with decisions. This is what we’ve been doing for over a decade, all while wearing gym attire. You can spend some serious money on sports science tools, falling into the same trap I have: You see a piece of equipment that is super fancy, has a highly interactive display, and can measure a result very accurately. After budgeting for this piece of equipment, you eventually make the purchase…but when you begin to use it, you are totally disappointed. It’s not that the equipment doesn’t work; it’s just that it’s too complicated, takes too long to set up or test people, or the worst-case scenario: A $5,000 piece of equipment gives you $0.50 worth of information.

Most of the sports science data we collect is from athletes performing simple jumps. For my program, we capture all of this information on a Probotics Just Jump Mat, which costs about $600. All the athletes must do is stand on the pad, jump, and land. The handheld computer takes in a bunch of information, then delivers jump height and hang time, or whatever function you are looking for. I will say this—as with every test, there are ways to cheat this (like pulling the knees up while jumping). But as long as you have people do the same thing every time you use it, then you can compare RELATIVE data, not ABSOLUTE data. I’m okay with that.

Eventually, there is a time when we need to look at the absolute jump height of our athletes, and then we bring them down the hall to our Exercise Science program and use the program’s motion capture system to look at hip height displacement. Since that is hard to coordinate and it takes significantly longer to test the athletes, I’m okay with using the relative data we get from the Just Jump Mat. If you aren’t in a position to spend money on a Just Jump Mat, you can make an adjustment and change the following tests from a vertical jump into a horizontal jump. Then, the only piece of equipment you’ll need is a 100-foot tape measure.

Static Jumps and Counter-Movement Jumps to Assess Strength vs. Power

At some point in your career, you will run into someone truly exceptional and then you may scratch your head, trying to figure out what to do with them. Should you spend time training them at low velocities, working heavy movements like the traditional eccentrically loaded powerlifting events? Or, should you spend training time working the high-velocity movements like plyometric drop jumps or reactive-style (otherwise known as dynamic effort) back squats?

It would sure be nice to have someone or something tell you what areas you should spend time working on. The good news is there is just that sort of thing out there, and it is really easy to add to your testing battery. All you need to do is have people perform two different types of jumps and compare the results. Okay, okay—admittedly, there is a little more involved in the tests than that.

If you are using a jump pad, begin by having the athlete do their jumps with their hands on their hips to isolate the lower body as much as possible and eliminate the significant contribution generated by the upper body arm swing. From that position, athletes will perform the more difficult of the two jumps: the static (or isometric) jump.

Video 1. A demonstration of the static (or isometric) jump done correctly. The athlete holds their jump stance position for 3-5 seconds to eliminate any stretch-shortening cycle benefit.

Video 2. A demonstration of the static (or isometric) jump done incorrectly. Watch out for athletes who perform a counter-movement hip drop to get a higher jump on their test.

For the static jump, the athlete assumes their jump stance, but then holds that position for 3-5 seconds to eliminate any stretch-shortening cycle benefit (more on this in a few paragraphs). The difficult part of the static jump is that the athlete has to have one single “push” that causes them to jump. Most people perform a little counter-movement hip drop in order to get a higher jump from their static jump test, which is something you need to coach them out of.

The next style of jump for the test does take full advantage of that counter-movement hip action: One that is, as you likely already know, called a counter-movement jump. As in the static jump, the athlete again prepares to jump with their hands on their hips—but in this jump, it is all about a rapid drop to their jump stance and immediately jumping from there. If you are thinking that the counter-movement jump sure sounds like the athlete is tapping into their stretch-shortening cycle, congratulations, you are correct! If the stretch-shortening cycle is something new for you, let me give you a brief overview.

Video 3. With the counter-movement jump, the athlete taps into their stretch-shortening cycle. After preparing to jump with their hands on their hips, they rapidly drop their jump stance and immediately jump from there.

Stretch-Shortening Cycle

When you stretch a muscle (called an eccentric load), the stretch can store up some of the mechanical energy in the tendon and ligament that interact with the muscle. This is not only something discussed in exercise physiology, but is also one of the laws of thermodynamics in physics, known as the conservation of energy. The catch is, in the human body we cannot store this energy indefinitely, which means you will lose this energy in less than a second.

Let’s say, however, you quickly stretch a muscle and act quickly. Then you can use this stored energy AND tap into a nerve that causes your muscle to contract even harder and faster than it could without the stretch. Think of a squat: You can lift more weight going down (the stretch) and up than you could if you started with the bar on the safety rails and only brought the bar up. This is what the stretch-shortening cycle can do for you. Not bad, huh?

Where the Data Comes in

By comparing the two types of jumps (counter-movement and static), you can create a rough idea of what Dr. Zatsiorsky refers to as the “explosive strength deficit” in Science and Practice of Strength Training. The explosive strength deficit (ESD) is a comparison of how much force can be produced with (counter-movement jump) and without (static jump) tapping into the stretch-shortening cycle’s benefits. This is something that you have to check on a regular basis, because the ESD is a ratio and it always responds to how you program workouts. At some point, the athlete is overpowered for their strength level and needs to get stronger at low-velocity, heavy strength work. At another point, they’re too strong for the power they can produce and need to spend time working on high-velocity exercises.

The relationship between the CM and static jumps helps me figure out what qualities to program for. Share on X

The relationship between the CM jump and the static jump is a part of how I figure out what qualities to program for. When you know the CM jump and static jump scores, you have to run a really simple equation:

ESD = 100 X (CMJ-SJ)/CMJ

That’s it. When you run this equation for the explosive strength deficit, you’ll get one of two possible results:

1. If an athlete scores in the 0-10 range, that should be an indicator that you need to spend more time developing near explosive strength—specifically, strength that involves rapid counter-movements like plyometric jumps. People who fall into this group include athletes who are really strong, but can’t translate their strength to their sport.
2. If an athlete scores greater than 11, it’s an indicator of being overpowered; they likely need to spend time doing some old-fashioned strength work. I understand that being overpowered and underdeveloped sounds like a contradiction in terms (since strength is a component of power), but remember we are trying to figure out which style of training can improve the athlete’s weakest attribute. In this case, there will be a much greater return on time spent focused on developing strength at lower velocities like deadlifts and squats.

Repeated Jumps Test for Return to Play Protocol

I’ve been fortunate enough to work with college athletes for almost two decades now, and in that time, I’ve seen a lot of injuries. Some were due to freak accidents, like a broken leg from sliding into the boards in hockey. Others were from overuse, seen in muscle strains resulting from bad compensation patterns. Others still, like a sprained ankle, were injuries written off as simply part of the game. It never gets easier, seeing people you work with get hurt, and it’s even worse when they reinjure themselves largely because they tried coming back to the sport they love before they were ready.

We can get into a much larger discussion of why athletes come back too soon (and the reasons why they get injured in the first place), but for now I’m going to focus on the practical and pragmatic side. When there has been an injury that resulted in a loss of game time, professionals in our field should have a say in whether that athlete is ready to return to play. Correction: When I said should, I meant that people in our profession need to have a say about the athlete’s return to play status.

Coaches in the strength and conditioning field have the ability, education, and tools to measure how well athletes create, absorb, and redirect force. And, if you truly look out for the best interests of the athlete, reviewing their ability to create, absorb, and redirect force is the best indicator for not only return to play, but for identifying athletes with a high injury risk in the first place.

An athlete’s ability to create, absorb, and redirect force reveals their return to play readiness. Share on X

To determine this, you’ll need to find a way to test people’s ability to handle repeated acceleration and deceleration. In my experience, when people are getting close to returning from an injury, they can usually compensate well enough during bilateral or even some unilateral tests. However, when the injured athlete attempts to jump and land repeatedly—now THAT is a revealing test. You’ll know simply by watching if the injured leg can safely handle the transfer of energy from landing to jumping as fast as they can.

If the athlete can handle the stresses of jumping, then they should be able to handle the stress of practice and competition without any increased risk. Basically, if I watch an athlete who looks like a superball bouncing when they do their repeated jumps, I am comfortable with them continuing their normal work. On the other hand, if the athlete bounces more like a tomato, well that’s an indicator that something is wrong and the next step is a conversation with the athlete to find out more.

Again, the athlete starts on the jump pad with hands on their hips, and jumps repeatedly as high and as fast as possible for four jumps. If you do this as a broad jump, the setup is the same, but they are trying to jump forward as far as they can, sticking their final landing. This will either give you a ratio number on the Just Jump Mat of their jump heights and ground contact times, or if using the broad jumps, a total distance. In both cases, the larger the number, the better the athlete did and the more “springy” they are.

To dig further into the data, you can have the athletes repeat the same test unilaterally. I must admit, it is fun to watch some of the football linemen attempt this single-leg quartet of jumps, but I do this for more than my own amusement. The comparison of right leg and left leg results very quickly shows any disparities and can help you focus on whether you should prescribe unilateral or bilateral training. My cutoff has traditionally been 10%: If the athlete is within that range, I feel comfortable with them spending more time doing standard bilateral work, since their dominant leg isn’t overshadowing their other leg, which is normal for that person. This is what it looks like in real life.

Video 4. If the athlete can handle the stresses of jumping, then they should be able to handle the stress of practice and competition without any increased risk. Here, an injured athlete performs single leg repeated jumps on her uninjured leg.

Video 5. This athlete is coming back from an injury to her left leg, and is yet unable to correctly perform the jump test with her injured leg. We adjusted her workout to include only unilateral leg training, giving the injured leg more volume than the uninjured one.

In this example, you see an athlete I work with who is coming back from an injury to her left leg. Before the injury, she didn’t have any training restrictions due to the difference between her right and left legs. Basketball players typically have their left leg as their dominant leg if they are right-handed, and in this case, she had one of the lowest differences between legs.

Now she is getting ready to return from an injury to her left leg, and as you can see from the video and the four-jump data, she is far from being able to perform the test correctly. Not only are there practice limitations, but we have also adjusted her workout to include only unilateral leg training, with the injured leg getting more volume than the uninjured leg. The literature suggests that the greatest risk factor for sustaining a new injury is a prior injury. Therefore, if you have an injured athlete, you’d better make sure they are close to their pre-injury ability before putting them back in for competition.

Standing Long Jump for Athlete Monitoring

Over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly interested in ways to predict athletic success and create profiles for athletes (if you haven’t read any of those articles on the subject, you can find them here). During my trials of trying to design a universal way to objectively compare athletes, I looked at all sorts of variables, but I kept coming back to two things that any comparison needed to consider: There needs to be some expression of strength, and it has to be relative to body weight.

Any comparison of athletes needs to consider an expression of strength, relative to body weight. Share on X

Trying to come up with a way to compare strength might seem easy. At first it was, and I was set to use my go-to exercise: the squat. It seemed like a good choice, since the majority of my programming is centered around that exercise and the transfer of training it provides to speed or power. Plus, you can quickly come up with a relative comparison based off of body weight.

But, then I ran into a roadblock.

One of the fastest athletes we had at the school couldn’t squat. It wasn’t that they were weak, either physically or mentally, but they had a chronic injury we had to train around (a spondylolisthesis, also called a spondy). Basically, this athlete had some sort of trauma when they were younger, which caused a fracture in one of the bones of their low back. This college athlete’s broken bone would sometimes shift—which, from what I witnessed, was very painful—and that would severely hamper their movements. The No. 1 thing that triggered their spondy was squatting. High bar, low bar, or front squat: It didn’t matter what bar position we tried, anytime there was a bar putting pressure through their spine, it caused a flare-up and the athlete was in debilitating pain for the next few days.

How could I make a comparison when one of the fastest athletes at the school couldn’t even be included?

Obviously, this was a problem. If we had one athlete who couldn’t be accounted for in a squat test, how many more would be underrepresented because they are unable to perform a skill like squatting—not to mention an even more complex skill, like a clean? But a simple skill like a jump—everyone should be able to perform that if they are able to participate in competitive sports, right?

Right.

While I was at an NSCA clinic, long-time coach and colleague Dennis Kline from Wisconsin-LaCrosse was presenting, and it was like he was reading my thoughts. He talked about how he monitors his athletes simply by having them do a standing long jump. Here is the equation that Dennis shared:

Power Rank = (square root of body weight in pounds) x (square root of length of jump in inches)

Well, there was the answer I was looking for. Everyone should be able to jump without much coaching. This power rank also takes into account their body weight, so now we can tell an athlete if the weight they added (or lost) is helping them perform at their best. After playing around some with Dennis’s first equation, here are the adjustments I use for the variety of jumps introduced in this article.

Power Rank (Vertical Jump) = (SQRT Body Weight) x (SQRT Vertical Jump Height)

Power Rank (Broad Jump) = (SQRT Body Weight) x (SQRT Broad Jump Distance)

Power Rank (4 Broad Jump) = (SQRT Body Weight) x (SQRT (Broad Jump Distance/4))

These results have no units, they are simply a number—and the higher the number, the better the athlete is doing. The nice thing about this monitoring system is that you can predict a performance simply by seeing how the athletes change over time.

This monitoring system lets you predict performance by seeing how an athlete changes over time. Share on X

Below are two of the football players I’ve worked with this past fall. They are in the same position group, and both are starters. The first attempt was when football reported for pre-season camp, and attempts were done every other week during the season. Looking at the results some more, the second attempt was the first game week, and the sixth attempt was the second to the last game. When you look at these results, you can perhaps see that we had concerns about one of the athletes. See if you can come up with the same conclusions.

It can be difficult to have a conversation with athletes and their head coaches about their diminishing performance. This is especially true when the athlete is one of the more talented people on the team. But, as you can see in the example above, there was a constant decline in the Power Rank for Athlete 1. We were in-season, and the player had a constant problem: low effort during workouts, chronic dehydration, and he gained about 10 pounds (mostly body fat) by the end of the season.

It’s embarrassing for me to publicly talk about this decrease in performance, but part of this profession is asking the right questions when things aren’t working correctly. So, that’s what I did. I checked the results from others doing the same programs and they weren’t having the same decreases in their scores. The next step was to talk to the athlete. He freely admitted that his focus was on playing football, not lifting hard: “that’s what the off-season is for.”

It’s hard to do much for people who accept this type of mindset. Athlete 2 was mostly consistent with their Power Rank, with a dip in the middle of the season due to a leg injury. It’s funny though—during the post-season review with the football coaches, they did say how disappointing of a season Athlete 1 had had, and how happy they were about Athlete 2’s consistent level of play.

From Data to Decisions

If 2018 ended with such a surprise, I can only imagine what 2019 will bring. After all, if an old-school coach wanted to talk about how we use sports science with his team, who knows what will happen next? I do think this coach walked away with more questions than answers, but that is part of our wonderful profession. All coaches use their own creativity to dig deeper and hunt for the information that is important for their success. The take-home message with all three of these ideas is that there is a world of information available for you and you don’t need to be in a sterile lab wearing a white lab coat to find it.

You don’t need a white coat and a sterile lab to discover all of the information available to you. Share on X

What you want to do next is completely up to you. I’ve shown you examples for how to figure out what areas to focus on for the next stage of a program, how to figure out if an athlete is ready to return to full competition, and how to monitor athletes over time, because these are the things that are important to my program. You’ve seen two ways to test everything that I talked about, simply because I wanted to introduce something that you can immediately put into your program without making any sort of purchase. If you’re creative enough and passionate enough, you should be able to come up with a solution to any challenge you’re facing.

Right? Now go out there and figure out the best way to help the people who are counting on you.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

Everyone is looking for the best workouts and methods to improve vertical jump performance, and at Exceed Sports Performance and Fitness, we’ve found that the kBox is a great tool to help with eccentric strength for serious hops. With the use of our own testing and training protocols, we implemented some additional methods that helped improve our athletes’ jump performances, and in doing so found some benefits to horizontal power as well.

Shane Davenport and I previously talked about different training methods and the best exercises for the kBox and kPulley, and now this article will focus on the flywheel’s role in vertical jump training and vertical jump exercises. It’s hard to narrow your focus and aim towards improving one specific quality without interfering with other qualities along the way. However, if your goal is to get your athletes more explosive and jumping higher, this piece is for you.

The verdict on #flywheels is in: A kBox or other isoinertial equipment can help athletes jump higher, says @SPSmith11. Share on X

The verdict for using flywheels is in: A kBox or other isoinertial equipment can help your athletes jump higher. This article is not about convincing you to use flywheels for jumping—the science will do that—but to assist you in maximizing the benefits of flywheels through smart programming. It will help you make better athletes, as well as better jumpers.

The Science of Jump Performance and Isoinertial Training

An earlier review on flywheel science briefly covered jump performance, and old research on the Vertimax. This section will not be detective work, but more like an extended list of what the scientific studies have shown works. My facility uses both the kBox and kPulley, but only as a fraction of our programming. Our athletes lift, jump, sprint, and do whatever else we think will give them their best chances on the field, so don’t think this article will only cover flywheel use.

We’ve had a great deal of success with our jumping protocols, and have seen athletes at the highest level improve their jumps and outperform the vast majority of their peers. In unison with our standard training programming, we use flywheel training to help our athletes absorb force, stop and cut aggressively, and be more efficient in their sport movements.

We had to figure out what happens when you add flywheel training to a program, not replace what you do. We use both the kMeter and force analysis when determining who needs extra “tutoring” and who may just need a taste of flywheel-specific jump work. At this point, it seems any incorporation of flywheel training into an athlete’s program will yield a positive outcome. Of course, the how, where, and why play a large role in how effective that outcome is, but if the trend is positive, keep doing what works.

Any incorporation of #flywheel training into an athlete’s program seems to yield a positive outcome, says @SPSmith11. Share on X

Although there isn’t a lot of research on flywheel training specifically for jump performance that I know of, several studies have hypothesized that faster inertia may make a difference. Our conclusions are the following:

• Movement specificity matters, so if you want to be better on one leg or two legs, training on a flywheel should mirror that need.
• General power development matters as well. Train for overall strength and power and don’t get lost in specificity only.
• Keep in mind that movement variability is still important to avoid mismanaging stresses and risking those potential wear-and-tear overuse injuries.

The most interesting study in all of the research on jump performance is the handball paper published a few years ago. We like it because the machine was less specific to jumping, as well as the Polish study, which experimented with different loads of inertia and jump performance. Both enhanced vertical jump performance; specifically, the countermovement jump where a lot of us make our money. There was also some unique research on patients who were forced to be in bed for extended periods of time and their rate of jump improvement compared to the control group. Anyone dealing with post-surgical clients who need to “catch up” might be interested in the results.

Profiling Good Candidates for Flywheel Sessions

A bad jumper with a poor training background will get better doing nearly anything, but well-trained athletes who are good at a few things are the main population coaches care about. How do we make the good great, and how do we make the great the best? Getting athletes better is easy when they are new to training, but how do you give your athletes an advantage if everyone else is training hard and smart? Information dissemination is arguably easier and more widespread than ever, so it’s becoming more important to keep experimenting, testing, evaluating, and adjusting.

From testing jumps with force plates we found that athletes with poor jump performances tend to have problems storing and releasing energy. If an athlete is unable to handle the eccentric forces of the descent (pre-jump), they will have a difficult time braking, reversing direction, and applying force with any appreciable effort. Traditional methods of improving these abilities still make up the majority of our training, but incorporating a tool that is almost perfectly designed to improve these qualities simply makes sense to us.

Video 1. Testing athletes using force plates with dumbbell jump exercises has a lot of value. A main goal with our jump testing is to profile who may be a great responder to loaded jumps with flywheels.

If you want to profile clients, you must spend a little time and invest in proper equipment. Eye tests are a thing of the past and some simple equipment can get the job done, but some of the tech out there now is a game changer. The addition of quality force plates this past year has made a huge difference in our ability to profile a client. We can compare static (squat jump) and dynamic (countermovement jump) jumping to categorize athletes using the Eccentric Utilization Ratio. Using advanced or simply more metrics does add a little bit of work for coaches at first, but in the long run, analysis improves results because the way an athlete jumps dictates how a training program will help, or not.

In terms of simplistic categorization, we generally see athletes who need basic training, advanced training, or highly specific training. Understanding when and what methods to use on which population isn’t all that straightforward; however, here are some simple guidelines on the approach.

• Beginner Trainees: General exposure to standard training and potentially adding flywheel training using common movements is recommended for this level.
• Advanced Trainees: At this level, you can incorporate more advanced flywheel training that focuses on intensive loading and maximal power development.
• Specific Training: Although best reserved for high-level athletes, specific flywheel training, using both low and high inertia, will help athletes achieve specific results. This could be jumping higher or returning to competition.

Beginner athletes who need to develop a sound foundation can jump into flywheel training after a few months of learning movement patterns in the weight room. After an athlete advances from new to experienced, we can help them hone in on specific outcomes based on a better indication of their ability and their response to training. Advanced athletes, those with 2-3 years of real training, tend to respond to demanding and intense training without much need for fancy workouts. They are similar to beginners in their need to polish the fundamentals, but they can no longer get better by just showing up. Specific training can be used at any level, such as rehabilitation programs or elite sprinters, but customized training helps advanced athletes who are now entering the realm of hard gains.

How to Make a Difference

The simple answer to what is the best exercise for jumping is easy: anything that resembles jumping. You’ll have slow, deep countermovements and short, fast, stiff jumpers, and it’s important to focus on what people do well and either bring up the lagging movements or fine-tune their strengths. How you train will dictate how you jump. Attention to detail and specificity are often the name of the game in this world, and it’s no different when it comes to the flywheel.

• Train Speed-Specific Patterns for the Desired Outcome: Fast or slow, heavy or light.

• Use Appropriate Depths: This may require more than just one depth.

• Use Appropriate Vectors: Are vertical patterns enough?

• Expect and Monitor for High Efforts and Quality Output: You can’t expect exceptional results from mediocre efforts.

Some single leg training has helped vertical jumping with poorly developed athletes who just need something, but jumping with two legs with a flywheel works better than split squatting at higher levels. Especially when we want fast movements, the squat pattern is just more appropriate and more effective than split stance patterns.

Lateral squatting has some research behind it in regard to jumping, but we tend to use that a lot less than bilateral patterns. Why? The research shows that unilateral movements help, but more so for change of direction. So, if you’re seeking raw horsepower, bilateral movements are better. Flywheel squatting improves jumping, sprinting, change of direction, and even muscle thickness in only six weeks with athletes.

Like variable resistance training, #flywheel training can be used at a multitude of depths, says @SPSmith11. Share on X

Another point of contention with coaches and athletes is the depth that squatting is effective to. As I mentioned above, we use force plates to determine what qualities we need to focus on, but we can also experiment with countermovement depth to better determine how an athlete should approach the test. If an athlete performs better at shallow depths than they do at deep squat jumps, that may dictate a slight change to the programming, but it often just gives us a quantifiable reason to work on jumping at the appropriate countermovement depth. Like variable resistance training, flywheel training can be used at a multitude of depths. While most people prefer to squat shallower and lighter, we also use deep ranges of motion for people who have difficulty achieving similar depths with bar-loaded variations.

Video 2. Deep and heavy flywheel squatting is simple, but yields great results. Focusing on the basics will work immediately and help prepare for advanced exercises later.

Because we are often asked about horizontal exercises in regard to vector training, we find that barbell and band training (supine movements mainly) work best. There has been research from Sophia Nimphus and her colleagues that exposed the limitations of horizontal training in jump performance, and suggested that the barbell was superior to the cable. It’s worth mentioning that most clients who are interested in jump height are also interested in acceleration and speed.

In the study, barbell work improved sprint performance for a much greater distance than forward-stepping cable work, and we’ve found it trickier to train the horizontal vector with the flywheel anyway. Movements that require a long learning process should be worth the time spent, so based on experience and the research findings, we don’t waste a lot of time on it. We spend a considerable amount of time directly on sprint performance and utilize enough movement variation in our training to give us confidence in our programming overall.

Currently, we only have one kBox and one kPulley in our gym, as we feel flywheel training should be monitored for most athletes and not treated like an accessory movement. If, and when, we have more units, we may use the kBox for more general use and accessory patterns, but as of now our kBox training is like Olympic weight training or heavy barbell work— you can’t look the other way and hope it’s done well.

A PR doesn’t happen every day, but a standard should be set when using certain equipment, says @SPSmith11. Share on X

The kMeter is our compliance solution and creates a fail-safe way to ensure effort. Not only do we expect the efforts to look a certain way, but the output must resemble the athletes’ capabilities. If they reach a certain peak output on a good day, we should expect them to be working around or above that number to hope for anything meaningful to result. A PR doesn’t happen every day, and that is acceptable, but a standard should be set when using certain equipment. Let them know they need to earn the right to use it through hard work.

Can You Jump Too Much?

We used a lot of jumps and plyo work in our programming already, so it only made sense to see where we could include or modify what we were doing and take advantage of the tools we had. We are happy with our jumping progressions, but were initially concerned with the potential problems that could pop up if we added to what we were already doing. Due to the mechanics of the exercises, we assumed there would be a noticeable increase in patella- or Achilles-related complaints, but we have found the opposite is true.

We have used the kBox and kPulley quite successfully in reducing knee and Achilles pain in many athletes, and the incorporation of long, moderately loaded sets have seemed to help the most. There’s a reason they call the injury “jumper’s knee,” and what we learned this year is that decreasing jump training or reducing volume isn’t as effective as preparing an athlete to withstand the stressors they will face. In the winter months, when running in the grass isn’t possible for most athletes in the Northeast, a strong set of tendons pays off big time.

We have used the #kBox and #kPulley successfully to reduce knee and Achilles pain in many athletes, says @SPSmith11. Share on X

For the rehab or prehab side of flywheel use, in regard to jumping and avoiding knee issues, we move between starting off with flywheels and finishing with them. Some clients see better results when they “activate,” for lack of a better term, prior to jumping, and some do well with simply adding a good amount of volume to wrap up a leg day. When injuries, whether lower body or even upper body (collarbone or shoulder surgery), require removing jumps altogether, it is possible to replace them with lighter, faster flywheel work. It’s not even close to the velocity you’ll get with jumping, but the improvements you can gain in eccentric strength and propulsion are worth the inclusion.

Video 3. Athletes can use high velocity and various depths to elicit the training adaptations needed to make improvements in squatting and jumping. A light inertial load is great for athletes who are fresh but find plyometrics a little too demanding for the day.

Lastly, the flywheel can be used in complex or contrast training along with jumping to bring the programming to the next level. This, as I’ll discuss in more depth below, is a great tool for performance, but also as a means of reducing the number of actual jumps an athlete needs to do. By using the flywheel for the heavier portion and jumping for the faster portion of the contrast or complex, you can achieve the desired result without additional foot contacts or impacts. Some athletes will do both flywheel training and plyometrics with no signs of wear and tear, because the potentially hazardous loading of the knee and ankle is lessened without reducing the amount of necessary stress on the tendons as a whole.

Contrast and Complex Training for Jump Performance

There is probably a more “cerebral” method of breaking down the programming, but we’ve simplified and refined the process with a basic decision-making tree. This is just an option of ours, but it’s likely the most useful one for other coaches.

• If an athlete lacks general strength, we don’t worry too much about complexes or flywheel programming. We can use both tactics, but not much beyond ensuring they are doing the exercises right and can perform other movements without any equipment.
• Athletes who can lift well with traditional barbells, but have poor eccentric abilities, will have a healthy dose of flywheel patterns. We typically see poor eccentric abilities in people who used to deadlift often and spent less time using squats, Nordics, or jumping in their training.
• Injured athletes who need to jump to compete are perfect candidates for complex or contrast work with flywheel training. Nothing beats a return to play program that actually improves an athlete’s performance, and isoinertial resistance can be a huge help in this process.
• Advanced athletes sometimes need to move beyond what got them to that point. Adding contrast/complex training is a normal addition to these programs, but at times it’s not enough. Flywheels can sometimes replace the majority of traditional movements when that small fraction of an improvement might make all the difference in an elite athlete’s training.

In terms of the actual training, there are many ways to skin a cat (what an odd expression). We try to use our testing and profiling protocols to determine what methods work best for each client. We often program the different methods in a block periodization scheme and use the appropriate tool for the current block.

During accumulation or heavy stress phases, we may use high inertia with low inertia contrast work, and during speed or peaking phases, we will probably program heavy fast work with jumps, as it applies more directly to our desired outcome. Here are the combinations we see as most useful in terms of general training and flywheel jump programming:

• High-Inertia Flywheel followed by Low-Inertia Fast Flywheel
• Heavy Work (Traditional Barbell or High-Inertia Flywheel) followed by Jumps
• Heavy Fast Work (Olympics or Loaded Jumps) followed by Light Fast Work (Jumps or Low-Inertia Fast Flywheel)
• RFD (Barbell/Strength or Squat Jump) followed by Rebound (Jumps or Low-Inertia Fast Flywheel)

All of these options are effective when programmed appropriately. We have experimented with clustering barbell RFD work with flywheel for advanced athletes, which seems promising. For now, the primary goal is just ensuring the flywheel training that is in a program is done well and consistently enough for our athletes. It’s easy to get caught into the minutiae of training, but you’ll never know when something works really well unless you experiment a little, and the experiments should last longer than a day (unless safety is the issue).

What About Other Exercises?

Nobody cares about training differently—they really just want to train better. The first question I had with flywheels is what did they offer that dumbbells could not? That point was already covered earlier in the science side, but with all of the other options, such as band assistance and eccentric drop jumps, why use flywheels to jump better and not true jump exercises? The answer is we will always use a mix of methods to get results, but we must decide what is a priority and what is nice to do in theory.

Nobody cares about training differently—they really just want to train better, says @SPSmith11. Share on X

If an athlete has good eccentric abilities but poor vertical velocity and poor capacity to generate a very rapid rate in force, we will spend more time training faster and less time on the ground with exercises that express speed. In our experience, the time frames for a kBox squat are too long to improve reactivity, but they do shape a large capacity to train reactivity more. To make things simple for a new coach, we just tell them the kBox bridges the gap well and it trains the redirection of momentum better.

Video 4. Contrast training is popular, but you’ll only know if it’s appropriate if you measure. Testing athletes after a set of flywheel squats on a force plate helps identify which trainees may respond better or could benefit from conventional training.

Regular plyometrics is a priority supplement to isoinertial training. The principle of specificity holds true with rapid sporting actions and flywheels won’t stand up to the test completely. It’s not that flywheel training doesn’t work if performed alone, it’s that it works best by tying other means of training together.

#Flywheel training works if performed alone, but works best when tied with other training means, says @SPSmith11. Share on X

Loaded jumps are similar to fast kBox squats, but they are not the same. Regular plyometrics are much faster, and barbell movements may look similar, but they are not even close to the same when you look at the line plots of the force plate. Anyone can load a jump—making the load work for them better is what matters. Jumping is a skill, but just performing vertical jump testing may not make you jump higher like rehearsing sprinting does. Jump training, not jump testing, is the key to improvement. We jump. We jump unloaded, loaded, reactively, from a dead stop, paired with heavy work, and paired with flywheels. But the bottom line is, we jump.

One thing we don’t do is jump with elastic bands. It’s not that it doesn’t have some value or science backing it, it’s just not currently worth the investment, when it can easily be replaced by dumbbells/barbells/flywheels and some creativity.

Jump Higher, Farther, and Safer

Many of our athletes made great gains in their jump performance before we had flywheels or any fancy equipment. We know that athletes everywhere are making improvements without any tools, but it’s not just about improving. Athletes invest so much time and effort into training that it’s our job as the professionals to seek out the best possible outcome, not just acceptable progress. With only so much training time after school for athletes, or in the off-seasons with our pro guys, we want to make sure they are explosive and reactive when they land.

It’s our job as the professionals to seek out best possible outcomes, not just acceptable progress, says @SPSmith11. Share on X

Don’t just add kBox training and expect it to do all of the work for you. We think screening eccentric abilities with jump profiling and training hard with the basics can make a big difference, but pairing exercises that have high speeds and unique qualities can be a huge benefit to an athlete’s program. We recommend using the kBox or a flywheel system for anyone seeking jump improvements and anyone who could use some quality strength gains (hint: that’s just about everyone).

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

The use of thermography is not new to sport, but more teams and clinics are adopting the technology because of our recent advancements in improving outcomes. Historically, thermography was seen as a promising technique and not a best practice. I have used thermography for years and understand its limitations, but also its potential. Injury reduction and athletic performance improvements in sport are sometimes seen as mirages, but when combined with clinical evaluation, thermography is practical and effective.

ThermoHuman, the company that I am a founder of, is the leader in sports thermography. We have serviced teams and federations for years, and now have clients in the MLB, NBA, and MLS, and individual athletes in the NFL and NHL. The goal of our company, and this article, is to show why thermography is effective, and explain the opportunity to coaches and medical professionals.

What Is Sports Thermography?

Thermography has many names outside of sport, such as infrared thermography and thermal imaging. Professionals have likely seen thermography used in surveillance or other fields like emergency response. Those in sports performance have used thermography to conduct research and help with monitoring athletes though thermal imaging. Sports thermography is an indirect measurement; meaning the camera detects radiation emitted by a body or structure. Human beings are warm-blooded animals, so they are easily monitored with thermogenic images or videos. A recording with thermography is called a thermogram.

We believe that thermograms, combined with clinical evaluation, can help reduce injuries. Share on X

Sports have used thermography to monitor change with athletes, ranging from exercise responses to injury prevention methods. ThermoHuman believes that, combined with clinical evaluation, thermograms can be used to help reduce injuries before they become problematic. Thermography is not able to predict with certainty that an injury is going to occur, but it can be used in conjunction with other approaches to improve the outcomes of a monitoring program.

Video 1. (In Spanish) Thermography uses infrared cameras to collect athlete data, and then analyzes the information with customized software. Based on the changes in temperature, and on the interpretation, teams can measure patterns of change and make more confident decisions. For non-Spanish speakers, watch the system in action as the information shared on the video is explained in this article.

The human body is a very intricate collection of networks and systems that emit heat, and those temperature changes and fluctuations are clues to possible physiological changes. The radiation of heat can be interpreted with the training to hint at possible issues with function and health status, specifically chronic injury or possible injury risk. A change in skin temperature could just be a normal variance of the human body, or if the pattern matches clinical findings, a possible injury. Most of the research with thermography in sports attempted to connect core temperature with skin temperature and athlete work rates, but over the last few years thermography has seen an increase in medical uses.

What Does ThermoHuman Do?

ThermoHuman is both a software and an education company, not a camera manufacturer. We do use FLIR technology for our customers, but we are interested in figuring out how to interpret the data better and what to do with the data post analysis. Our software is about quantitative change, not interpreting information like sonography or magnetic resonance imaging.

Technically speaking, thickness and sizing information can be found with those technologies, but those imaging techniques are usually preferred to help diagnose an injury using qualitative approaches. ThermoHuman assists professionals by automating the process as much as possible, and educates practitioners on capturing technique along with proper analysis.

ThermoHuman is a tool for clinicians or very educated support staff, not interns or coaches without education. A thermogram from a camera with our software asks better questions—it doesn’t give comprehensive answers. A thermogram is a representation and summary of heat radiating from an athlete’s body; it’s not a solution that can alert of an injury or weakness directly. Acute pathologies, chronic injuries, and pain perception require clinical evaluation by medical staff, but athlete injuries that are not symptomatic or showing up in functional evaluations are worth exploring with ThermoHuman software and education.

How ThermoHuman Can Help Sports Professionals

ThermoHuman has four effective ways to support player health and performance, and we have seen great success with monitoring and medical divisions of teams. Thermography in sport is still evolving, but it is strongly suited to help the fast-paced environment of world-class sports. Medical staff are mainly concerned with reducing injuries, but when injuries do occur, they want the rehabilitation process to be more effective so re-injury or cascading injury doesn’t strike later.

Thermography is strongly suited to help the fast-paced environment of world-class sports. Share on X

Initial assessments are the first step faced by all teams and clinicians. Screening, specifically orthopedic assessment, is useful for documentation but is not always effective for identifying injuries or specific injury risks. Baseline information using ThermoHuman is important for vascular responses, creating an important profile that every professional should have. Vascular defects are complicated matters and should be added to the discussion of player health and wellness.

The second area that ThermoHuman excels in is injury management. If an injury does occur, monitoring the advancements in rehabilitation requires a way to track change without even more overloading of the injury site. We do appreciate that muscle performance with strength testing has value in sport clinics, but in combination with thermography the information is even more insightful, such as return from ACL surgery. Tracking a complex injury with an athlete making millions of euros is a very stressful process that requires as much additional information as possible.

Load assimilation is an exciting metric that ThermoHuman specializes in. Player workload is usually very arbitrary, meaning the measurements are not specific to areas of the body. Using the software to add anatomical landmarks enables coaches and medical staff to observe the time course of heavy training and competition during the season. When areas appear to be overloaded, very clear adjustments to sport training or resistance training become easy with our reporting. In combination with GPS tracking and load calculations, we believe that ThermoHuman adds more possibilities to keep athletes training without resorting to resting unnecessarily.

Injury prevention is the final area in which we are seeing growth and success. ThermoHuman is an additional layer that can increase the success rate of injury prevention if used consistently. Asymmetry is a very contextual measure with thermography, since an imbalance requires more than just a comparison between limbs or sides. Having injury history, training information, and other data can explain if an asymmetry is acceptable or if a true concern requires a physiotherapist’s attention. Athletes are able to compensate and manage asymmetries, but over time fatigue and heavy loads result in compromised states that leave an athlete prone to muscle tears or joint injuries.

These four approaches to athlete performance and health improve every year. ThermoHuman is a new company and we are rapidly updating the software as the hardware improves. New research and new methods of athlete support will also shape our software and education, so expect us to continue to refine our technology. 

ThermoHuman’s Advantages and Limitations

Sports thermography has a lot of advantages and, of course, limitations. Starting with the drawbacks, you must have training in order to collect the data, and even more training to properly use the information once you collect it from the cameras. The software helps improve the process for organizing the thermographic readings with reporting, but it requires medical expertise to know what to look for. Right now, we only recommend the product’s use in sports medicine and the applied sciences. High-performance coaches should be aware of our system, but the responsibilities of using it will likely be in the hands of the medical division of a team or university.

Its speed in collecting data makes thermography very useful and powerful in sport. Share on X

The speed of data collection is why thermography is so useful and powerful in sport. Within seconds, an image is captured and digitally saved for further analysis. An entire body can be measured in a few minutes and analyzed just as quickly. In addition to the speed of data capture and analysis, the use of sports thermography has further benefits to the user:

• The process is completely non-invasive and painless.
• Thermography is passive—the athlete requires no active effort to collect data.
• Information can be merged with other data streams for cross-validation.
• Data is longitudinal, so trends and patterns can be extracted from the recordings.

Of course, these customer demands are just the tip of the iceberg, but to me they are the foundational directions that lead to the right answers. Like all data and clinical evaluations, cross-referencing other data is suggested to get to the bottom of the problems faced by professionals.

There are limitations with thermography, as it’s not only an indirect measure of body heat, but many of the possible interpretations are indirect as well. Thus, without careful analysis, the use of thermography is extremely limited. If they don’t have the training and clinical skills, practitioners can’t use sports thermography alone.

Other limitations are also environmental, meaning a protocol must adhere to the requirements of proper data collection. Each athlete must remain still and follow instructions or possible artifacts and interference could occur from outside variables. Cameras are more sensitive than a decade ago, but with technical advancements, the process does increase the demand on compliance with end users. Overall, the challenges of thermography should not be an issue for those who adopt the technology, but it’s only fair to warn you that while the benefits are convenience and speed, the method also comes with responsibilities.

Scientific Evidence for Thermography in Sport

A thorough look at the research on thermography does show problems with the interpretation of skin temperature when used as a summary of an athlete’s health status. I want to embrace those limitations again here, with explanations for why the research is sometimes conflicting and difficult to understand. The first step for new users is to understand the science of heat biologically, and then we advance to sports performance and sports medicine.

The first step for new thermography users is to understand the science of heat biologically. Share on X

Biologically radiating heat is a natural process that constantly adjusts for internal physiological factors that occur in everyday life. An athlete drinking a cold beverage will change their core temperature, and this may or may not change skin temperature. An athlete with poor circulation of the legs may feel cold, while an athlete of similar build and ability may be sweating. Thermoregulation and physical responses are all unique and each athlete should be seen as an individual being with patterns that are unique.

The validity and reliability of skin temperature with healthy athletes is a question that usually comes up early in conversation. My colleagues and I researched this question and we agree that sometimes readings are problematic, and that’s why our software was designed to manage those conditions. It’s not perfect, but with the mortality risks premature infants face, hospitals are investigating FLIR thermographic cameras as a trustworthy approach to real-time monitoring.

Post training or competition requires a different approach to interpretation, as workload and the response to the strains of exercise add more analysis to the process. Highly trained and untrained athletes respond differently to exercise, and subjective monitoring seems to have a relationship with thermography data as well. Case studies on soccer athletes were useful in explaining the recovery time from practice loads, and repeated monitoring may be a great solution for those that play sports where tracking running isn’t as effective, such as baseball and cricket.

Structural differences in athletes can change work rates and overload patterns, such as the equinus and non-equinus conditions of the foot. A current study with soccer athletes demonstrated how thermography can be used with groups of players to monitor the stress on the gastrocnemius and Achilles tendon. Foot eversion was researched as well with runners, but the relationships were too weak to use as a monitoring solution.

Monitoring chronic and acute injury with thermography is where education transforms the technology into a practical and effective strategy. Pre-scanning athletes when limitations are known is useful, especially when measurements are combined with structural modalities such as traditional medical imaging. ThermoHuman’s goal is to make sports thermography a part of every athlete’s routine. I realize it’s a very small part of the picture, but it’s a real opportunity for teams to reduce injuries. Proper training, comprehensive monitoring, and highly educated staff help a successful team win games and reduce injuries, and thermography fits into the methodology. Each year, sports thermography evolves and improves so that it’s faster, more accurate, and less expensive.

In addition to the above scientific references, I recommend reading these declarations by my colleagues in sports thermography.

How Teams Use ThermoHuman

Teams are implementing ThermoHuman to manage complex situations and administer athlete monitoring with greater precision and speed. The best way to apply ThermoHuman is to have it compliment what your team does and not force it to take over the monitoring process.

A medical device is a tool for practitioners, so the process should only expand with the addition of thermal imaging and not really change much. The right way of using ThermoHuman is to integrate it proactively and commit to the system you find is manageable in the long run. A few teams utilize ThermoHuman to handle very complex injuries, such as athletes who have gone through multiple surgeries, but it’s also powerful for large teams that are young and are relatively healthy. Success with ThermoHuman relies on being organized and having a plan.

Sports thermography is most powerful when it’s used continuously. Share on X

The clinical process of integrating sports thermography benefits teams, as it ensures the performance of a best practice with conventional care, and adds in a second round of athlete examination. An initial assessment is useful, as explained earlier, but sports thermography is most powerful when it’s used continuously. Due to the fact it is visual, it may seem to be in the same category as medical imaging, but that is not the case.

Thermography is, again, quantification of physiological responses, and it’s up to the practitioners to determine if false negatives and false positives are due to confounding variables or the limitations of emitted radiation. A thermogram captured over time reveals how injuries and possible pathologies are trending; it doesn’t diagnose the injury or directly predict risk without interpretation and other information.

Sport science is using sports thermography to manage workload responses with more resolution for athletes. We support the concept that player tracking and other technologies are excellent for monitoring load. In addition to the collection of data, statistical evaluation of the workload is also proven to be effective in managing risk. Our issue with those methods is that they are very general and non-specific, making them limited in practice.

For example, a body may fatigue in a pattern that can tell us how a program can be altered so an athlete can practice without increasing risk. Another point is that some athletes who are not load-tolerant are usually held back by an injury or past surgery that’s slow to heal. Therefore, summary models of workload are not useful for veteran athletes, or those who are fit overall but managing a small painful condition.

A few users are privately experimenting with ThermoHuman to assist in recovery approaches. While we educate our users, a strength of ThermoHuman is that we also learn from our users, especially those who are successful and finding original ways to use our service. The collective intelligence enables us to expand our reach and refine the process each year.

How to Work with ThermoHuman

We at ThermoHuman welcome questions and discussion about thermography in sport. We also realize that ThermoHuman is not a great fit for everyone, but do believe that every team can benefit from the power and convenience of thermographic imaging on a routine basis. ThermoHuman won’t do the work for you, but it will streamline and improve the process so that precious time and energy can go toward better support of athletes.

My hope is that the biological sciences help improve the capability of thermography in sport. Share on X

For years, we have seen successful outcomes by working with teams that are proactive and patient with our technology. If you are interested in demonstrations, I recommend watching the videos of our system in practice to understand how convenient our solution is. If you are skeptical about the effectiveness, I welcome you to look at the best available science to become familiar with the potential and limitations of thermography. My hope is that the biological sciences help improve the capability of thermography in sport, and ThermoHuman will be ready for those advancements.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

Regardless of where you are in your career, the interview process is extremely important. While a lot of colleges offer a career center or similar services to help you organize your resume, there is no blueprint for how to interview for a college strength and conditioning position. In this article, I list ten ways to navigate the interview process professionally and provide examples from my experiences with phone and in-person interviews that will you help you stand out from the pack.

Know What Position You Applied For & Who You Are Talking To

I completely understand and respect that young coaches are applying for 10, 20, or even 30 jobs at a time when trying to land an opportunity. That, however, is not an excuse to avoid doing your homework when you land a phone interview. Without fail, two of the interview questions will be: What do you know about this school, and why are you interested in coming here? I’m always impressed with someone who digs into our athletics mission and vision or did some research on the teams and their success, and I’m equally unimpressed when I get a generic or lazy response.

Here are some recent examples that I’ve heard during phone interviews: “To be completely honest with you, coach, I don’t even know where the school is. Where is it again?” “I have applied to so many jobs, it’s hard for me to keep track.” These can disqualify you immediately. You do not need to recite word for word the department philosophy and the head strength coach’s bio, but try to educate yourself on the school if you want to give yourself a chance.

Research the sport programs' current records, the school location, and conference they compete in, says @GreeneStrength. Share on X

Tip: Research things like the current records of the sport programs, the school location, and the conference they compete in. Also do a Google search to see if the school has received any national attention. It will take you no more than 10-20 minutes and will give you the information necessary to ask the right questions and come off prepared for the interview.

Answer the Phone When Your Time is Scheduled

Answering the phone is the easiest part of the interview, yet some still struggle to do this. I’ve had one candidate ignore the call, then text and say, “can we talk in 20 minutes?” I had another forget the time zone difference when I specified it in the email. Again, this can be an immediate disqualification. If you can’t stick to the time and be punctual for a phone meeting, how can I trust you to do so in the weight room? Keep in mind, coaches may be interviewing 10-20 candidates so it’s easy to eliminate a person if they can’t keep to their time.

Tip: Treat the phone interview as if you were doing an in-person interview. Throw on a suit and take the phone call in a quiet place where you can concentrate. Leave notes out and have a pen and pad ready so you can write down important information. Most importantly, be ready 15 minutes before the interview starts, turn your phone on, and be prepared for the phone call.

Avoid Swearing

It is always a turn off to me when a candidate starts to swear, whether in-person or on the phone. In an interview, you need to act like a professional. If you swear in one of our first conversations, I’ll believe you might do the same in front of a coach or administrator.

Tip: Treat an interview the same way you would if you were meeting your girlfriend’s or boyfriend’s parents for the first time. Even if you felt comfortable in the first 10-15 minutes, you probably wouldn’t start dropping F-bombs at the dinner table. Be sharp.

Have Questions Ready

Having questions ready shows that you did your homework and are interested in learning more about the school, program, and philosophy. Although some of your questions might get answered during the flow of the discussion,spend the time and ask well-thought-out questions that separate you from other candidates.

Questions about the school, program, and philosophy will separate you from other candidates, says @GreeneStrength. Share on X

Tip: Ask questions that show you did your homework. For example, if you see in the bio that the coach running the interview started as a GA and worked their way up to the head position at the same school, ask what their journey was like and how the program has grown during that time. Questions like this will set you apart.

Have a Strategy for When to Ask About Pay

If the first question you ask during a phone or in-person interview is “how much does the position pay?” you run the risk of rubbing the hiring committee the wrong way. This occurs in other professions as well, and it sends the wrong message. If it is a phone interview or in the early stages, your focus should be on learning more about the university and the athletic department; the payment details will come later if you’re fortunate enough to move forward in the process.

Tip: Generally, compensation does not come up during the interview process until you receive an offer. Be patient and research comparable positions and the cost of living in the area so you can professionally and confidently negotiate the salary when you receive an offer.

Dress the Part; When in Doubt, Overdress

Everyone talks about making a great first impression. The first opportunity you’ll have to do so is when you walk into the room for your interview. Whether you’re applying for an internship, GA position, assistant, or director role, dress as if you’re attempting to land your dream job.

Dress well and bring along workout clothes in case you're asked to demonstrate exercises, says @GreeneStrength. Share on X

Tip: Bring a pair of sneakers, shorts, and a t-shirt in a bag. On some interviews, the committee may ask you to demonstrate exercises or invite you to join the staff for a workout, which is a fantastic way to get to know the staff. On one interview I was asked to lead a group on the fly from start to finish, so be prepared for anything.

Do Not Lie on Your Resume

Everyone makes themselves sound a little better on their resumes—I get that. Outright lying, however, will expose you and eliminate you not only from the job you’re applying for, but also for future positions with anyone in that particular coach’s network.

I had a GA candidate list a school as their current job on their resume and went into specific detail on the phone about their experience there, even going so far as to tell me a specific story to make a point about a question I had asked. Little did this candidate know that I had a contact at the school in question, and I immediately picked up the phone to follow up for more information. Come to find out, this candidate had never stepped foot on the campus and was scheduled to start employment there a few weeks later.

I had another candidate take it upon themselves to change their title on their resume. They listed they were the assistant director of strength and conditioning when they were a graduate assistant per their supervisor. Assume the place you are applying is going to call everyone you’ve ever worked for or with during your career—because they will!

Tip: Plain and simple—be honest. Coaches who are hiring across the country are looking for intangibles: hardworking, motivated, and hungry individuals who are passionate and care about the athletes they work with and the job that they do. A slight title adjustment to spice up your internship experience isn’t going to land you the job, but it can prevent you from getting it if the coach does their homework.

Focus your attention on making a huge impact wherever you are, and the staff you work with will go above and beyond to help you. If I have an intern or GA that does a great job for us, I will do everything in my power to help them land their next opportunity. A strong recommendation from your boss or sport coaches is 100 times more valuable than words on a piece of paper.

Come Prepared for Your On-Campus Interview

Find the facility. The opportunity to land an on-campus interview is special. Hundreds and hundreds of resumes are read, and 20-30 phone calls are made before an on-campus interview takes place. Whether you get the job or not, you have a tremendous opportunity to leave a lasting impression. The first step toward making a great first impression is finding the facility!

You’ll likely receive directions to the location—however, most weight rooms on campus don’t come with an address you can throw into the GPS. The last thing you want to do is call the hiring manager while you circle campus trying to find the building. Drive to campus the day before if possible and take your time navigating around so you can find the correct building and avoid any chaos the morning of your visit.

Give a Good Handshake. Another important factor when trying to make a good first impression is how you shake hands. Do not give the “wet noodle” handshake and stare at the floor. Make eye contact and give a firm handshake.

Address the Committee Appropriately. Remembering names is also important during the interview process. Before the interview, look at the agenda for the day and put a face to the names of the people you will meet by reviewing the staff directory on the school’s website. Sometimes you’ll be introduced to someone quickly in the morning before a more formal sit-down with that same person in the afternoon. Keep in mind, this is an interview. If you’re dealing with coaches, always refer to them as “Coach____” and call administrators “Mr._____” or “Ms.____.” Unless someone insists you call them by their first name, stick to these guidelines.

Tailor to the School. Tailor your programs to the school and its sports. I find many people do a nice job of preparing packets or booklets for committee members on the hiring process, and it helps separate you from those who do not. However, take the time to add in the school’s current logos and colors.

When we host candidates for on-campus interviews, I’ll ask them to provide sample programs, and many bring copies of their current school’s programs without adjusting for our school. Additionally, write your sample programs with the sports you might be working with or the coaches that might be on the committee in mind.

For example, if the soccer coach, softball coach, and hockey coach are all on the committee, it would be wise to provide a sample program for each. Something simple like a 4-week off-season plan for soccer, a 4-week in-season plan for softball, and a 4-week speed program for hockey will cover your bases and allow the coaches to see that you can adjust your program based on the demands of the sport and account for different times of the year.

Follow-Ups

Follow-ups go hand-in-hand with first impressions, but they deserve their own section. I have not met another coach or administrator who does not value a follow-up note or an email. Whether it’s a phone call or in-person interview, take a few minutes to follow up with the people you met or spoke with.

I have not met a coach or administrator who does not value a follow-up note or email, says @GreeneStrength. Share on X

I also find the timing is important. It’s best to follow-up the night of the interview or the following day, as you don’t want to wait too long. I also recommend sending a thank you note in the mail to the person running the search and possibly their supervisor in addition to the email (i.e., the head strength coach and the athletic director). It could take a few business days, and a lot of schools have an old-school mail room so it may be even longer. Therefore, the email is critical to send ASAP. Another thing to keep in mind is to personalize each email. Below is an example:

Dear Mr. G,

I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to meet with me and talk to me about the position at _____ University. It was great to meet you and hear your perspective after 17 years at ________ University. I really enjoyed learning about your mission to transform the life of each student-athlete and your plans to build a brand new indoor facility. It would be an honor to join your team, and I appreciate you considering me for this position. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,

___________

It’s concise and highlights 1-2 things that you spoke about in the interview. Keep in mind many of these people share office space and will talk about the follow-up note you sent to them. If it is a “copy and paste” message sent to each person, it will carry less weight.

You Are Always On an Interview

Whenever I go to a conference or clinic, I make it a point to talk to as many young coaches as possible. When I meet someone who impresses me, I make a note, and when I have a position open or someone in my network does, I may contact them. At the same time, I make a note of those who I feel would not be good candidates for future positions.

Two of the questions I usually ask young coaches at conferences is: Where are you currently and what are some things that you and the staff are doing? It’s disappointing how many young coaches will start talking poorly about their current employer without blinking an eye.

Here are two recent responses:

• “We do a lot of old-school training, but that is because my boss is a dinosaur. I am hoping he retires or leaves.”
• “We do my boss’s program because he is a micromanager. I don’t get to write things the way I want so I am on the hunt for another job. Do you know of anything open?”

These responses came within ten minutes of meeting me and with disregard for the fact that I could have known their supervisor. Loyalty is very important in this business, and every head coach wants to hire loyal staff members.

Loyalty is very important, and every head coach wants to hire loyal staff members, says @GreeneStrength. Share on X

It is the exact reason young coaches get so upset when they apply for 100 jobs and don’t receive a single response. Wrong or right, your two years of experience, ten certifications, and a master’s degree are thrown out the window if the other candidate comes from a trusted colleague or happens to be former athlete or intern.

One day you'll get your shot, you'll have your staff, and you'll want that staff to have your back, says @GreeneStrength. Share on X

The term loyalty is thrown around a lot, but many do not understand how important it is. Keep in mind: one day you will get your shot, one day you will have your staff, and one day you will want that staff to have your back.

Regardless of where you are as an assistant or GA, chances are good you will have things you will want to do differently than your boss does and that’s okay. Make notes of the good things your current supervisor does while also making notes on the things you would do differently. During your work as a GA or assistant start to develop a manual that you would use to manage your department if you were to get the opportunity to be a director.

Starting this process early will build your confidence and prepare you for the future without dwelling on the things you don’t like about your current job. Preparing for what you shouldn’t do is equally as important as preparing for what you should do.

Recap

I listed these examples to share some of the things to avoid during the interview process. The strength and conditioning field is more competitive than ever, with more and more professionals competing for the same jobs around the country. We have all heard the phrase “control what you can control” and that could not be truer for the interview process. If it comes down to you and one other person, don’t let the lack of attention to detail be the reason you don’t land your next job. Final review:

• Know what you are applying for and who you are talking to
• Answer the phone when your time is scheduled
• Avoid swearing and be professional
• Have well-thought-out questions prepared
• Have a strategy for when to ask about pay
• Dress the part
• Do not lie!
• Come prepared for your on-campus interview
• Follow-up
• Loyalty is very important—you are always on an interview

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

At SimpliFaster, our gaze is forward. Training. Technology. Speed. Every day we ask: What are the best ways to go from where you are to where you want to be? As 2018 winds to a close, however, we thought we’d indulge in a rare backward glance to survey the year that was. Even then, in order to know where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve been, so this review will also double as a preview of what to expect from us in 2019.

Every day we ask, ‘What are the best ways to go from where you are to where you want to be?’ Share on X

Whether looking back or looking forward, SimpliFaster offers an accessible platform supporting coaches, athletes, and high-performance professionals along the micro and macro paths of athletic achievement, ranging from “one day better” and autoregulation to Olympic cycles and long-term athletic development. That open platform continues to grow through the ongoing evolution of our blog, the expansion of our online resources, the increasing line of performance equipment available in our web shop, and the broadening scope of our sponsorships and partnerships with leaders in the field.

Where do we go next? Here’s where we’ve been the past 12 months.

SimpliFaster Blog

Chris Korfist kicked off 2018 at SimpliFaster with the phrase “I thought I knew all of the butt exercises” in his post “Top 5 Glute Exercises for Sprinters.” There it is—whether you’re training a slate of elite sprinters or a crew of new clients harboring January 1st resolutions, whatever you thought you knew, there’s always more. Or, at least what you thought you knew can be re-examined, with enough of a different twist to make what was old into something new again. Over the course of the next 12 months, 261 original posts followed, presenting a range of authors, training methods, and performance technologies that would be impossible to do justice to in the space of a few short paragraphs.

When aspiring authors reach out to us and ask what we are looking for on the blog, we tend to respond simply: “Value.” Solutions have enduring value. Here’s a problem, here’s how I tried to solve it, here are the outcomes I observed as a result. Whether the challenge at hand involves general training for sport, properly using high-performance technologies, or specifically developing faster and more explosive athletes, since the answer to most questions in sport is “it depends,” from those simple foundations (problem-solution-outcome), the possibilities are limitless.

When aspiring authors ask what we look for on the SimpliFaster blog, we respond simply: ‘Value.’ Share on X

Through the course of 2018—and anticipating 2019, in turn—that enduring value often came via our regular contributors covering their unique areas of expertise. During the year, we featured Carl Valle’s prolific examinations of industry trends, techniques, and topics (“10 Sport Scientists Strength Coaches Need to Know”); William Wayland’s from-the-trenches programming advice (“7 Upper Back Pulling Exercises for Athletes”); Shane Davenport’s creative methods for integrating new equipment and technology in training (“The Top Accommodating Resistance Methods for Strength Coaches”); and Craig Pickering’s deep dives into cutting-edge sports science and research (“Creatine: Not Just for Muscle”).

Call those the “Big Rocks,” if you will—from those jumping-off points, the SimpliFaster blog in 2018 was further propelled by a diverse mix of returning authors and engaging new voices. We championed thought-provoking posts from continuing favorites such as Cameron Josse, Hunter Charneski, and Ken Jakalski; we also introduced proficient authors making their SimpliFaster debuts, including Jeremy Frisch, Nanci Guest, Carmen Pata, and Cody Roberts. Meanwhile, in our Freelap Friday Five series, we offered weekly interviews with top practitioners sharing their own words on the topics that inspire their passion each day, featuring notable conversations with JB Morin, Ken Clark, Michelle Boland, and dozens more.

In addition to coaching philosophies, exercise selection, and best practices, SimpliFaster is dedicated to the tools and technologies that support these methods on the track, in the gym, on the court, or in the lab. These tools may come with a technical manual, but for those still evaluatingwhether to buy or needing suggestions on how to make the best use of the tools they have, SimpliFaster continues to provide “from the horse’s mouth” articles on how to apply top products available on the market. Among the equipment-based posts on the blog in 2018, we featured Fredrik Correa on flywheel training with the kBox, Sean Smith on neck training with Iron Neck, and Eric Joly on developing speed on the HiTrainer.

Something we missed in 2018? Something to add in 2019? Feel free to send your firsthand insights on training, technology, sports, and speed to [email protected]. We consider new submissions year-round and our editorial team of Rachel L. MacAulay, Jeanie Simoncic, Joel Smith, and Nathan Huffstutter will work to bring your words to life.

SimpliFaster Resources

Back to that concept of value. All the coaching experience and insight in the world is useless without athletes to coach. You don’t need us to tell you that it can be a volatile industry, and in 2018 we added our Job Board to the SimpliFaster platform. It’s an easy-to-navigate, reverse-chronological listing with over 3,000 open positions for sport coaches, PE teachers, sports scientists, strength and conditioning coaches, and interns. Positions in track and field, soccer, volleyball, swimming, tennis, football, basketball, baseball, lacrosse— you name it, across the United States there is a demand for coaching talent.

For both job seekers and job posters, the job board is free to register for and use, with positions sub-categorized by sport and an additional section to post resumes. Visit the job board and see what’s out there.

Beyond the hiring front, in 2018 SimpliFaster also expanded our clinic calendar, featuring a monthly view of USATF educational offerings, TSAC courses, NSCA conferences, CSCS exams, and much more. Have a look to see what’s on the horizon and stay on top of the opportunities available in 2019.

SimpliFaster Store

In 2018, SimpliFaster added more and more products to the line of high-performance technology and equipment available in our online shop. The intent is, once again, value: Products we believe are the “gold standard” in their space, available to coaches, athletes, and performance professionals in a single location, with the customer support and follow-through that are the hallmarks of SimpliFaster.

The SimpliFaster store features high-performance products that are the gold standard in their space. Share on X

In addition to touchstone products like the Freelap timing system, GymAware’s velocity-based training, and Exxentric’s kBox and kPulley, the SimpliFaster store features the ability to browse and buy from 1080 Motion, Assess2Perform, Hawkin Dynamics, HiTrainer, MuscleLab, Swift Performance, PNOE, and more.

Sponsorships and Partnerships

Bringing the year full circle, not only did Chris Korfist write our first post of 2018, but the year was also bookended in part by our sponsorship of the Track Football Consortium’s clinic in Tampa, FL, in mid-December. Leading up to the pre-holiday conference, we featured new posts from event founders Chris Korfist (“Microdosing off the Track and the Tools to Make It Work”) and Tony Holler (“Why Coaches Recruit Speed (But Still Neglect It)”), and helped promote TFC events featuring speakers such as Ken Clark, Ron Grigg, Dan Fichter, and Al Leslie.

In 2018, SimpliFaster also continued our enthusiastic sponsorship of the Just Fly Performance Podcast. Joel Smith’s weekly interview series continues to be one of the most valuable online resources available, providing consistent insight into best practices in training from innovative coaches and professionals in a range of sports. Rather than asking boilerplate questions, Joel directs conversations toward those unique areas where each guest is currently pushing the envelope, providing consistent value to his audience in conversations with the likes of Henk Kraaijenhof, John Kiely, Rob Assise, and Cal Dietz.

Joel Smith’s Just Fly Performance Podcast is one of the most valuable online resources available. Share on X

In this past month, we were also pleased to be a sponsor of the online World Speed Summit, hosted by Tyrone Edge and including sessions on speed training with USC Track & Field Head Coach Caryl Smith Gilbert, ALTIS Sprints and Hurdles Coach Chidi Enyia, and previous SimpliFaster contributors including Derek Hansen and Tony Holler.

In addition to championing those providing educational resources in the field and on the web, SimpliFaster further bolstered our output in 2018 via partnerships with ALTIS and Power Lift, who each began to fill out their own pages on the SimpliFaster blog. Over the previous 52 weeks, ALTIS delivered tips on warm-ups and preparation from Chris Miller, the building blocks for a performance culture from Jason Hettler, and a master class in applying the ALTIS “Kinogram” method from Stuart McMillan and Dan Pfaff.

Meanwhile, under the Power Lift banner, in 2018 our friend and frequent contributor Bob Alejo posted articles on grip strength and game-day lifting. He also served as “master of ceremonies” for roundtable discussions covering topics ranging from power development to supplementation strategies, coordinating conversations with members of the Power Lift Educational Board (including Mike Young, Bryan Mann, and Doug Kalman).

Onward. Forward.

Just as Chris Korfist provided an appropriate kickoff to 2018, Jamie Smith of The U of Strength offered a fitting summation in answering the fifth and final question of our last Freelap Friday Five of the calendar year. (Smith was so comprehensive in his approach to tackling each question that we split the interview into two parts.)

“I look at resistance training and all of the varying weight room movements as tools that play a part in developing a robust and resilient athlete. When coaching an expansive range of different sports and skill levels, it’s essential to have an extensive toolbox.” 

Thank you for being with us on the journey through 2018. We look forward to doing our part in expanding everyone’s toolboxes as we move into the New Year.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

The commercialization of sport has led to an increased emphasis on getting an edge over the opponent in any (mostly legal) way possible. Historically, this was achieved through improved training techniques aimed at enhancing physical performance or reducing injury rates. Over the last few years, however, there has been a focus on how the backroom staff collects and utilizes data. This has naturally fed into an increased emphasis on how data is used to make decisions, and more and more sport scientists are tending to “borrow” from other disciplines, such as computer science and statistics, to help them make better use of this data.

As a result, we’ve seen a rise of the data scientist—or at least sports scientists that are comfortable in using data—within sport, with some prominent examples being Mladen Jovanovic, whose website I fully recommend, and Sam Robertson, a researcher from Victoria University who is embedded within the Western Bulldogs AFL team as Head of Research and Innovation. Additionally, a number of leading sports organizations, such as the New South Wales Institute of Sport and UK Sport, have recently advertised for data science positions.

People involved in sport should have some idea of what data scientists add to athlete preparation, says @craig100m. Share on X

Consequently, it is probably a good idea for people involved in sport to at least have some idea of what these roles add to the athlete preparation sphere. In this article, I aim to explore machine learning and its close cousin, data mining, in order to shed some light on what information we can expect to gain from these practices that are emerging in sport.

What Is Machine Learning?

First, some definitions. Machine learning refers to the process by which a computer system utilizes data to train itself to make better decisions. So, if we input a set of data—such as that from a GPS system—along with injury data across a season, the software will try to create a model that allows it to predict which players got injured. We can then feed in additional information, such as the next season’s injury data, and the computer will again try to predict injuries—but this time, it will also look for corrections in the calculations it makes in order to enhance its predictions. What calculations were unnecessary, for example, or which data point was given too much weight previously? We can then add more data, such as player wellness scores, ratings of perceived exertion, etc., and the program will continue to make these calculations, refining its output.

The goal of #machinelearning in sport is to be able to predict what will happen in the future, says @craig100m. Share on X

The aim of this is to be able to predict what will happen in the future: for example, which player from your youth team will become a world-class player? Which type of training is best for a given athlete? How likely is a given person to become injured, and how does this change with exposure to specific types of competition or training?

As such, the quality of the prediction is associated with the quality of data that is put into the machine. Garbage data in will lead to garbage data out. This is where the data mining aspect comes in: Data mining is the extraction of patterns (and therefore knowledge), from large amounts of data. It essentially represents the first aspect of efficient machine learning—which parts of data matter, and which can be discarded?

One of the advantages of the machine learning process within sport is that it allows us to better understand non-linear systems. Biological processes tend not to operate in a linear manner: This is important, because if we can only analyze using linear analysis—such as the “r” in standard correlation calculations—this can hamper our understanding of these processes. As a simple example, let’s take the recent work of Tim Gabbett and his development of the Acute:Chronic workload ratio. Based on the findings of a number of papers, we now understand that both too much and too little training are risk factors for injury.

Applying the #machinelearning process in sport allows us to better understand non-linear systems, says @craig100m. Share on X

If we plot this on a graph, with training load on the x-axis and injury risk on the y-axis, it would not be a linear relationship, but rather a curvilinear relationship in the shape of a U. As such, standard statistical methods for understanding this relationship (i.e., a non-linear relationship) are insufficient, and we need to start to build slightly more complex models. Adding more and more data types—such as wellness, age, previous injury history, sleep duration, and other aspects associated with an increased injury risk—increases the complexity of the modeling required.

Predictive Modeling

Another important aspect to consider is the difference between explaining what has happened and predicting what will happen in future. Explaining why an athlete has previously been injured allows us to identify some potential risk factors for this. Age, for example, has been found to be a risk factor for hamstring injury. As a result, we can state that age is associated with hamstring injury in athletes. But can we then use this information to predict future injury? To do this, we need what is termed a “holdout set,” meaning a set of data that has not been used in the previous statistical model to test the predictive power of that model in the future (the data used to create that model is termed the “training” set).

Obviously, in sport, it is far more important to predict what will happen in the future than explain what has happened in the past. A good example of this is a recent paper from the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. Here, researchers collected data from a group of professional soccer players over the course of five seasons. They collected hamstring injury prevalence and severity, “exposure” time (such as time spent training and playing), anthropometric data, and information on a number of different genes. They then plugged this data into a statistical model, finding that the following were significantly associated with hamstring injury during that five-season period:

• Seven genetic variants
• Previous hamstring injury
• Age (with players over 24 more likely to become injured)

Furthermore, if the researchers selected two players at random, the probability that the player with the higher injury risk (as determined by the model) would be more likely to suffer an injury was around 75%…which is pretty solid. This represents the training data stage.

The next step was to use this model, and its related inputs, to “predict” future injury using holdout data. In this case, the researchers used data from the following season, in which 67 players suffered 31 hamstring injuries. Here, if the researchers selected two players at random, the probability that the player with the higher injury risk (as determined by the model) would be more likely to gain an injury was around 50%, which is essentially the same as flipping a coin—i.e., chance. So, while this model was useful in explaining previous hamstring injury, it did not predict future injury rates well at all.

The strength of any predictive model is enhanced by its total number of data inputs, says @craig100m. Share on X

The reasons for this lack of predictive ability are likely varied. The first is that the strength of any predictive model is enhanced by its total number of data inputs. A model trained on 1,000 players will typically outperform a model trained on 100 players. This is obviously problematic in professional sport, because the average first-team size in most sports varies from 20-50 players, and most teams do not want to share their data.

In individual sports governed by a central federation, it might be easier to overcome the problem of sample size—although, by definition, the prevalence of elite athletes is always going to be very low. Furthermore, sporting injuries are notoriously multifactorial, as demonstrated in a seminal paper by Roald Bahr and Tron Krosshaug. As a result, any statistical model aimed at predicting injury risk would need to have a great number of data inputs that cover the various individual risk factors, while the model used to predict hamstring injury in the paper under discussion only used a limited number.

As a result, it’s clear that, for complex outcomes such as injury risk—which is highly multifactorial in nature—we need a large number and range of data inputs. However, for more “simple” outcomes (and by “simple” I mean affected by a small number of variables), less complex models may hold promise. An example of this is muscle fiber type, which is largely influenced by genetic factors.

Understanding an individual’s genotype may be useful when it comes to selecting various training modalities and variables; but, at present, there is a limited number of available options by which we can achieve this. We could take a muscle biopsy, which is highly invasive and somewhat damaging to the muscle, or we could use some sort of test, such as a vertical jump, to predict muscle fiber type. A recent paper explored the effectiveness of a model utilizing seven different genetic variants to predict muscle fiber type, finding that it was pretty accurate. As a result, for more simple outcomes, such as muscle fiber type, a less complex model can be useful, while complex outcomes often require a complex model. 

From Data to Decision-Making

A further example of how we might be able to utilize machine learning as a way to support better decision-making was reported in a conference paper from late 2017. Here, researchers from Belgium utilized a machine learning tool to optimize training load based on the prediction of session rating of perceived exertion (sRPE). They collected data from 61 training sessions of elite Belgian soccer teams, where the players wore data collection sensors, allowing the researchers to gain insight into metrics such as speed, distance covered, and heart rate.

Additionally, after each training session, the players reported their sRPE for that session. Further inputs, such as environmental temperature, humidity, age, baseline fitness, muscle fiber type, and others were all added to the model. In total, the model performed well, providing coaches with the ability to predict sRPE before the session occurred, which has some obvious benefits: Individual training session load and intensity can be modified prior to the session occurring based on real-time data to ensure that the required outcomes are met.

The use of data mining and #machinelearning in sport holds promise, and has wide implications, says @craig100m. Share on X

Similar results have also been recently reported when attempting to predict the risk of injury in a group of soccer players. Here, the authors utilized a variety of inputs based around individual player anthropology (e.g., height, weight, age), sporting factors (e.g., position), GPS metrics, and various other workload-related aspects, such as previous training load. Their model could detect around 80% of injuries, which is better than currently available estimation techniques.

Additionally, the model had very few false positives; this means that few players who were flagged as being high injury risk went on to not get injured. This is important, because incorrectly suggesting a player is at an increased risk of injury can lead to needlessly missed training sessions, and possibly even missed competitions. A machine learning approach utilizing artificial neural networks has also been shown to correctly predict around 70% of a player’s competitive level (i.e., Premier League vs. Championship) when data such as passing accuracy and shots were utilized. Early research has also been undertaken to explore the use of machine learning in the development of optimal training programs.

Clearly, the use of data mining and machine learning in sport holds promise. If we can predict what will happen in a given circumstance, then we can make interventions to guide us to the desired outcome. This is obviously going to be of great use when it comes to training program design and load management, hopefully improving athlete performance and reducing injury risk. The concept also has wider implications.

For example, these techniques could be utilized when developing tactical frameworks—within a team, which moves and passing networks lead to the greatest success? Data mining can also be used with competition data to better understand the underlying aspects that are most associated with success. For example, if teams that win perform a certain skill better than others, it allows for the use of targeted technical training to ensure that players can effectively execute those crucial skills.

It’s important that coaches and data science specialists speak each other’s languages, says @craig100m. Share on X

This is undoubtedly an area that will grow in the future, as evidenced by the increasing number of data science roles in sport. As always, because sporting success often relies on an effective supporting team, the ability of each support team member to speak each member’s “language” is important. As such, it is potentially important for coaches to at least have a bit of working knowledge around data science, especially at the highest level. However, just as importantly, the data science specialists will have to speak the coach’s language. Given the promise this area holds, I look forward to watching it develop.

Further Reading

Practical prelude to machine learning by Kyle Peterson

Predictive modeling of football injuries by Stylianos Kampakis (PhD Thesis)

Machine and deep learning for sport-specific movement recognition: a systematic review of model development and performance by Emily Cust, et al.

Since you’re here…
…we have a small favor to ask. More people are reading SimpliFaster than ever, and each week we bring you compelling content from coaches, sport scientists, and physiotherapists who are devoted to building better athletes. Please take a moment to share the articles on social media, engage the authors with questions and comments below, and link to articles when appropriate if you have a blog or participate on forums of related topics. — SF

Coaches of distance runners should be asking an overarching question, one that is often not mentioned because it seems way too obvious: How does an athlete get better at running? Most leading researchers, physiologists, and coaches will point out various things that coaches need to convey to their runners. But I like to narrow it down to basic, easily remembered concepts that can be expanded on in an equally simple manner:

1. How to use oxygen more efficiently
2. How to improve lactate threshold
3. How to enhance running economy

A bigger and stronger heart that pumps more blood to the muscles makes sense. So does having strong respiratory muscles that can move great amounts of air in and out of the lungs more efficiently. To emphasize this point, early in my coaching career, I had a wrestler who was running cross country to “get in shape.” After admiring a competitor who appeared to glide through three miles to win a big race, the wrestler observed “that kid has balloons for lungs.” Another essential component is the ability to efficiently extract oxygen from the blood by way of muscle cells. Knowing this, coaches can select at least one of these qualities to target in training.

In all of this, there is one component—by way of Owen Anderson’s most recent book, Running Form: How to Run Faster and Prevent Injury—that appears to address what I consider the “elephant in the room” that most coaches probably are aware of but are not sure how to deal with: running economy.

Running Economy

Running economy is the amount of oxygen we use at a given running speed. We can easily make the case that an efficient runner will probably use less oxygen. The reality is that genetics likely has something to do with this, but the amount of oxygen a runner can use effectively without any waste can be influenced by what I refer to as a few key economy indicators.

First, we need to consider what Dr. Jordan Metzl highlights as key economy indicators:

1. The way in which a runner pushes off the ground (vertical oscillation)
2. Arm swing
3. Stride length
4. Ground contact time
5. Stability
6. Number of mitochondria in the muscle cells
7. Strength and efficiency of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems
8. Efficiency of metabolism
9. Neuromuscular coordination

Some of these points fall under what most coaches would call biomechanics. And these same coaches would agree that good running form is economical with no wasted motion. Okay, that sounds great, but what can we do about it? How many coaches are struck when noting that some runners look inefficient but run very fast?

When this happens, we start to consider (probably with good reason) that the way a particular runner looks might be due simply to the way they need to translate the skills of running based on their structural asymmetries and abnormalities that we don’t even know exist. It’s a fair point for coaches to keep in mind: style may indeed be the way runners translate the skill of the sport.

Kaleidoscopic Coaching

At my clinic sessions, I now talk about our need to engage in “kaleidoscopic coaching” for those of us working with distance runners. Meaning, we all know that inside our personal kaleidoscope there are all kinds of shapes and patterns that we call coaching strategies, workout concepts, and enhancement drills.

Rather than fixating on maintaining and considering only one specific pattern, sometimes we need to “turn the tube” so the same pieces emerge in different ways. We might not choose to change what we do, and that’s fine. But at least we can come to accept that other patterns do exist, and sometimes looking closely at the new arrangements can enhance the way we coach our athletes.

I contend that sometimes we need to entertain the possibility that the elephant in the room for distance runners may not really be an elephant but a completely different animal that we don’t fully see because we haven’t “turned the tube” on our kaleidoscope. How a runner looks while running is often due to the traditional way we view mechanics, and that’s precisely why “turning the tube” is so important—we see all the same parts in a somewhat different way.

What Are Good Mechanics?

The classic example of one-way vision is how coaches have long approached the apparent mechanical flaws of Emil Zatopek, the great “Czech Locomotive.” But was Zatopek a mechanically-flawed runner who simply learned how to translate the skill of running despite the shortcomings in his form? Zatopek’s incredible success in distance running should lead us to consider that mechanics is not simply style of form and that perhaps we’re overlooking the idea that the mechanics we consider essential are not even the right ones—and in fact may be an entirely different animal.

As Owen Anderson suggests, “shouldn’t a definition of proper form go beyond smooth activity and control of the torso? Should it also include precise mention of how the feet, ankles, and legs are functioning with actual scientific numbers placed on joint and leg angles, limb positions and movements, and foot angles at initial contact with the ground?”

If forward propulsion comes from what the legs are doing, shouldn’t we focus on lower limb actions? asks @Zoom1Ken Share on X

Most coaches will say it’s difficult to do such a complicated analysis outside a locomotion lab, but perhaps we’re missing the whole point. If forward propulsion really results from what the legs are doing and not what the upper movements appear to reveal, shouldn’t we focus on the lower limb actions?

And this is what I believe Owen Anderson attempts to explain in his book.

Midfoot Landing

So what are the characteristics of the mechanics animal we need to identify? Here is what more and more researchers and biomechanists appear to agree on: a midfoot landing underneath the runner.

What do we need to identify? The midfoot landing underneath the runner, says @Zoom1Ken. Share on X

Why? First, this landing will reduce stress, and mechanical stress can lead to injury. Second, a midfoot strike makes for a shorter ground contact time. When a runner’s heel strikes, their foot hits the ground in front of their center of mass. We observe that the leg is straighter, and this straight leg results in a braking action. The foot landing so far forward from the runner forces them to pull their body forward instead of pushing off the ground.

The bottom line: Zatopek, most known for winning gold medals in the 5K, 10K, and Marathon in the 1952 Olympics, won because, as Anderson points out, “his legs and feet interacted with the ground in very positive ways, but this has never been mentioned in the examination of his form.”

To deal with this elephant in the room, we should first verify that it is indeed an elephant before we consider correcting its trunk position.

References

Anderson, Owen. Running Form: How to Run Faster and Prevent Injury. Human Kinetics, 2018.

Metzl, Jordan D., and Claire Kowalchik. Running Strong: The Sports Doctor’s Complete Guide to Staying Healthy and Injury-Free for Life. Rodale, 2015.

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