Increased attention is being paid to the qualifications for people involved with athlete performance. As the professions involved with athlete performance integrate, the task of Applied Sports Science is often about collaboration, but absent real expertise those multi-faceted processes falter or fail. And as Applied Sports Science becomes a bigger deal, it becomes easier to identify the weak links.
A new paper unearthed by Andrew Jones came with the detail: 88% of exercise professionals were asked to give nutritional advice that was outside their expertise (link to paper). Other recent blog posts and research papers looked into how the increasing complexity of athlete performance and injury prevention gets managed, for better and worse:
- Derek Hanson lamented the lack of attention recovery receives compared to training when it comes to sensor technology and data.
- Jaquie Tran gave her state of professional practice for performance analysis at her HSE314 blog.
- Nike offered a behind the scenes look at how the company Sport Research Lab uses data to improve product.
- Mike Robertson interviewed Darcy Norman about how he performance trained the German Men’s National Team for World Cup success.
- And two noteworthy papers appeared online as Sports Medicine journal pre-prints. Shona Halson wrote Monitoring Training Load to Understand Fatigue in Athletes, an inventory of sensors and data interfaces now used in sports training. Dave Collins and Andrew Cruickshank from the University of Central Lancashire published The Illusion of Competency Versus the Desirability of Expertise: Seeking a Common Standard for Support Professions in Sport, a look how athlete performance professional accreditation is settling for competence when expertise is increasingly called for.
All this comes at a time when Australia has begun the process of creating a professional sports science accreditation. Check out the feedback survey.
Sports media is observing the change taking place at professional sports teams. Ben Lindbergh wrote about how the Pittsburgh Pirates have avoided injury at Grantland. Similiarly, Jeff Stotts wrote about how the Sacramento Kings have avoided injury at his In Street Clothes blog. A new standard narrative for these articles is falling into place. New technologies provide data; players have become more interested in their health; training staffs are resourced and prevention-minded. Will Carroll has done a good job for years documenting the “death spiral” that occurs when injuries and attention to rehabilitation overrun a team’s capacity to prevent injuries and maintain fitness. No mention of death spirals in the new standard narrative though.
Integration and collaboration happens, we’re told in the standard narrative, but the professional teams are mostly unwilling to describe what goes on, which is another reason for paying attention to expertise, as opposed to just focusing on competence. Witness the Daniel Sturridge injury screwup by the England Men’s National Team, which ignored the Liverpool player’s personal training schedule and may have contributed to the quad injury he picked up during National Team training. Mismatched incentives between club and country lead to different injury risk assessments for players. Expertise is what’s needed to keep everyone on the same page, and it was absent for Sturridge.
The San Antonio Spurs hired Spanish sports scientist Xavi Schelling who recently published work on fatigue biomarkers among elite European basketball players. The Spurs could have opted for a blood-testing service like WellnessFX and/or a saliva-testing service like Salimetrics, and expected team staff to competently apply the biomarker testing. Instead, San Antonio chose to hire expertise.
The emphasis on expertise makes the knowledge-sharing that goes on at conferences crucial. Top-flight academic research meetings like Ohio State Sports Medicine’s ACL Workshop and the Body Computing Conference at the University of Southern California will share analysis, practices and technologies, with the goal of transferring those ideas to places where they will be put to good use. Such knowledge transfers depend on expertise beyond competence.
It was also great news to read that Stanford psychology professor Robert Sapolsky, an authority on human performance and learning, will keynote the Boston Sports Medicine and Performance Group Summer Seminar next May.
The Best Things I Read Last Week:
- Squad management, injury and match performance in a professional soccer team over a championship-winning season. European Journal of Sport Science … European footballers collected data over five season and made useful comparisons between the four non-championship years and the team’s best season.
- NCAA starts big study of concussions The Columbus Dispatch … The NCAA is occupying a larger sports medicine footprint, and might be on its way to an expanded sports science footprint.
- Feet Per Point: The New Tennis Stat You Need to Know Mens Journal … Fitness has been a tactic in elite tennis going back to Agassi but it seems to growing in importance now.
- Brain vs. Brawn: How mental fatigue affects physical performance The Sport In Mind blog … If athletes’ brains are tired, their bodies are tired, and vice versa.
- Why your team should appoint a “meta-knowledge” champion – one person who’s aware of everyone else’s area of expertise BPS Research Digest … Multi-faceted, inter-disciplinary collaboration is difficult and complex. Managing the communications traffic can help.