Applied Sports Science is a lot of things and I try to pay attention to all of them: athlete training, sports medicine, human performance psychology, nutrition, sensor data systems, sports analytics, coaching strategy/tactics, sports management, to name most. The real world things where sports science seem to make the greatest difference is a shorter list, just two items: injury prevention and talent development.
There is also a good chance that injury prevention and talent development will eventually become more closely tied together. As we get better at understanding injuries at every level of sport it becomes increasingly apparent that injuries sidetrack athletes who want to improve performance. In this sense, to minimize injury risk is to maximize talent development.
This is mostly about the non-injuries part of talent development though. A college professor, Hope Jahren, recently wrote a great essay, an open letter to college students’ parents about their 18-22 year olds that is really a manifesto that lays out sensible human development progressions for young adults and the older adults around them.
Athlete development should be 100% percent consistent with human development, and college age is a critical growth period. Not enough is done to tie one to the other and vice versa. I don’t know that I would have gained that sense without reading Jahren’s essay. (Check her essay out here.)
Adults play crucial roles in young adult development, Jahrens points out, especially with regard to curiosity, intellectual risk taking and enjoyment of learning. These habits benefit more than just the individual young person who takes them up. We all gain and have some stake in their adoption,
Parallels between this mental development pathway and a sustainable, long-term athletic development progression are easy to observe. Adults who are always challenged and always learning will often feel like they are on the cusp of doing their next, better thing. Athletes can put themselves in the same situation, progressing through the goals and challenges they set.
Applied Sports Science is set to have increasing importance for athletic talent development. No matter how technical, evidence-based and data-heavy you want to get with athlete performance, performance gains are mostly meaningless if it fails to translate to sport performance. Team sports have varying degrees of complexity and collaboration but advancing the personal human development of athletes should go directly to bottom line team performance in sports. It is a mistake to fail to account for the whole person and just set out to improve the athlete.
The Best Things I Read Last Week:
- Scientists Unveil the Secrets of Visual Attention Scientific American Mind … Great longread feature story with in-depth details how the intersection between human cognition and the visual processing machinery.
- Highlights from the inaugural Performance Therapy Program World Athletics Center … The sports coach-clinician can execute manual interventions without any time-consuming mode switch away from practice/training. It’s a big advance.
- How Soccer Is Reshaping the NFL Wall Street Journal … Football watchers have noticed the benefits that athletes who played high-level soccer bring to the game–footwork, vision, spatial intelligence.
- Not All Fitness Goals Are Created Equal. Choose the Right Ones. Outside Online, The Fit List … Goals help, but accomplishments matter more. Better goal-setting = more accomplished.
- Want to avoid injury? NBA teams are looking to Marcus Elliott for answers Sports Illustrated, SI.com … Don’t miss the companion piece where the writer, Chris Ballard, puts himself through the P3 battery of athletic performance tests.