Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 4, 2015

Sometimes as coaches, we need to stand back and see if we have taught them anything (the ducklings.) If you are simply quiet, and let them have a little independence, they’ll prove your worth as a coach. There is no better feeling. This is a story by a coach about their first three days of summer open gym, that we all can learn from and relate to I think.

What is the professional journey to becoming Cristiano Ronaldo’s sleep coach? For former golf pro and bedding industry marketing guy Nick Littlehales, the path to one of sport’s most unconventional and interesting careers started in the late 1990s, when he wondered why elite sporting organisations and teams didn’t pay any attention to the importance of sleep.

He started by zeroing in on the world of football and contacted “his local club”, which just happened to be Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United. “I was always fascinated on one hand how important this natural recovery process was but just that the general population, never mind sport, took it for granted,” he tells Guardian Australia while in Sydney to talk all things sleep.

“Things have changed a lot,” he says. “Technology and sports science has come to the forefront.” Littlehales’s previous experiences in the field came not from science or the world of academia but in the more practical process of designing, manufacturing and selling sleeping products – beds, mattresses and pillows.

… “To me, we’re dealing with 2035,” Baylor coach Art Briles said of McGowan. “We’re dealing the future. We’ve got a physical specimen that plays football that I think will be common 20 years from now.

“If you have a team in 20 years, there will be three or four 400-pounders on it. That’s the way the world is coming. That’s the way football is changing.”

Ronny Deila, the Celtic manager, believes the widespread changes he has made behind the scenes at the club has resulted in solving the injury problems of the past.

It is well known that the Norwegian was not overly impressed by some aspects of the training and fitness regimes he inherited, which were in place under the previous regime of Neil Lennon, when he first walked into the club.

Since arriving Celtic Park a little over year ago, Deila has leant heavily on his medical and sports science staff in a bid to sort out what he perceived to be deep-lying problematic issues.

…

Nothing annoys me more than watching a coach not paying attention during training. Whether it is mindless chatting with others, continuous checking of texts and emails on his or her phone, or just simple day-dreaming, coaches who do not pay attention do not deserve to call themselves coaches. Real coaching requires constant attention – being present.

At risk of sounding overly zen, when we are not present, our ability to react is compromised. An over-dependance on planning (the future) and former program outcomes (the past) impedes our appreciation of what is happening right now. Let us learn from the past – but not be dictated by it. And let’s not get too preoccupied with the future, as that kidnaps value from the present.

… “Brett Hawke [Lazor’s coach at Auburn University] has been a great influence to me both in the physical side of swimming as well as the mental side. There’s always going to be a snag somewhere in a pre-race routine, maybe the beds in the hotel aren’t comfortable, or the food isn’t what you expected; Brett has taught us to trust our training and not let anything affect our races.”

Mental toughness is that “nothing will deter me from performing my best” mentality. Mental toughness keeps you focused on going forward with your plan.

Instead of looking for excuses, mental toughness focuses on what you need to do at this moment.

While I adore that perfectly tweetable quote from Joi Ito’s Ted Talk, I’ve come to appreciate something he says a bit later in the same talk as an incredibly concise prescription for success in your career (and life in general):

[I]t’s about stopping this notion that you need to plan everything, you need to stock everything, and you need to be so prepared, and [instead] focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware, and super present.” (Emphasis added)

It’s no coincidence that that phrase is also an accurate description of how young children naturally engage with the world around them. In fact, John Seely Brown, in a talk called Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner in the 21st Century makes the case that we finally have the tools and technology to help spread and scale the kind of play-driven education first popularized by Maria Montessori more than 75 years ago.

… For me the best consequence of this decision is to finally be able to fill in the massive holes for consistently tracking individual training and game load.

The differences between match day semi-automated camera systems e.g. Prozone and GPS are widely reported. Variations as large as 40% in sprint distance have been published in the literature (Randers et al, 2010; Harley et al, 2011). Many clubs, including ourselves, have conducted in house comparison testing and found the differences unworkable. Martin Buchheit has tried to present formulae for integrating different tracking systems in football to overcome this variance (https://mart1buch.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/buchheit-integrating-different-tracking-systems-in-soccer.pdf).

But the logical solution has always been to allow GPS in games. This of course is not new to our friends in rugby union, rugby league or AFL who have been using it in competition for many years.

They call it "The Most Used Secret In Sport," and now USC football will be using the Catapult GPS tracking system in 2015 to monitor player movement.

The United States women’s national team went into the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup with a chip on their shoulder, trying to avenge a heartbreaking finals loss in 2011. But eagle-eyed viewers might have also noticed the chips the women wore under their shirts as well, as Will Carroll pointed out on Twitter.

The objects were Polar Global’s H7 heart rate sensors as suggested by this Wired article and confirmed by Polar Global. The USWNT is also listed as a client of Catapult, an Australian-based company that combines GPS and inertial measurement units (IMU) into a single sensor.

Strength and fitness coach Dawn Scott confirmed that her team uses heart rate sensors and GPS systems to monitor player performance. However, because the team does not have a formal relationship with either company, she could not discuss the specific devices she uses in detail. Nevertheless, she was still happy to answer general questions about how she and the rest of the American coaching staff used the devices.

… People think of design as something aesthetically pleasing, but how much influence do you have in the product itself?

The ideas start off being very fuzzy and general. How about a pedometer that’s connected to the Internet? What is the physicality of light field technology? The assumption was that it would be a camera. We tend to ask a lot of cultural, marketing differentiation questions. We influence directly with concrete suggestions but also indirectly by fostering introspective dialog that forces the client into thinking about paradigms.

It’s not only the high-level conceptual, philosophical question. There are a lot of core issues like production technology, availability of components, cost and time to market. We navigate within this three dimensional state quite easily and I credit myself and the team here for being able to create really good, well-substantiated alternative points of view. We can think about an iconic design, but until we put it into form — and color and hold it — we cannot ascertain how valuable or good or bad it is.

… Dundalk-based Playertek, with the backing of several high-profile investors, recently launched a GPS tracking system aimed at bringing elite-level analytics to amateurs in all the football codes.

Playertek CEO Ronan Mac Ruairi said strength and conditioning – the analytical part of a team’s coaching arsenal – had recently taken off even in codes where it traditionally played a very distant second best to teams’ skill-based work.

Isaiah Kacyvenski is not your average NFL player. The retired linebacker has transformed from gridiron competitor to entrepreneur at the forefront of science and technology.

The former Seattle Seahawk runs business development at MC10, a company focused on wearable devices.

“Electronics are rigid and boxy. We’ve created a way to allow them to stretch, flex and bend,” he said.

CoachMePlus has a new client, and it’s one of the most heralded organizations in professional sports.

The Los Angeles Kings — which have won two Stanley Cup championships in the past four years while earning plaudits for a sustainable business model and market outreach — have signed on for the full suite of CoachMePlus services.

That brings the number of National Hockey League clients to six for the Buffalo-based tech startup, along with 18 professional teams in total and a number of clients in the higher education and military fields.