Previous Leaders speaker Alex Hill discusses the habits that set apart organisations that have been at the top of their game for a century.
It was the All Blacks’ worst-ever World Cup finish and their unconvincing performances were attributed to arrogance, complacency, poor team selection, and ill-advised tactics, or a combination of all four.
In any case, Henry was held responsible, so there was surprise in some quarters when New Zealand Rugby [NZR] decided to retain his services post-tournament. The controversy was largely forgotten by the time he led the All Blacks to the 2011 Rugby World Cup on home soil.
NZR had bucked their 20-year habit of replacing the All Blacks’ head coach either at the end of each World Cup cycle or as soon as results and performances were deemed unacceptable. ‘Now, they realised, this strategy wasn’t working,’ writes Professor Alex Hill of the episode in his book Centennials: The 12 Habits of Great, Enduring Organisations.
While changing a leader can feel tempting when analysing a poor outcome, in the All Blacks’ case, Hill argues it was their lack of stable stewardship that had hampered the team. ‘If you change your leader every four years then you fail to build a collective memory. You lose out on applying lessons you’ve learnt from one World Cup in the next, and you leave yourself with insufficient time to build up all the knowledge you require’.
Stable stewards – a quarter of your team
Hill, the Co-Founder and Director of the Centre for High Performance, has dedicated more than a decade to researching organisations that have outperformed their peers for more than 100 years – the Centennials at the heart of his book – which include NASA, British Cycling, the Royal College of Art, the Royal Shakespeare Company and, of course, the All Blacks. They won’t all endure all the same problems at the same time, or in the same ways, but Hill has identified 12 habits that denote them all at their best and the ingenious steps they took at key moments to sustain their high performance.
Beyond habits, a character common to all Centennials is the ‘stable steward’: an individual who guards an organisation’s values, purpose and long-term vision. They are embedded throughout a team and, according to research, should make up about a quarter of your people. They facilitate the building of collective knowledge within an environment and carefully manage transitions from one generation to the next.
“You keep thinking ‘I’ve met this person before’,” Hill tells the Leaders Performance Institute of his encounters with stable stewards during research visits to Centennial organisations. “It is often somebody who is quite humble, who is in it for the long term and comfortable working in an environment where the organisation is more important than they are. The stable stewards guide. They are more like parents and set the behaviours, norms, values and principles, the environment.”
In Centennials, Hill points to the fact that most Rugby World Cup-winning coaches have been part of their team’s coaching ticket for at least six years, while a quarter of their players have been regularly selected for the past eight years. ‘Inevitably, stable stewardship and stable team membership tend to go hand in hand. Fresh talent is always needed, but world-beating success demands continuity too,’ he writes.
For the All Blacks, further continuity came in the form of Assistant Head Coach Steve Hansen succeeding Henry in 2012. He led the All Blacks to a second World Cup in 2015. Hill says: “I went through some of the big All Blacks World Cup matches and what’s interesting is that it’s the disruptive experts who often turn a game or do something unusual in a moment that changes everything. So they have a real role, but the stewards are guiding them forwards.”
However, much like New Zealand Rugby in the decades before 2007, he believes organisations routinely fail to understand that balance.
Disruptive experts – the majority of your team
The stable stewards are fundamental, but sports, as Hill explains, need their disruptive experts too, whether they work part-time or hold other jobs. They are, as he writes in Centennials, ‘the grit in the Oyster that produces the pearl.’
He illustrates this point for the Leaders Performance Institute with another metaphor used in his book: “They are more like teenagers and their role is to tell you that you are rubbish, you’re out of date, you need to get with it, and that can be very challenging. But they tend to come and go. They have a very disruptive role whereas the stewards are more a part of the fabric.”
Some organisations, it could be argued, have suffered from too little disruption. Peter Keen, the former Sporting Director at British Cycling, told Hill of the transformation that occurred when the team opened itself up to outsider expertise. ‘Our biggest breakthroughs always came when we worked with brilliant people from outside who looked at our problem in a completely different way,’ said Keen in Centennials.
The team, who had been treading water in the late-1980s, started working with an aerodynamicist and a test driver from Lotus Cars as well as a psychologist from Tottenham Hotspur. None of these individuals had a background in elite cycling but their input led to innovations in bike and helmet design, the way riders sat on their saddle, and in psychological preparation.
As British Olympic gold medal-winning rider Chris Boardman told Hill, this approach is ‘the perfect mix of expertise and ignorance that can bring about giant leaps of innovation’. British Cycling claimed the nation’s first gold medal in 70 years in 1992 (Boardman’s) and Great Britain has topped the cycling medals table at the 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020 Games. The organisation has endured its challenges down the years, but the incremental advances borne from ‘constant analysis, experimentation and enquiry’ continue to this day.
“What you realise is that although from the outside these organisations look incredibly stable, there is a disruptive element within them,” says Hill, who also considers himself a disruptor. However, “you do have to work alongside each other, so you have to be comfortable knowing that if you’re going into an environment wanting to shake things up, there will be tension and you won’t be able to do everything that you want to do. But ultimately, it’s the radical and the traditional that works together going forward.”
Radically traditional
It was the Royal College of Arts who coined the term ‘radically traditional’ and it applies to all Centennial organisations. ‘Out of this balance emerges the energy that propels them forward and a stability that ensures no one loses sight of what each Centennial is there to achieve or forgets what has led to success in the past,’ Hill writes in Centennials.
On one hand, that means recruiting brilliant individuals. Hill tells the Leaders Performance Institute: “Great institutions go broad in terms of where they look. As soon as they’re not working with the best in the world then they’re going to lose their edge.”
On the other hand, it also means finding the people who create the best team. Hill refers to the success of Norwegian polar expeditions of the early 20th Century. The most common factor in all those successful crews? “It was the cook,” he says, referring to the affable Adolf Lindstrøm. ‘He [Lindstrøm] has rendered greater and more valuable services to the Norwegian polar expeditions than any other man,’ wrote Roald Amundsen in his diary in 1911, which was the year he led the first successful expedition to the South Pole.
“What he did,” says Hill of Lindstrøm, “was sit down with everyone at the end of the day, nourish them with food and also with conversation and laughter. He listened and provided that supportive element. It’s a bit like Ringo Starr in the Beatles. He wasn’t the most creative, he wasn’t pushing things forward, but he kept the group together.
So you’re not just recruiting for exceptional talent, you’re also recruiting for people who have a real team role.”
Create the best environment and new recruits – whether they turn out to be stable stewards or disruptive experts – can thrive. “The British Olympic teams have a simple but useful phrase: ‘performance equals talent times environment’. How do we get the best people and then how do we create the best environment? You realise that the best environments are based on safety and people feeling safe to be themselves. How do we create a diverse team? Then how do we create a space where everyone can contribute fully and is fully engaged?”
The stable stewards will help to create that space, then disruptive experts can decide where they believe they can give the best of themselves.
“I think it’s working out the environment where you think you can create the most impact that’s important.”
NASCAR driver Anthony Alfredo explores cognitive training with Pison’s AI-powered neural sensors.
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Alfredo, a 24-year-old native of Ridgefield, Connecticut, competes full time in the Xfinity Series as the driver of the Our Motorsports No 5 and makes appearances in the Cup Series behind the wheel of the Beard Motorsports No 62 car. (Both are Chevys.) Alfredo spent the 2021 season entirely on the Cup Series, leading parts of three races and securing one top-10. On the Xfinity circuit, he has 15 career top-10s, three top-5s and one pole.
The most recent addition to Alfredo’s sponsorship portfolio is Pison, makers of AI-powered neural sensors that track nervous system and brain function through skin measurements. The Boston-based, MIT-spinoff began as a tool to aid those suffering from ALS [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis]. That same core ENG technology — electroneurography, which reads neuromuscular signals — is now a part of its new performance product, Pison Ready, which was launched in conjunction with Alfredo’s participation in the Daytona 500.
On his introduction to Pison…
A cousin of mine does commercial real estate in Boston, Steele Divitto, with the Steele Group, a fellow sponsor of ours, and he introduced me to them. They actually were at the summer Daytona race last year as well, some of the co-founders and employees. I got to know them pretty well and learn about their technology. It was just different than most other products out there. For me, I take pride in only being affiliated with brands I believe in. When I learned about their technology, and how it could actually improve lives out there and potentially save lives in the healthcare industry, I thought it was really cool, and I wanted to figure out a way to partner up with them, whether it was on the track or off the track.
Fortunately, we had the opportunity to get together, and we’re doing some cool stuff on social media this year. They’re going to ride along on my B-Post as an associate sponsor all year long, and my gloves have their device printed on them. And we’re going to be giving away my race-worn gloves a handful times throughout the season, starting with my Daytona 500 gloves, which is pretty awesome.
On wearing the tech…
So I actually used a very early-stage device for testing, I would say late last year, and then now that their newer consumer product has been released, I’ve had it on for a few weeks and been able to get familiar with the app, the device itself, some of the cool features. The full version, when it comes out, is going to do a whole lot more as well, so I’m really excited for that.
Currently, I can test my mental agility, my focus and my reaction time at any point in the day, anywhere I’m at, from the comfort of my mobile device. It is really neat because you see a lot of athletes and other people train with cognitive function tools — whether they’re those dots on the wall and all this stuff — but that’s super inconvenient and you can’t get that everywhere. But to have this on my wrist, I was sitting in the airport the other day running a couple of tests. I could run them in the morning, I could run them before I get into the car to qualify — and it must have worked because I made the [Daytona] 500 on time.
On what he’s learned about himself…
My reaction time is super-fast, which I guess is kind of expected for probably most drivers. Now it’s like a game to me to always see if I could beat that [best score]. But more importantly, I can just check my mental readiness when I wake up in the morning — usually I can tell if I’m going to have a faster or slower time based on how I’m feeling. But sometimes I surprise myself, maybe I don’t necessarily feel 100%. Or I’m a little wore out or tired, but my cognitive function is still operating at peak capability.
Other than that, there is a focus test that is really cool, because a go/no-go. So this device, the flashes on the reaction time test, and basically you have to react to that as fast as possible. But with the go/no-go, you have two different colored lights. There’s one that you want to react to and one you stay static — you don’t react to. So that one has caught me off guard. It’s surprising how challenging that is because you’re still trying to go for the time, obviously, of being as quick as possible when you see the white light. But when you see the orange light, instinct is like, you see a light and you want to react, but you got to remember that’s the no-go light.
It can seem like a game at times because it’s so addicting, but in all reality, it’s improving my mental focus, my capability, and preparing me to go about my day but more importantly strap into a racecar and have to make split-second decisions at 200 miles an hour.
On his prior exploration of cognitive training…
I have a fair amount of experience with some of the other tools out there, just from trainers I’ve worked with and teams I’ve been associated with. But this has had the same effect for me, way more conveniently, because like I said, I could do it anywhere throughout the day. I think the important thing is implementing it into our training routine as professional athletes or race car drivers.
Say I’m doing reps with weights and then I’m super-setting that with the rowing machine. In-between sets, when I’m super worn out, instead of just sitting there taking a minute or two break, I’m doing my reaction time [on Pison] — and that is a challenge because you’re physically wore out, and you don’t really feel like paying attention to something like that. But in the racecar when it’s 130 degrees, and you’re uncomfortable, you’re tired, sore, whatever it is, you still have to be operating at your peak, at least that’s what it takes to be a winner.
When I ride my bike, I can almost break it up into a race, like stage one, stage two, checkered flag. So what I mean by that is, if I go ride 30 miles, maybe every 10 miles, I check my reaction time and my focus real quick and just see, how the further end of the ride I get, and the more wore out, I can see how my reaction time changes. Maybe it slows down, maybe it doesn’t. If it does, how can I improve that? I think doing it more consistently in my routine, is where you see that. So I have user other technology out there, like I said before, and I think a lot of people do implement it into their training routine, but this is so much more convenient. And you could do it anywhere, not just in the gym.
On his use of other wearables…
No, not anymore. I used to. I have quite a bit of experience with a lot of the other technology out there, but this is truly revolutionary, as I like to say, because there’s some amazing things going on in other industries — healthcare industry, [the United States] Department of Defense, and then obviously, professional athletes.
One thing we haven’t really talked about is why it is important to the average person. Someone might say, ‘Well, I’m not a NASCAR driver, I don’t need this.’ But I think for as humans, it’s important we all operate at our peak functionality at work, no matter what you’re doing, as a family member, maybe you’re a parent, whatever the case may be. You see how many people are out there wearing other devices or wearables that track their heart rate, their sleep. And the sleep isn’t even accurate, to be completely honest, from what’s out there. But people don’t know that.
On Pison’s upcoming circadian rhythm prediction functionality…
It’s coming soon, and that’s what I’m most excited about — that, the sleep and much more. So right now, it’s more cognitive function and preparation. But very soon, in a couple of weeks, I’m going to have my device and start testing. But I think summer is where anyone will be able to get their hands on this device and improve the quality of their life.
On whether he’s learned what makes him most ready for race day…
Yeah, 100%. And that’s kind of a fun thing: we were messing around yesterday with how Death Wish coffee could potentially improve your reaction time and your focus with the caffeine content. Or right now, even, I’m sipping on a Celsius energy drink on the track, seeing how that [impacts me]. I could do a test before and after that — that’d be interesting to see.
That’s what I’m most excited about when that the rest of the technology comes out here shortly. Right now I could say, ‘OK maybe I didn’t sleep that well. My reaction time was slow this morning.’ Or maybe I didn’t feel like I slept well, but it is good. But to eventually have that sleep data soon, I could directly correlate that information and validate these predictions I already have about myself.
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
In the recent edition of their Startup Series, SBJ Tech spoke to Bat Around, a company seeking to blend sport and entertainment with potential performance edges for athletes and coaches.
Main Image: Bat Around
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Our Startups series looks at companies and founders who are innovating in the fields of athlete performance, fan engagement, team/league operations and other high-impact areas in sports.
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World’s shortest elevator pitch: “Bat Around is gamifying baseball batting practice.”
Company: Bat Around
Location: New York, N.Y.
Year founded: 2020
Website/App: https://www.letsbataround.com | Apple Store app | Google Play app
Funding round to date: “We are self-funded at this point. Pre-revenue.”
Who are your investors? “The main investor is single-sourced, Steve Zelin of PJT Partners in New York.”
Are you looking for more investment? “Yes.”
Tell us about yourself, CEO Matt Farrell: “I’m a career-long sports marketer with about 30 years working in the sports business. I mainly have worked for leagues and governing bodies – Golf Channel, USA Swimming, the U.S. Olympics and Paralympic Committee, as well as Warner Bros. in the early days of the internet. I started a consulting business in 2020 during the pandemic, and I started out as a contractor working for what is now Bat Around, and that eventually led to this role.”
Who are your co-founders/partners? “Steve Zelin, he’s a partner and the head of restructuring and special situations group at PJT Partners. Ken Byck, he was a co-owner of one of the largest fantasy baseball vacation companies licensed by MLB. Robert Lipps, 20 years of investment banking experience. Clint Hurdle, former manager of the Rockies and Pirates, 1,269 career wins as a manager, National League Manager of the Year in 2013 with the Pirates. He’s really the vision and the soul behind what is Bat Around.”
How does your platform work? “If you think about any type of simulator, most notably in the golf industry, hit the ball and watch the animation take place on the screen – that is essentially what we are for baseball. We’ve created a game out of that. We took a technical player development tool of swing analytics, swing outcome and turned that into a game. We call it “sportainment.” It’s a mixture of sports and entertainment. Hitting the ball with live, on-screen results.”
What problem is your company solving? “When we started this, we saw two things that weren’t necessarily headed in the same path but we thought they could. One is we saw the baseball/softball industry have a lot of really strong player development tools that were very technical, but few that really gamified the experience. That was happening at the same time we certainly saw the explosion of Topgolf, golf simulators generally and, believe it or not, even some activities like axe throwing that were getting people active in something they didn’t really think they could do or they didn’t think the game was available to them. We felt like that was a convergence of where we wanted to be.”
What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “Right now, we’re distributing the product free to batting cages that have a HitTrax system. That’s a product very prevalent in the batting cage world. We’re going to support that with sponsorships and partnerships, but starting this out to grow the user base and get as many people playing this game as possible as we start on this HitTrax platform. We have two target audiences. The first being baseball/softball batting cages with a HitTrax system. The second is more in the entertainment space of baseball stadium concourses, family fun centers or even entertainment locations.”
How are you marketing your product? “It’s a little bit of a combination. We have 12 former MLB players with 29,000 combined hits that are advisors on the project, and they are a great source of introductions, content and giving validation to what the product is all about. We’ve done an on-site activation for two weeks at the College World Series in the summer of 2023. We just finished in (early January) at a baseball conference in Dallas for coaches. We did a demonstration and were invited to be part of the MLB Winter Meetings in a tech innovation expo. We’re really starting to use experiential activations and digital marketing to spread the world about how you can get this in an area near you.”
How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “The good news about scale with the product being software is it’s really a one-click download to get the product onto your HitTrax system. We came out of our beta mode of three pilot cages in January to release the product. We see starting and building authenticity in the baseball/softball world first, but we really see growth coming in entertainment venues and restaurants. We have signed our first agreement with an MLB team and will be on their concourse as a fan activity starting this season. We will announce the team in the coming weeks.”
Who are your competitors, and what makes you different? “In many ways, we’re at the beginning of this sport and entertainment mixture within baseball and softball. The golf world is very well advanced in this, but baseball/softball has not been as much. Our competitors come in other sources of entertainment for people. Within the baseball world, it’s re-educating people how to take player development tools and turn them into a game. HitTrax is a great example of that. In the future, there are a ton of great player development technology tools in baseball – Diamond Kinetics, Blast Motion, Rapsodo, TrackMan. Really, we just see the universe of gamification in baseball having so much opportunity.”
What’s the unfair advantage that separates your company? “What we think is the special sauce to our game is we’ve created our own specific metric that actually measures your success of the game, it’s called your Bat Around Metric or your BAM Score. Obviously, baseball is a very statistics-driven sport. What we’ve done is taken different strategic hitting skills, strategy of the game, hitting a line drive, moving the ball around the field, moving runners and we’ve taken your overall success rate of all of these different hitting skills, not just hitting the ball hard, which is an over-focused area right now of just exit velocity and how hard you can hit the ball. What we’ve done is taken all of these hitting skills and rolled them into one successful number, where you’re a power hitter and I’m a singles hitter, we can actually score well in this game and maybe just perform well on different skills, roll that up into your BAM, which I describe as a decathlon of hitting. From there, just the other soft advantages are first mover in the gamification space, the advisors we have on the project, like Clint Hurdle, and being that early adopter in the space.”
What milestone have you recently hit or will soon hit? “We just came out of our Beta mode and we are now in 18 cages and adding new ones each day. Our major milestone, our coming-out party as a product, was really this past College World Series in Omaha. Having the feather in the cap of being invited by MLB to display at the Winter Meetings was huge for us as a young company. Another is this MLB team concourse.”
What are the values that are core to your brand? “We have a mission and our guiding principles of the game. Our mission statement is connect with the ball and others, meaning we want you to hit but we want it to be a social activity. That’s the simplicity of our mission, connect with the ball and others. Then, we have three guiding principles. One is everybody hits, which essentially means making the game, swinging a bat, accessible for anyone and everyone. The second guiding principle is what we call baseball with more BAM, which means there’s a fun element to this and also a scoring element that can actually help us – think of a handicap in golf – that can allow us to play different skills with each other. The third, really inspired by Clint Hurdle, is innovation built on tradition. We want to take old school hitting strategy and elements of the game of baseball but have it be packaged with modern technology, and in many ways trick people into learning the strategy of the game and strategy of hitting, versus just trying to hit bombs all day.”
What does success ultimately look like for your company? “It’s making the game of baseball and softball more accessible than ever before. Many people, such as myself, the game retired us. The game retired me at 19-years-old. Outside of adult leagues, I didn’t really feel as if there was much of an outlet for me to play. Now, we’re trying to re-open the door. We want to give the game back to people to enjoy, no matter what their skill level is. I feel like going back to our mission of making that a connected experience of the ball and with others, whether it be a restaurant or a professional stadium concourse or being able to play the game in your garage if you want – make the game more accessible again.”
What should investors or customers know about you — the person, your life experiences — that shows they can believe in you? “The depth and breadth of my experience working in sports and sports business, but not just that, but I’ve always worked for challenger brands in sports. It’s one thing to be a marketer and promote some of the biggest NFL, NBA, MLB teams. My career has been about building brands with Olympic sports, non-traditional golf events. It’s really the love of sports and sports business with being, of knowing the grind of building a brand and especially a challenger brand.”
How much does adding the gaming element of this more appealing across different sects of baseball fans? “In this case, I will make a loose connection to Topgolf and our game. What I love about both is if I stood out on a golf course or stood at home plate and hit a ball, the massive amount of real estate that is comes into reality really quick. When I can be in a more confined setting, then see the animation play out on the screen and see the defenders play my ball, score points, even if I hit a weak ground ball I’m still scoring some experiential points and there’s the phenomenon of seeing some numbers tally, whether they’re small or large, there’s a rush to that. And seeing some success. The same way in Topgolf, if I shank a shot, I can still hit a target and there’s some fun in it. It’s not the same in Bat Around, but we’re showing you constant feedback of you earned 50 experiential points for this hit, you earned 300 points for that hit, so we can give you instant feedback and keep the integrity of competing with someone but have some small wins along the way.”
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
Ryan Alexander of Atlanta United came on the People Behind the Tech Podcast to discuss understanding the demands of the team, player profiling and brain training.
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“Understanding how the physical demands and fitness is going to be interpreted on the field as it is going to relate to the technical and tactical execution of a certain style of play.”
Alexander, the Director of Sports Science at Atlanta United, was speaking to John Portch and Joe Lemire on the People Behind the Tech podcast ahead of the new MLS season, which began in late February.
He also spoke about the club’s groundbreaking work with i-Brain Tech, a neurofitness training aid that has transformed their skills and cognitive training and led to players having “higher levels of conversations with their technical coaches”.
Elsewhere, Alexander explored:
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Dr David Fletcher explains how the training environment can be manipulated to promote resilience.
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“It’s the same for all of us in our day-to-day lives with stressors and strains that we experience,” he continues. “It might be that a major life event occurs and as a consequence that’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back and we struggle as a consequence. It may be day-to-day stressors in the environment that build up over time.
“Psychologists call this ‘allostatic load’ and it’s where it can lead to burnout or, in a sporting context, overtraining.”
There is more to it than just teaching psychological skills or qualities. “That’s the starting point.”
Fletcher is talking to the Leaders Performance Institute for a series that looks at better understanding psychological resilience, how it can be developed, as well as any other considerations for coaches in sport.
In the third part of our interview, Fletcher discusses how the environment in which someone operates influences their resilience, which has implications for coaching practice.
Why is it important to balance challenge and support in developing resilience?
DF: Challenge is all about providing developmental feedback. It’s feedback telling you how you are going to develop over the next 12 months and the challenge is for you to be able to step up your game in this respect. And, of course, there could be physical goals, certain technical goals, nutritional goals, lifestyle goals, psychological skills training goals. There’s a whole raft of different things that go into challenging people; and in sport and high performance we tend to be quite good at that. The area that sometimes gets neglected is the idea of supporting people in order to meet those challenges and those demands. ‘So if you’re going to progress by this much in the next week or the next month towards this goal, what do we need to put in place to support you in order to do this?’
What can coaches be doing better?
DF: This is all about encouraging people; providing them with confidence and motivation. I mentioned developmental feedback, but the feedback we need here is motivational feedback. Instead of looking forwards, we’re saying ‘12 months ago, you were here now you here look at how you’ve progressed and here are the reasons why you’ve progressed over the last twelve months you did this better. You did this better. You perform well in this situation, in this context’. So it’s about bolstering people, bolstering their self-esteem, their confidence and motivation. It’s also about providing them with support around what they’ve done better and how they’re doing things better on different fronts.
Is there a role for other staff too?
DF: Absolutely. This is where you need to try and draw in your sports science and medicine team so that the sport support they get is bespoke to them as individuals particularly at elite levels of competition. So what are the fine-grained areas that you can work on that are bespoke and specific to you? It’s an area that can get neglected, particularly at the higher levels. The optimal development of resilience is very much contingent upon balancing challenge and support, the fluctuations between the two, and trying to get that balance right; and some of the research that we’ve done suggests the best coaches intuitively and instinctively have a really good feel not only on how to balance the two for an individual but how to balance challenge and support for all of the individuals in the team. So you can imagine, if you’ve got a squad of 20-30 players they’re coming in and out of training, they’ve got all sorts of things going on in their lives. It’s not just the stressors and demands associated with the sport. It’s things outside of the sport. So no psychologists in the world could monitor all of those stresses and demands on all of those different athletes and then modify and tweak an intervention. The best coaches have got that real instinctive sense of when to back off somebody, dial down the challenge, dial up the support and put the arm around them. Or maybe an individual is getting a bit complacent and they need to dial up the challenge in different ways.
Are there any specific types of training for resilience that involve manipulating the environment?
DF: It’s really extending this idea around challenge and support and looking at specific contexts. What are the specific types of stresses and strains that people need to perform under? The principles are the same whatever the sport. We’re still looking at how can we place individuals under or challenge them to perform under more pressure. The key to that is what can we do to support them to do that? So you’re asking more of the athletes but you’re also saying ‘in order to meet this demand here’s my advice, here’s some of the things that you can do to step up and meet that demand’; and that’s crucial for coaches to do. You don’t just throw them into a pressurised situation that that, first of all, is too pressurised and too extreme. We’ve seen some cases of that in the past over the last couple of decades where people have wildly misjudged that and what people are capable of. I might add to that as well situations when the pressure is completely irrelevant or unrealistic, such as in a boot camp. The stresses and the pressures can be completely irrelevant to what your athletes will face in competition. The environment has got to be progressively challenging and it’s got to be realistic to meet these demands, but also, as I emphasised before, you’ve got to support players and athletes in order to achieve this. So what are you underpinning this with in terms of psychological skills training around imagery, around preparation around planning, around nutritional development? All the things that can help them meet these demands within the context that they’re working.
Read our interview in full:
Part II – Psychological Resilience: Everyone Has a Trainability Bandwidth
The Hawkin TruStrength dynameter promises to guide training and rehab for athletes and coaches.
Main Image: Hawkin Dynamics
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Developed by John Cronin — a professor at the Sports Performance Research Institute New Zealand at the Auckland University of Technology — the TruStrength is the size of a fist with two protruding rings on which users can attach resistance bands or cable-tethered bars to measure both isometric (peak) and dynamic force.
Hawkin touts the TruStrength as having a sensitivity of one Newton and a reading measured at 1,200 hertz, a sampling rate several times the industry average. Data feeds into the same app as the force plates for practitioners — strength and conditioning coaches, physical therapists and others — to guide training and rehab.
“We can enable coaches and clinicians to get better, more accurate data easier and more rapidly, more efficiently — and that’s the name of the game in sports tech,” Hawkin Dynamics CEO Ben Watson said. “I don’t care what your device does. I don’t care how advanced the technology is, how much AI it’s got jammed into it, whatever other buzzwords we want to use. That stuff sounds great. But if it doesn’t make the coach’s job easier, they’re not going to use it.”
Between Cronin’s research at SPRINZ and some additional work he does in his appointment as Chief Science Officer of Athlete Training and Health in Houston, the TruStrength has already undergone years of validation with his team building protocols and normative datasets before he brought the device to Hawkin for commercialization.
Hawkin, which is headquartered just outside Portland, Maine, has deployed nearly 1,600 force plates across its performance, clinical and tactical divisions. It has a notable presence in elite sports, particularly in the NHL.
“We’re not inventing new modalities of measurement,” Watson said. “No, we’re just doing it better.”
Cronin, who has joined the Hawkin team as Product Specialist, said the use of TruStrength in physical therapy settings is an early focus. Many clinicians don’t have easy access to objective force measurements and thus under-load what patients are capable of because they don’t have the datapoints to help with exercise progression. Additionally, isometric movements are safe starting point for injured patients.
“What we’re trying to bring to the PT market as a rehab-by-numbers approach,” Cronin said. “We’re trying to bring a lot more quantitative accuracy to what they do. It’s a guessing game, really, for them.”
Low-tech training tools such as resistance bands can now produce objective data when attached to the dynamometer. And Cronin envisions the TruStrength as a training tool, with previously hard to measure movements now quantifiable.
“Peak force is important,” he said, “but a lot of people are really interested in how fast you express your force and so that’s that rate of force development measurement.”
The impetus for TruStrength first originated on the SPRINZ campus in Auckland, which doubles as New Zealand’s National Olympic Training Center. Cronin began collaborating with a PhD student seeking better isometric force measurements — an assessment of one’s true strength, hence the name. The faculty and graduate student population are wholly focused on improving sports performance with an eye on chasing answers in their research institute with a high bar for innovation, an environment that helped shape TruStrength.
“It’s a campus where industry and a university have come together,” Cronin said. “Our mantra is ask, answer, share.”
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