Donna Johnson of Zena Sports discusses her organization’s protective vests and the wider need for education around breast injuries in sports.
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A 2020 study by the University of Wollongong in Australia surveyed 297 female athletes (rugby players and Australian rules footballers) and 242 team employees, like coaches and medical staffers.
On the player side, 58% said they had experienced a breast injury in their careers, with 48% feeling that their play had been affected following the injury. On the team side, half of the staffers “were not aware that breast injuries were a problem for female contact football players.”
In 2022, Wollongong released another study that said that 60% of female athletes had experienced previous breast injury, but 90% of those athletes never reported those injuries.
Donna Johnson wasn’t armed with those stats when she first dreamed up the Zena vest in 2017, but she recognized a void. The idea came over coffee with a friend with three daughters who just started playing Australian rules football. The conversation made Johnson, a mother of two, think about the amount of equipment she would purchase for her son’s sports. She didn’t see nearly as many options for her daughter.
“We were just discussing how fierce these girls were playing and the impact that they were receiving,” Johnson said. “I was just concerned that these girls were sort of at an adolescent age, crucial stage of their physical development, and they weren’t wearing any form of impact protection.”
Later that day, Johnson spoke with her husband, Brad, a hall of fame Australian rules footballer. After some initial research, the only chest protection she found for women was a hard chest plate meant for martial arts. It was not nearly nimble enough to move around in, much less sprint and jump.
For the next 12 months, Johnson tried to find a manufacturer with no luck, and the idea nearly died on the vine. One final internet search yielded Sydney-based Modulus Design, a sportswear company with expertise and manufacturing contacts. During that same time, Johnson toured Australia, meeting with different female athletes in sports, trying to understand the need for this product. The responses both validated and shocked her.
“I was really surprised by the feedback I got from them in terms of the type of breast injuries that they had, in terms of bruising, what they were doing to try and prevent it,” Johnson said. “A lot of girls talk about wearing two sports bras, a lot of girls talk about bandaging padding to their ribs or something like that.”
Fast forward to now, Zena Sport’s product uses a polyurethane foam that is injected into the molding (which Johnson compared, visually, to an ice cube tray). It’s then heat-sealed against the fabric so there’s no stitching into the nylon and elastane material, all of which increases durability.
Johnson said 70 to 80 players in top-level Australian competition wear the Zena Sport vest. “We don’t have any research yet to tell us what the long-term impacts of a breast injury could be,” Johnson said. “So we’re sort of in that unknown space and trying to educate people.”
Zena Sport is still a small company. The only employees right now are Donna and Brad, who oversees lead operations. Brad has spent some time in the US, building connections with governing bodies. Johnson said the company sees real growth potential in options like soccer, basketball, lacrosse and flag football.
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.
Former Olympic swimmer Shikha Tandon discusses her work in Silicon Valley and her role with the US Anti-Doping Agency.
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You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. The Athlete’s Voice series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.
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While competing as an elite swimmer, Tandon also was enrolled at Bangalore University, from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Science and a Master’s in Biotechnology. Upon moving to the US, she completed a second master’s, this time in biology, from Case Western Reserve University.
Following a five-year stint working as a science program lead at the US Anti-Doping Agency, Tandon worked at a couple fitness startups (Moov Inc, Repmonk AI) and at TechCrunch as a product manager before joining Silicon Valley Exercise Analytics. At SVEXA, she is the Director of Global Partnerships working on a team intentionally assembled of members with dual competencies: both technical and athletic. SVEXA’s employees include numerous current and retired athletes who have competed professionally as well as at the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
On her early life in sports…
I grew up in India. I spent most of my childhood there. I swam and competed for India for about 15 years, eventually, but at the start of it all, swimming was not my sport of choice. I was a pretty athletic kid, loved being outdoors, and actually running was my sport of choice. I was eight at the time, and I wanted to join a local running club in India, but they were taking kids only when they were nine. I was told to come back when I was nine.
I have a younger brother who had severe asthma at the time, and so the doctor recommended that he start swimming just to help his lung capacity. Being the age that my mom was not going to leave me behind at home, I was taken to the pool with him, and one thing led to the other.
Initially, I was really scared of the water — I didn’t want anything to do with it. But over time, I quickly learned to enjoy it, love it. I won my first national medal when I was nine, so pretty much a year after learning to swim. I was just enjoying it so much. I went to nationals, went to international events right from when I was 12. And there was really no turning back beyond that. It was just one of those things, which happened by chance that swimming was brought to me and I loved it.
On beginning to train more seriously…
The coach I had the first year was one coach, and then I moved over to train with another coach. And so he was my coach for 14 of the 15 years so right throughout. And so when I say train more seriously, it was more just setting higher goals, competing at more international events and really keeping an eye out on those qualifying times and training outside India as well, because after the age of 13, actually, I was the fastest swimmer in, in my event at the time.
I needed to train outside to just get exposure to understand how things work, to help me compete in those international events. A lot of those things — the training mindset, the training programs — are geared towards those bigger international events versus just winning at nationals. Four or five years prior to when I qualified for Athens, that’s when I really started thinking that the Olympics is something I could do.
On the training tools and tech available to her…
Very, very limited. And nothing compared to what we have today. So we would have some amount of video analysis, some amount of heart rate-related training that we would do. We would have these different threshold sets and whatnot for benchmarking, but nothing really beyond that. So it was a very, very different world training environment 15 years ago than it is today.
On her swimming career after Athens…
I trained to try and qualify for Beijing as well in 2008. I missed a qualifying time by .05 of a second. I actually swallowed water at 35 meters of the 50 meter raise, so that didn’t help. I swallowed water when I turned to take a breath — it’s something that I still think of. I moved to the US in 2009 and then swam a little bit more ’til 2010 and then decided that I wanted to switch focus to something outside the pool.
On her studies in science…
I was interested in biology, just because of being an athlete. I wanted to understand how the human body works, and just from a performance standpoint, we were reading up and talking with my coach. Everything just came together from an interest standpoint. And then also, as an athlete, I’d been drug tested so much. So I’d seen how that system works in India, and I saw I wanted to work in the anti-doping field after I graduated college. Some of the classes and courses that I took in college was geared towards getting to work at an anti-doping agency, post-graduation. So that was the motivation, really. And then after I graduated, I worked at USADA for about five years on the science team. And that was, at the time, my dream job.
On her belief in the anti-doping mission…
I definitely believe in clean sport. We put in so much effort as athletes, and you want to know that you’re standing at the start line with a level playing field. And I’ve also seen people around me in India not really — there was stuff going on, which didn’t get the appropriate, for lack of a better word, punishment. Part of that [interest] was because of that, and USADA is pretty much on top of things, as far as anti-doping goes in the world.
My role involved a bit of research and also understanding current trends and research. At a high level, it was translating that science into stuff that people could understand and that we could use that science to educate folks. While I was at USADA, towards the end, I actually helped build out one of the first online tutorials for anti-doping science, which was geared towards health and medical professionals and I think that’s still running even ’til today.
On her transition into the Silicon Valley tech industry…
I was immersed in the tech space, way more than I’d ever imagined. And so that’s what got me interested in tech, just by nature of being here. I worked at a few fitness wearable companies, and then I also worked at TechCrunch, which is a tech media platform. Working at TechCrunch allowed me to think about startups, understand a lot more about startups because that was the content we were covering.
I was drawn towards SVEXA for two reasons. One, I understood the space from an athlete perspective, but also from a tech standpoint, and I understood what they were trying to do. I really, really believe in their mission.
On her work at SVEXA…
From a SVEXA standpoint, we work with these different [stakeholders]. It could be tech companies, it could be sports teams, it could be junior athletes, it could be individual athletes, it could be even health and medical professionals who are reaching out to us. We help them essentially use all of this data, and then based on who their end customer is, help them with insights and recommendations that align with what their end customer is trying to achieve.
What we’re trying to do is a combination of AI and that human domain expertise, which is what a coach typically brings. And so for me thinking back, what we’re able to do here using all the data that we have is keep people in optimal zones in terms of performance, recovery, taking into account their goals, and when they want to peak and things like that. We’ve worked with a lot of elite athletes, and we’ve essentially helped them do that on a day-to day-basis — how do you structure and modify your training regimes to peak.
Having access to this, I think, would have helped me potentially elongate my career a little more because I did start getting injured quite a bit towards the end. So I think from an injury prevention or management standpoint, I think a lot of this could have also helped. And, again, from an overtraining perspective, keeping me in my optimal zones, I think, also could have helped in some situations.
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.
Five factors to consider when meeting the challenge of devising individualised and holistic athlete programming in para sport, as discussed in a recent Keiser Virtual Roundtable.
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“It blows your head in terms of the constraints you would have normally – probably unconsciously – worked with because you’ve been doing the same pattern, training and programmes all the time.”
Russell, who will also serve as Team Ireland’s Chef de Mission at the 2024 Paralympic Games in Paris, speaks from both sides having also worked with non-disabled athletes in her previous roles at Rowing Ireland, British Rowing and the English Institute of Sport (now UK Sports Institute).
She was speaking in late August at a Keiser Virtual Roundtable, which was attended by high performance coaches and practitioners from across the world. The aim of the session was to explore the space for innovation and adaptation in a para sport environment while providing some food for thought for those working in non-disabled sport.
“[When coaching para athletes] you have to really rethink and relearn a lot of what you would have presumed or assumed,” she told the host, Keiser’s Gabe Derman. “You need to work off the needs of the athlete and be really creative.”
Russell explained what it is like to work at Paralympics Ireland before taking her place in a series of breakout discussions with the coaches in attendance. The group emerged from those conversations with the consensus view that the growing ability to innovate and effectively adapt in para sport is a consequence of improved investment, which itself is a sign of greater social acceptance and sporting credibility for para sport in the wider world.
The sporting landscape, they agreed, is still not equitable, but well-intentioned organisations are beginning to meet the unique challenges presented by para athletes with creativity, innovation and adaptability.
Here are five factors lifted from the conversation to consider when meeting the challenge of providing individualised, holistic athlete programming in para sport.
Ultimately, para sport is just another branch of your sport. As one coach noted, if para sports were the sole focus at sports organisations then there would be fewer of the issues of limited funding, research and resources that crop up continuously. In that regard, it resembles the general women’s sporting landscape, which has also been neglected from a coaching, medical and sports science perspective. Those of you with para teams: how accommodating is your organisation of para athletes? If you need to ramp things up it is crucial to bring your team’s decision-makers onboard. When the conditions are favourable for para sports programmes, one can look to make the strategic changes that promote innovation or adaptability. Locating a seat for para sport at the top table of high performance often requires a push and will not happen without advocates who are willing to back up their words and intentions.
Russell argued that the athlete-coach dyad in para sport requires an even greater degree of trust than in non-disabled sport. This is due to the challenge presented by an athlete’s unique impairment. For example, a para athlete may not be able to see their coach or engage in video analysis. Or they may not have movement in their lower limbs and it is therefore incumbent on the coach to help tweak their movement patterns. Such situations require both curiosity and humility on the part of the coach as they seek to understand their athlete’s day-to-day preferences. Does the athlete, for instance, want you to offer your help or not? A coach can best develop an understanding of how an impairment impacts the training programme of an athlete by learning in real time. There is no textbook to follow. Any wisdom or experience gleaned from the successful implementation of innovations and adaptions tends to be shared anecdotally from coach to coach. This is, as one participant pointed out, a ‘legacy’ of the lack of investment and sports science research in para sport.
There was a consensus at the roundtable that, in comparing non-disabled and para sport, the performance principles are approximately “80% the same”. However, in para sport, there is an even greater need for individualised and holistic support, as no two athletes will have the exact same impairment. It may come down to modalities or prosthetics but could just as easily come down to other physiological factors. For example, an athlete of short stature will generate lactate especially quickly, which has implications for their recovery protocols. Athletes with spinal cord injuries will have problems with their thermal regulation, especially in outdoor sports where they need to be mindful of managing their cooling strategies. The pinch points may also come in the athlete’s daily living. You may want your athlete to go directly home after training but if they are visually impaired – and therefore unable to drive themselves – they may require buses or even taxis to make their commute. Or if an athlete takes substantial time to prepare a meal because of their impairment then you may wish to ensure they have meals already prepared for post-training in order to help them optimise their recovery. You need to bake such factors into your training programmes. These are just some of the “nuances” a coach must navigate with what Russell termed “richness and craft”.
It is notoriously difficult to establish ‘what it takes to win’ in para sport given the wealth of classifications and range of impairments even in linear sports. However, before considering podium potential, it is important to ask: is your athlete at home on the international stage? It can be difficult for some nations to provide para athletes with the requisite level of competition ahead of a major games. How can you as a coach expose your athletes to international standards? That transition can be managed with better coach and performance support packages. A national Paralympic committee in attendance said they are hosting ‘pathway to Paris’ workshops for their athletes who have either limited international experience or a low training age. These sessions can be remedial at times, but are nevertheless invaluable to that nation’s para athletes.
Talent pools can be shallow in para sport and there are likely to be further disparities between disciplines. National governing bodies have a number of factors to consider when seeking to innovate around recruitment. They include where you recruit your athletes and the best approach to take. A national Paralympic committee at the roundtable said they had adopted a place-based approach in working with its national governing bodies. This means they are working to understand the issues, interconnections and relationships within those para sporting environments in order to coordinate action and investment. There are, as they explained, numerous moving parts and “well tests” (data acquisition tests) that enable athletes and coaches to see what works for them and what doesn’t.
Crystal Palace and Royal Antwerp have developed data storage and visualisation systems that increase athlete availability, enable smarter recruitment, and ensure more efficient workflows.
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Dr Cedric Leduc, a sports scientist at English Premier League club Crystal Palace FC, is sharing his experience with practitioners working in athlete monitoring.
It is a natural enough recommendation for a sports scientist to make but the case Leduc makes to the Leaders Performance Institute is compelling. “If you aim to work in a sports club as a practitioner,” he continues, “one of the key things when considering your own learning and development journey is to integrate some of those data skills that will help you to understand what is actually required by an organisation when it comes to data and technology.”
Why a data infrastructure is important
Leduc, who has been at Crystal Palace for almost two years, addresses that question on a daily basis. “How can I refine a thousand possible metrics on the market into a presentation or construct of what I am seeking to present?” As he sees it, there are two viable approaches; firstly, by calling upon his own experience and relationships with colleagues, coaches and athletes; and secondly, by running statistical analyses that enable those selections to be made in an objective way.
Crystal Palace and Royal Antwerp track Player Availability using Smartabase, which enables performance staff and coaches to make informed training and performance decisions. Image: Smartabase
“A combination of both works,” he says. “When you have to turn things around quickly, you might actually use your experience, but when you have time and access to a good historical database, you might be able to run those analyses. There’s a trade-off between short-term actionable points and more long-term objective decisions.”
Leduc and Crystal Palace use human performance optimisation platform Smartabase as a data storage and visualisation solution for all players and staff, from the academy to the first team.
“In a way, building the system from nothing was an advantage because you can build it the way you like and set up the structure” – Peter Catteeuw
To operate without such a system puts a club at a disadvantage, as Dr Peter Catteeuw, the Head of Performance at Belgian Pro League champions Royal Antwerp FC, explains.
“When I arrived at Antwerp in 2017 there were no records of injuries, records of tests with the players, no records of training sessions and so on,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. Mindful of how well Smartabase had served him in his previous role at Racing Genk, he began to use their technology at his new club, building a monitoring system for a second time with the help of Smartabase’s agile customer success team.
“In a way, building the system from nothing was an advantage because you can build it the way you like and set up the structure,” he says. “It’s still changing every day and getting better, helping players from the academy to the first team. The team’s management and administration is also coming onboard.”
It is a product of the latitude afforded to Catteeuw and his ability to scale the system. “We needed time to build the system to our own needs and it continues to develop. On the other hand, we can implement changes immediately.”
Smartabase enables the collection of both objective and subjective sources of data relating to athlete wellness. Image: Smartabase
Of advice he would give a team who are starting from scratch, Catteeuw says, “You can easily start with a smaller group within the club, say the academy, and then progress through the organisation as you build the system.”
How accessible and actionable data can improve workflows
Alignment and accessibility are critical for new members of staff. When Leduc arrived at Crystal Palace, his first question was: where is the data and can I access it easily? “Then you start to realise that you have multiple data sources like in any sports organisation,” he says. “What’s important, if you want to make practical use of that data, is to first make sure they are stored in one secured place so that it can be easily accessed – then you can turn that into something actionable.”
“We have a holistic view of the players; what they did in training, what they are doing outside of training, how well they are recovering every day and if they are ready to train or take on more load or not, and if they are ready to play games or not” – Peter Catteeuw
At Royal Antwerp, Catteeuw welcomes the ability to tailor the club’s data management platform to his wishes thanks to Smartabase’s hands-on approach to customer success. A response within hours is the norm. A solution often follows in a day or two. “Most systems are fixed but Smartabase gives you the tools to create your own club system to enable you to work the way you like with physios, strength & conditioning staff, the technical coaches and management. Most companies only make it if it’s interesting for other teams.”
Injury Risk Profiling is an essential area of Catteeuw’s work at Royal Antwerp. Image: Peter Catteeuw / Royal Antwerp FC
Leduc has witnessed the benefit first-hand at Crystal Palace. “A new player signed this summer and the head physio asked me if he can integrate the profile of that new player so that he can start adding notes,” he says. “Another example from pre-season was the request to implement a new technology, integrating its data with their Smartabase storage system.” The organisation was able to facilitate the club’s request. “They are very reactive in trying to understand your needs and not simply relying on what already exists.”
At Royal Antwerp, Catteeuw was able to make the API work in linking the sleep tracker Whoop and Smartabase. “Now it’s up to me to pick the right data, the data we want to see, and make clarifications if necessary,” he says. “I will make the first simple dashboards for ourselves, the medical staff or the coaches to have a quick view every day. In the next days, I will try to combine data we have now from Whoop with the players’ wellness questionnaires and with all the training and game data we collect so that we have a holistic view of the players; what they did in training, what they are doing outside of training, how well they are recovering every day and if they are ready to train or take on more load or not, and if they are ready to play games or not.”
Agility is critical to data-informed decision making
There is the imminent possibility that this process will lead to red flags with some of the players. Perhaps they have not slept well on a consistent basis. This will, however, not lead to an overreaction from Catteeuw and his colleagues.
“We don’t have to take drastic action right away. These alarms just let us say ‘let’s first talk to the player and see what’s going on’ and then maybe check with the physios. Is there something else from the medical staff? Is there something from the training pitch that also raises an alarm?”
Catteeuw recalls an illustrative example from last season when Royal Antwerp used NordBord, ForceFrame and ForceDecks in strength testing. “In every first training session after a match, we ran tests. The data gives us a signal i.e. it’s too slow for these players, the difference between left and right is too large. We won’t pull them out of training immediately but we’ll check the player and see if there’s anything too serious to let them train. But most of the time it means we maybe have to adapt a little bit of training or we need to get an additional session in the gym.”
Access to the initial sources of raw data has enabled Leduc at Crystal Palace to streamline some of his processes. “The initial data collection with a given technology can be pushed into Smartabase in the right format,” he says. “I can then push it to get the right visualisation or run some analysis on it in a very straightforward way. You limit human interaction, which decreases the risk of errors. Having access to the original data enables you to be very agile with the data you’re collecting.”
However you use your databases, the important thing is to understand the needs of your organisation. As Leduc says: “Do you need a storage or visualisation solution? That will depend on your organisation.”
Crystal Palace and Royal Antwerp use Smartabase to track player soreness on a daily basis. Image: Smartabase.
The data landscape is changing and the days of teams failing to track even basic performance metrics are largely consigned to the past. In addition to Crystal Palace and Royal Antwerp, Smartabase clients include both Arsenal and Nottingham Forest in the Premier League, Stoke City in the English Championship, to AS Monaco in the French Ligue 1, Ajax in the Dutch Eredivisie and SL Benfica in the Portuguese Primeira Liga – all clubs looking to make a real difference both in training and in competition by developing a data infrastructure that enables coaches, practitioners and the players themselves to make faster, smarter and better informed decisions.
The world soccer union wants greater education and regulation around data that can help to prevent injury and improve performance.
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Such a statement reflects data’s evaluated status in modern sports. Yet while name, image and likeness rights have been commercialized extensively in professional sports, data rights are a nascent field, evolving at varying speeds based on club cooperation, league and union maturity and legal jurisdiction. There’s a wide range of data collected, too, inclusive of GPS vests, optical tracking cameras, force plates, heart rate monitors and more.
FIFPRO, the consortium representing 66 global professional soccer unions, recently announced its grand ambition to tackle the issue itself, serving as an accelerant of a universal solution across soccer. The idea, Baer-Hoffmann said, is to “translate the highest standard of data protection legislation” into a centralized platform whose development is led by FIFPRO with the athletes’ interests at the center.
The Netherlands-headquartered FIFPRO started exploring rights and protections of athlete data about five years ago. A survey it conducted during the 2020-21 season reported that 80% of pro players rated their interest in using data as at least an 8 on a 1-to-10 scale. Only about half, however, had full access to it or even understood why and how it was collected.
This led to the Charter of Player Data Rights that FIFPRO created in collaboration with FIFA and published in September 2022. Athletes’ three primary expectations for data was codified in that document — access, portability and control — and followed the framework of stringent privacy protections instituted by the European Union’s GDPR and others.
FIFPRO’s work is independent of the Project Red Card lawsuit — through which 1,400 cricket, football and rugby players are seeking compensation for what they consider unlawful use of athlete data — but it espouses the same underlying legal reasoning.
The first test case of this plan was the FIFA player app made available to all participants in the men’s World Cup 2022 in Qatar last December and again in July and August this year for the Women’s World Cup 2023 in Australia and New Zealand.
“We obviously have much higher ambitions and ambitions that go well beyond a World Cup environment but really go throughout the entire career parameters of any of the professional players around the world,” Baer-Hoffmann said, “whether it’s club, whether it’s country, whether that’s commercial partners, whether that is high performance coaching, etc., with all the different applications, risks and opportunities that come with it.”
FIFPRO has not announced any technology partners, but the expectation is that one or more third-party vendors will help build the product, which Baer-Hoffmann estimated will take six to nine months. Educating and onboarding athletes across so many leagues and countries will take considerable time as well.
The scope of global soccer makes FIFPRO’s task daunting while some individual unions have begun seeking their own solutions, with the NWSL Players Association partnering last week with BreakAway Data for use of its athlete data passport app.
“One of the things that’s become very clear is that an athlete’s right to have access to their own data is important, but it’s not very practical unless there’s actually a tool to make that access easy,” NWSLPA Executive Director Meghann Burke said.
Baer-Hoffmann contended that most current uses of athlete data by clubs could be easily challenged legally, but he was clear that athletes don’t seek to shut down all such uses and want to preserve the many benefits of preventing injury and improving performance — just with agency over how it’s used. The data platform, he added, can help bring to life the privacy rights that are often “very technocratic, and the enforcement is very, very legalistic.”
“A natural phenomenon that is happening at the minute is that the innovation potential, in the private sector around sports data and technology, is just a whole lot faster than the regulatory response, which is the case in many parts of society, right?” he said. “Usually technology just exponentially grows faster than the regulatory capabilities of institutions that govern the country or a certain sector.”
Basic game stats such as goals scored and shots saved plainly reside in the public domain. MRI results and bloodwork are clearly private medical records. But the performance data in question — biomechanics, movement patterns, heart rate — sits “somewhere in between, and which way should it lean?” BreakAway Data CEO Dave Anderson said.
Volumetric data, such as Hawk-Eye’s ability to track 29 points on the body for 3D motion capture, is an example of the increasingly granular data that prompted Anderson to conclude “that performance data is starting to lean more and more towards health data and that it’s vital to understand, how much wear and tear is on these guys?”
Commercial opportunities for the data are possible, too. The NFLPA is among the unions investigating that market fit, partnering with Sports Data Labs last year to explore possible revenue generation potential.
“We ultimately view your personal data — if you’re an athlete, a patient, a citizen with a watch that collects data — as a digital asset,” Sports Data Labs CEO Mark Gorski said, before cautioning that such assets won’t immediately lead to new income. “Most people want to talk about the end use case. There’s a whole bunch of steps that have to be taken in the right way in order to get there. What we’re spending part of our time with is really helping groups navigate some of those complexities on a global level.”
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.
The NASCAR driver talks tech, using a simulator and partnering with Hurley in his first season racing in the Cup Series.
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Gragson, 25, is a Las Vegas native and graduate of the NASCAR Next program for promising drivers. The affable self-proclaimed Mayor of Throttleville is also a two-time ‘most popular driver’ award winner, claiming that honor during the 2018 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series and the 2022 NASCAR Xfinity Series. Among his sponsorship portfolio are Wendy’s, Black Rifle Coffee Company and, most recently, Hurley.
On preparing for race weekend…
It’s a seven-day-a-week job, for sure. You race on Sunday, you fly home Sunday night, we got back at about 2:30am Monday morning this past weekend. Then I headed to the gym, leaving the house at 6:30 in the morning, then meetings the rest of Monday. And then try to get done by 3 or 3:30 and have the rest of the afternoon to relax. Tuesday is working out again. I did simulator this morning for the first half of the morning and had a meeting. Do some interviews like we’re doing. That’s what I’m doing the rest of this afternoon.
Wednesday, it’s usually a workout in the morning time, got pitstop practice, and then it’s more meetings with the race team, going over the race weekend stuff. Thursday morning, we’ll do a workout and then pre-race debrief with the guys in the Chevrolet program with Josh Wise. He runs the Chevrolet program — he’s an ex-driver — and now a lot of Chevrolet drivers will prepare for the races together. So we’ll do more race prep, then we’re either flying out on a Thursday afternoon, or sometimes we have the second half of Thursday off if we’re not in the simulator ’til about 6:30 on Thursday nights.
Then we either fly out Thursday afternoon, Friday morning, go to the racetrack, do tech, do some sponsored stuff, practice, qualify on Saturday, and then again race their Sunday and then back home. And it’s a constant seven-day-a-week job, but I love the process of everything. It’s a lot. It’s definitely time-consuming. But it’s a lot of fun as well.
On his use of the simulator…
It’s helpful, definitely for the Chicago street course, which is a brand new track for NASCAR. They just made it. We’ve never raced on a street course before. We’ve never raised at this particular track so utilizing the simulator and trying to just get some ideas on what you need to focus on for when you go to the real track in real life — how far can I drive in before I have to hit the brakes? What are my visuals looking like? Little stuff like that is what we really use a simulator for helping build up the setups and get the car tuned in on the simulator to give us some ideas when we get to the real racetrack. It’s definitely very beneficial, and we utilize it a couple of days a week for sure.
On his fitness training…
We definitely track our heartrate and everything like that. So when we work out, we’ll do a little warm up and then whether it be a run, row, or the skier or the bike, then we’ll stretch out. Then we get into a daily workout we have. We’re in the gym three days, and then we do karting or other stuff on Tuesdays where there’ll be a trail run or whatnot. But Dan Jansen, the Olympic speedskater, he is our trainer over at Chevrolet. So, man, he loves the leg workouts — they suck — because he comes from the speedskating side and having all that power in his legs. I mean, this dude’s legs are just massive. It’s crazy.
So we do a lot of leg workouts and a lot of heat training on bike rides and runs. Upper body stuff in the gym as well. And then we’ll sit in the sauna for about 30, 45 minutes after the workout just to get some more heat training in. And so that takes about two, two and a half hours a day of in the gym and prepping for the races.
On his use of SMT analytics…
We definitely look at that a lot throughout the week and the race weekend and just finding where we can be better. The majority of the time, it’s during the race weekend and right before practice. We’ll take a look at the prior year and how guys were and where they’re lifting on the gas, how much brake pressure they’re using. We can overlay [data] and compare that.
So that’s a definitely a double-edged sword, I think the SMT data is. Normally you spend your whole racing career figuring out how to go fast, and now it’s like, if you’re in the second group in qualifying, you just look at what the guys in the first group did. And you just go implement that into your driving and try to match up the data to the fast guys. So I think it’s good if you’re first starting to expedite that process of learning the tracks and where you need to be, car placement-wise, how much break, how much throttle you need to use, but at the same time, it kind of takes away a little bit because you just see what the fast guys are doing and you just go copy that.
On partnering with Hurley…
The coolest thing is I grew up surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding. I loved action sports and always wore Hurley stuff at the beach. I remember when they came out with the Phantom swim trunks, in the early 2010s probably. Being a kid, there was a store in Laguna Beach — we’d always go down to Laguna Beach every summer with my family — called 225 Forest or something like that. It was a Hurley and Nike store, and you could customize swim trunks and Nike shoes and Hurley swim trunks and Hurley t-shirts. I just thought that was the coolest thing ever.
I was a little kid running around and would try to do some chores throughout the week so I could get a little spending money. I so got a couple of pairs of custom phantom Hurley swim trunks back in the day and just loved them. I wish I still had them. I think my mom probably threw them away or something. She calls me a hoarder because I like collecting cool stuff and crazy stuff, and my argument to her would be, ‘Those are my first pair of custom swim trunks, c’mon.’ But that was pretty cool. That’s how I got introduced to Hurley and have worn them ever since.
On his creative interests…
[The custom shorts] were pretty wild. It was like a blue and black cow print on one leg — and, I mean, they were wild — and yellow and gray stripes on the other leg with a crazy pocket. I forget exactly, but they were really, really wild looking. I always liked the wild, bright, colored stuff. Now for me from the swim trunks to now designing my own helmets and the paint schemes on my helmets, I really liked getting to do that. So it’s a cool process.
I liked drawing a little bit when I was a kid. I like the helmets because I feel like you can show personality and do some cool stuff and be unique. So yeah, I like art a little bit. I think it’s cool and definitely always loved the designs on race cars, designs on helmets and just cool t-shirts and stuff.
On how he evaluates brand partnerships…
I’ve always told our management group [to pursue] just stuff I believe in, stuff that I enjoy wearing in this scenario or food I like eating. Just stuff I’m passionate about is really the biggest thing. You see so many ambassadors and athletes and whatnot that have partnerships with companies, but they’re just getting a check and they don’t necessarily believe in it or are passionate about it. We turned away deals because I don’t have any passion over this, so why would I want to be an ambassador a spokesperson for this company if I don’t believe in it? It’s a complete opposite with Hurley. I’ve always been a big fan of their stuff. I call myself a swimsuit model for them even though I’m not really.
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.
The program’s Director of Football Performance Nutrition discusses the dietetic practices of the back-to-back national college champion.
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“He used that next year to really focus on nutrition,” she tells Joe Lemire and John Portch. “[He] got down and dropped his body fat percentage by 7%, lost 45lbs [20.4kg], and he was a first-round draft pick.
“He just did such a good job at buying in and it made him a faster, more explosive person. He never lost any muscle mass, which meant he was really focusing in on eating enough of just the right things so that we were able to retain that muscle and focus on losing that fat.”
Collier’s pride is palpable, particularly as a native of Athens, Georgia, and long-term Bulldogs fan. “It’s so much fun to see them buy-in and then say ‘C, I feel so much better in practice’. ‘C, I didn’t know I could have this much energy’. It’s probably the most rewarding part of my job.”
In this edition of The People Behind the Tech podcast, Collier lifts the lid on her work as the Director of Football Performance Nutrition at the Georgia Bulldogs, who retained the NCAA national championship in January.
During the course of the conversation, we covered:
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Here are 10 factors that can increase the effectiveness of your recovery practices.
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Those two are inseparable as far as Skylar Richards is concerned. He says: “As technology has improved, to allow us to have interventions to help the best they can off the field, that has really given us the ability to look into what’s effective, what’s efficient, and how we can individualise those sorts of treatments to make sure we’re as optimal as possible.”
In Early August, Richards who is an Athletic Trainer with the US Soccer Federation, spoke at a KYMIRA Webinar titled ‘The Evolution of Athlete Recovery’ where he was joined by Mark Pavlik, the Head Coach of the Penn State men’s volleyball team, and session moderator Johnny Parkes, the Lead National Coach at the United States Tennis Association.
“So much in sports science and medicine, we worry not so much about the medicine side of things as much as the optimisation,” Richards continues. “And so really keeping people as healthy as possible is the focus with recovery but also then the art of how to do that consistently within their regime.”
Here, we discuss 10 factors raised during the webinar to consider when seeking to establish optimal, consistent recovery practices with your athletes.
Do you need to prioritise passive or active modalities? Your athletes’ culture of recovery – practices and habits – should tell you. In his time at FC Dallas between 2012 and 2019, Richards noted differences between his younger players, who were happy to visit the recovery lab while they watched tape, and those players in their mid-30s who had families and, frankly, far less time and cognitive capacity. “Those become the tricky puzzles to figure out,” he says. “How can I help them recover in their lives and support them in that? That can be the difference between applying an active modality versus a passive one, a wearable or something like that. It helps them to do it all the time no matter what life throws at them.”
Whatever an athlete’s preferred combination of recovery modalities, there is an important question to ask. “What gives you the biggest dosage of all those things put together in one package, which is easy to manage and to be consistent?” says Richards. “You don’t want them to burn out having to think about stuff all the time.”
A veteran may have a busy life but, as a cohort of largely self-driven individuals, Richards can work with soccer players to “scratch that itch” around self-improvement. “Something that I’ve found I can do well with my older athletes: I’ll say ‘why don’t we try to instal a recovery room at your house? It gives you an hour away from the kids and the craziness to go in, watch some videos, and now read a book. Whatever you need to do justify it as your job’.” Now, the athlete has a consistent pattern of recovery and doesn’t feel the need to, say, go on an evening run that may well clear their minds but has a detrimental effect on their physiology. “We scratch the same itch by helping you rather than sacrificing something.”
The success of Richards’ approach with his veterans has enabled them to take that message to the rest of the team. “Getting them to talk about that approach to the younger players really helps them to buy-in,” he says. With men’s volleyball at Penn State, it sits with Pavlik and his colleagues to educate the archetypal 18-year-old who “doesn’t know what they don’t know yet from a recovery standpoint”. He says: “They’re coming off of club or high school practices at most three times a week, they’re living at home with mum and dad when they wander into our gym, it’s my job to ensure that the educational points that we’re trying to drive home so they can have a longstanding, successful collegiate career, and those that continue to move on through the professional ranks and international ranks with men’s volleyball have something in their background.”
That aforementioned education is best delivered by a friend. In that regard, Pavlik ensures that his student-athletes are surrounded by smart and passionate people who make an effort to build relationships. “We do a pretty good job of getting these people around my team early in their career and, let’s face it, the adage of ‘the team doesn’t care what you know until they know that you care’ [is true],” he says. “When you have these types of experts having relationships with our players; coming to practice, just being around the water cooler during water breaks, being able to just say ‘how’s it going?’ Then when the guys are in a position to listen to what the expert is saying they’re no longer experts – they’re friends, they’re buddies.”
Are there opportunities for you around game day? “It’s always been crazy to me that we control every other variable with athletes all the time, but the one day we completely flip the schedule is game day,” says Richards. “Those older guys love those moments of recovery on the road. For them, it’s less chaotic, it’s easier to focus. So much so that we’ve had a lot of success with having players to stay at a hotel the night before a home game or have that option, so that they can get into that rhythm and we change those practice times to the same as game times so they can get that day before the game rhythm into their bodies and their minds.” The benefits are palpable. “Allowing them to get into that rhythm early on, sleep, get out of that chaos, get their recovery mode early and have time to do any modalities that they want is crucial.”
Customisation is important and, at Penn State, it goes beyond age (i.e. an athlete at 18 versus an athlete at 23). “We look at the age and the experience of the athlete, then we take a look at what their on-court responsibilities are,” says Pavlik. “Some max jump much more often than others on the court during the match or practices. There are going to be some that have to get up the floor a lot more than other guys. What we try to do here is make sure with our training staff and med staff that we understand what we’re asking them to go through.” For Richards, it involves asking better questions. “What is the question for that athlete that we can solve the best? All physiology is too much of a blanket statement,” he says. “Is it overall energy? Is it mental fatigue? Is it truly physical fatigue? Is it something masking as another [marker]? And how can we hit those?”
As moderator Johnny Parkes says, “With all these physical modalities we can use, I think we sometimes forget about the things we can control the most, which is our level of sleep recovery, hygiene and the effect of resetting the body for the next day.” For Richards, good sleep can be an outcome of a holistic approach to recovery. “That’s when you get the most synergistic effect out of all of them,” he says while asking, “Can we create that cycle of measurements to enhance individualisation and effectiveness?” He once again cites the idea of players staying in hotels the night before a game. “It really ties this together in a practical way in terms of ‘let’s get you good sleep in an environment I can go in early and control, make sure the sleep hygiene is there, giving you the time to implement those things well and then tie-in any other recovery modalities you want at the same time’.”
According to Richards, both younger and older athletes are interested in the gamification of recovery, but in different ways. “Younger players thrive for the most part on comparing what they’re doing and being effective versus their peers,” he says. “For an older athlete, I’ve found they’ve passed that point in their life, they’ve been saturated by that already and what you come to is the gamification comes from comparing them to themselves. Can they get a high score? Can they see what’s most effective for them? What patterns help them to be the most consistent over time? Scoring that on a streak becomes the better motivator for them.”
What don’t teams consider as much as they should in recovery and how do we overcome them? “Anything is better than nothing,” says Richards. “We have a huge market for recovery tools and methodologies but I haven’t seen a huge move towards a blend of that. That’s where I’ve been pushing a lot of companies on their research. Can we let the monitoring devices drive the intervention; the duration, the velocity, the frequency and occurrence? Can we use measuring sticks to drive it for individuals; its appropriateness, effectiveness and sufficiency on an individual level? Until we do that I don’t think we’re doing the best we can do to figure out the puzzle, which is an athletic body.”
The pitcher explains why wearables have their limits in his eyes and how biomechanics have transformed his approach to strength training.
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You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. The Athlete’s Voice series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.
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Cole is 10-3 with a 2.27 ERA [Earned Run Average] over 150 innings so far this season. He has twice led the majors in strikeouts, including in 2022, and also led the AL in ERA back in 2019. He has finished in the top-five in Cy Young voting five times and twice been the runner up.
A Yankees first-round pick out of Orange (California) Lutheran High, Cole turned them down to attend UCLA, after which he was the Pirates’ No. 1 overall pick in the 2011 draft. His nine-year, $324 million free agent deal with New York prior to the 2020 season remains the largest contract ever awarded a pitcher — nearly $80 million more than anyone else.
On how he recovers the day after a start…
I try to sleep as best I can, but I don’t always sleep great. And then if I need to catch up on sleep, I just I try to find some time to maybe take a nap. I’ll try to put down some electrolytes and about four liters of water. I’ll do a recovery walk either at the house through the woods or on the treadmill. I’ll get a little bit of treatment in the training room just to make sure things are roughly in the right place so that I can walk better
To me, [soreness] is always a whole body experience. And then sometimes, hot or cold tub therapy, just depending on how life’s going, I guess. And I’m hungry. I’m going to eating all day.
On his previous use of Whoop…
Basically, I’m in the green pretty much all the time, and so I thought it validated my process. And I thought after I collected four or five years worth of data on it that it validated some of my practices and my routine, and going a little bit too much into the micro aspect of it, I’m not sure it’s so beneficial.
So there’s stuff you can’t control, right? Like we’re going to fly to the West Coast, and I’m probably going to be red for three days after that. And we’ve got to play. Sometimes I’ve got to pitch. Do I need something to tell me I’m in the red all the time? Or do I just need to know that I need to be on top of everything that I possibly can be to give myself the best chance?
On heart rate variability (HRV)…
HRV fluctuates throughout the day. There are different breathing cadences. There are different physiological things that evolve throughout the day in terms of exercise, how stimulated your nervous system is, caffeine [consumption] — all these things fluctuate HRV positively or negatively throughout the day. Obviously alcohol and dehydration negatively affects it, but sometimes those are quality of life [decisions].
But the algorithm the Whoop uses is at a specific time, right [before] you wake up. So it’s not like you’re a 50 HRV for the whole day. It’s just when you wake up. So depending on how you slept, depending on what your routine is for the rest of the day — let’s say you had to perform at 7 o’clock [p.m.], your HRV could be back to normal. I wore it for a long time. I wore it through a lot of stuff — starts and workouts and vacations and everything. There are some things that we learned, for sure. I definitely tightened some stuff up, but on the whole, it just validated that you’re pretty good.
On nutrition…
I’ve done a lot of food allergy and blood work over the last, I don’t know, forever. So I pretty much know what I’m sensitive to, what causes systemic inflammation and how to try to manage those levels by just regulating the exposure to those things: gluten, dairy and some other random stuff. Sometimes they change, too, depending on how much you avoid them or where your tolerance is.
I would expect a player to have things be more inflammatory, inadvertently, at the end of the year when your immune system is depleted, and you’re at the end of your rope and your at high-level stress. Just your tank is not full, so in a sense you’re overall less resilient. But at the same time, if you focus all of that resiliency on your performance, you can maintain, or even sometimes improve, regardless if all the other stuff is falling low. So t’s always an ebb and flow. It’s always a balance.
On strength training after a start in season…
Day two, day three depending on if it’s five or six days [between starts]. I would say definitely trying to maintain power, elasticity, control. Through that control, the proper mobility. You build a tank up in the offseason, and you just put as much gas in there as you can. And then during the [season], you’ve got to make sure you treat your performance as load, and your weightlifting as a supplement to that load. So I am gaining strength by pitching, I am gaining more efficiency the more I pitch.
These things are allowing me to operate at a more efficient level, and the supplementation of the lift maintains the integrity of the tissue, maintains the power, maintains the routine in terms of when your central nervous system is recovered and spiking and peaking on the fifth or on the sixth day. It’s different than position players, very much so. It’s very much almost like horse racing, football [when you have one shot kind of thing].
On how his approach to training has changed since the beginning of his career…
Total strength, we build in college. We build when those growth plates are just about ready to be closed up, and then you go through life and you start maturing and, again, you’re trying to find ways to maximize power with the least amount of wear and tear because you only get one joint. And then you have kids, and then you carry you carry your kid around. So then you get the dad strength, so your load goes from just your body all day to another 10 pounds for about 10 months, and that has a cumulative effect. And then you have two, and then your 10-month-old turns into three and he’s 40 pounds.
You definitely mature as you get older, and you realize that you want to take all that tissue and strengthening stuff that you built early in the career and make sure that functionally you’re rock solid because that preserves the joints, preserves the tissues, and maximizes power.
On how much he analyzes biomechanics…
The Hawk-Eye stuff is super helpful. At this point, I just think the more data we get is even better. AJ Burnett told me once you’re never going to throw two pitches the same way even if they land in the same spot. And I think, to a certain extent, do we want to be ultra-repeatable? Yes. So do we need to be adaptable at the same time and still be able to produce the same output? It’s going to be hot, could be a hard mound, could be wet, sloppy, it could be slipping, I could be pushing through an injury in a certain area.
There’s all these different variables that are going to contribute to the release point having some variance and the delivery never being the same back-to-back outings. Always being able to be resilient while you have those uncontrollable things changing. Your body’s always adapting to this and that. You can look at one delivery in slow mo and look at another delivery, and that’s not always very helpful.
What I find will be probably really helpful, especially it continues, just the more and more reps that we get on the Hawk-Eye and finding the centration of the joints and the centers of the joints and how biomechanically they’re moving over and over again. Where’s my window for performance? And how do I use that to my advantage? I don’t really know yet. But how do you use that to your advantage as you as you start to gain [more data]? Gill’s great and David’s great, and they’re on top of it all the time. [Gillian Weir, Senior Biomechanist, and David Whiteside, Director of Performance Science.]
On childhood pitching mechanics and throwing load…
I built my mechanics as a kid, just basically trying to be as close to some form of Clemens, Pedro and Maddux. Just simple and repeatable and putting myself in position to minimize load and also giving myself time to recover as a youth. My dad only let me throw six months out of the year until I was 18 at UCLA.
You’re going to stress the ligaments, you’re going to stress the labrum and all that stuff, but then you’re going to give it six months while you’re still producing large amounts of GH and growing and your growth plates [close]. So it gives your tissues time to adapt and lay down those adaptations.
They should look asymmetrical left to right, but they shouldn’t necessarily look worn down, to a certain extent, because you’re pushing, you’re pushing and pushing, and then you’re recovering. A lot of kids these days, just push, push, push, push, push. [Pitching] being a unilateral move, the more fatigued you get, the more you just end up putting too much load in the wrong areas.
On the importance of training the deceleration muscles…
They always used to use an analogy of ‘you can’t have a Ferrari V12 engine and Honda Civic brakes.’ The car’s not going to go very fast, and it’s going to crash.
On tracking his spin rate and other pitch tracking metrics…
I have general parameters that I keep an eye on, I would say, but that’s not at the expense of performance. So if the fastball is spinning high, but it’s getting hit, or if a fastball is sitting low but it’s not getting hit — I’m in for not getting hit, you know what I’m saying? In terms of introducing a new pitch, I would only start that in the offseason, and it probably will take a year or two at this point for it to really even settle in. I feel better with the cutter this year than I did last year, but I guarantee you that next year I will feel even better.
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