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The insight is provided by Steve Gera, a former US Marine, NFL coach and Co-Founder of Gains Group, in his role as moderator of this Keiser Webinar titled Data Decision Making in a High Performance Environment. He continues: “[Kelly said:] ‘That information is completely true but I cannot do anything with it.’”
While coaching reactions such as Kelly’s are common across sport, they are not inevitable. Joining Gera to explore the question of data’s role in the decision-making process were Kate Weiss, the Director of Sports Science at the Seattle Mariners of MLB, and Jordan Ott, Assistant Coach with the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets.
Weiss, who joined Seattle from the LA Dodgers last year, explained that datasets are increasingly prominent in the performance questions the club is seeking to answer. Ott, who has been in New York for six seasons, is part of a team that uses data to inform its decision-making as the franchise continues to evolve.
Here are the ten key considerations to emerge from the discussion.
1. Data can inform your athlete development plans
Weiss explains that Mariners draftees are provided with a personalised, holistic player development plan that is shaped by each practitioner and hones in on specific aspects of their development and how progress will be tracked. “That’s why that initial planning phase, that goal-setting phase, is really critical for us because that’s what sets up the tracking plan. ‘OK, if these are our goals, we’re going to measure this, this and this,” says Weiss. “Knowing what we’re trying to develop makes it a lot simpler to come up with a plan for what to measure and the frequency of the testing.”
2. Relationships are a source of ‘soft’ data
“That’s where it starts and ends,” says Ott of those conversations he and his colleagues have with Brooklyn’s players. “The coaching side to it is that you do have to develop a relationship with the player.” It resembles a partnership and, as Gera points out, it is important to find out information that the numbers cannot tell you or to ask athletes what they feel are their strengths and weaknesses. Ott adds: “We’re trying to maximise each player’s strength so it’s less about what we want as a coaching staff, it’s more about maximising the strengths of the personnel that we have and it’s about us being flexible.”
3. Disseminating data insights
In addition to clubhouse meetings, the Mariners, as Weiss explains, ensure that their data insights are delivered in both written and visual form. “We actually have a team of people to help develop the reports in-house,” she says. “Ahead of new report development, we’re all meeting together as staff to discuss the pieces of information that are most helpful in that day to day decision making, as well as on longer time horizons. We do a very good job of tailoring it to the key stakeholders, including players, making sure the information is clear, straightforward and easy to understand and addressing questions it leads us as a group to come up with.”
4. Using data to inform testing protocols
Gera says that the ‘Holy Grail’ is taking data and linking it to specific tests that track athletic development. Weiss walks through a hypothetical process with a Mariners pitcher. “When they come in, we’re going to test range of motion, we’re going to test movement capacity; how are they going to move in a general sense and a baseball-specific sense,” she says. “We’re going to look at the different components of strength, speed, power, we’re going to look at body composition. All these different things that we know contribute to and help support what they do on the field. Then what we’re going to do is look at the on-field data and link that back and go ‘OK, maybe there’s issues with their shoulder separation on the mound.’ We’re going to look through everything and go ‘OK, is it coming from a range of motion issue? Is it coming from just a movement capacity issue?’ Or if it’s not those things maybe it’s just a coaching issue that we have to work on and come up with specific drills.”
5. Balancing long-term and short-term goals through data
There is a need in sport to balance game to game player development with the need to develop a player to a certain point in the future. The balance between tactics and strategy, as Gera puts it. Ott says that while it is hard to measure development game to game, long-term athletic development can have a knock-on effect on skill development. “I have one guy who’s a really good shooter, so obviously the shooting piece is important, but what he really improved was his ability to get directly to the basket. He’s not just a shooter, he’s a driver and a shooter and it’s opened up the avenue to him having a longer career, in my opinion.”
6. Data-informed markers for scouts
The Mariners are better-placed than ever to provide detailed briefs to scouts. “With HP data, we can provide more colour and that helps you to discern between two players that may play very similarly on field. With this data, you can make a more informed decision about who is the better option,” says Weiss. “For us, understanding what types of players we’re looking for, the specific qualities we’re looking for on the field, and then providing education from that general athleticism standpoint or an injury standpoint.” The benefit is clear: “You can start to put together recommendations that help the scouting process from the other side as well.”
7. Using data to assess risk factors
Whether it is a draft pick or a free agent, data can inform the levels of risk a team is willing to take when building their roster. “In the first three or four years we were taking young guys that maybe physically had to grow,” says Ott, referring to the Nets’ initial rebuild under General Manager Sean Marks. “We’d take a younger guy that physically wasn’t ready but had good character and knew that would work. We’d bet on that person.” Having signed a series of high calibre free agents, there has been a shift in the team’s thinking. “A big key to where we’re willing to bet now are guys that have defined skillsets that would fit with our superstars and how to make our elite players more elite, and how we fit those guys in that can help those three guys is the challenge we took on last summer.”
8. Data as a driving force of research & development
“In game,” says Weiss, “we know that if we adjust launch angle that can improve the hitter’s ability to hit it out of the park. We can think that if we want to focus on launch angle and we’ve seen these trends, how are we optimising drill selection? What are we doing from a strength & conditioning standpoint? Are there ties to other components as well? And by exploring those things it helps us to come up with a new way of training and developing and creating drill sets for players. Or maybe it’s the implement itself. Going through, looking at what’s changing and how that’s making a big difference and what’s tied to that is how we’re thinking long term.”
9. Innovation can emerge from a single dataset
As Joe Shulberg, a coach at English Premier League club Norwich City points out in a question submitted to Weiss and Ott, we may think that innovation comes out of the blue, but it’s often a datapoint that influenced an idea. Ott concurs, adding: “The thing about basketball is that it’s so interconnected, so what we’re doing offensively affects us defensively. Maybe something we’re doing offensively is hurting us defensively and if the net benefit is not good enough then we have to learn to adjust how we’re coaching the team.” Ott highlights the reluctance of officials to give free throws in the current NBA and Gera ponders a hypothetical future where the GMs of the league request bigger, stronger and faster players as a consequence.
10. Data has its limits
Ott and Weiss touch upon the general limitations in data collection in the major leagues, but current datasets have very little to tell us about mindset, game intelligence, self-sufficiency, motivation or leadership potential. “There’s no magical test out there, no magical number, no psycho-graphic test,” says Gera. “The teams and organisations I’ve seen do it the absolute best typically mimic what the FBI, Special Operations and those folks do. They have intelligence units that go out and gather massive amounts of soft data and information and process that into a decision-making matrix that helps them find if that person is a red-line risk or whether or not a person has some of the soft traits you can actually mould.”
Kate Weiss of the Seattle Mariners and Jordan Ott of the Brooklyn Nets discuss their teams’ complex relationships with datasets and how they inform their work on a collective and individual level.
A Webinar brought to you by our Main Partners
The insight is provided by Steve Gera, a former US Marine, NFL coach and Co-Founder of Gains Group, in his role as moderator of this Keiser Webinar. “[Kelly said:] ‘That information is completely true but I cannot do anything with it.’”
While coaching reactions such as Kelly’s are common across sport, they are not inevitable. Joining Gera to explore the question of data’s role in the decision-making process were Kate Weiss, the Director of Sports Science at the Seattle Mariners of MLB, and Jordan Ott, Assistant Coach with the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets.
Weiss, who joined Seattle from the LA Dodgers last year, explains that datasets are increasingly prominent in the performance questions the club is seeking to answer. Ott, who has been in New York for six seasons, is part of a team that uses data to inform its decision-making as the franchise continues to evolve.
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Notwithstanding my bias, it is important to remember that it is in fact nutrition that provides the basis of all human performance. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that in my conversations with leading performance directors from around the world, I often comment that nutrition should be one of the first and most important hires for anyone leading a new performance programme.
I am going to explain why.
Why nutrient intake impacts performance
Where once our focus was solely on ensuring sufficient muscle fuel stores, it is now accepted that what we eat before, during and after every single training session has the capacity to drastically alter our whole-body physiology, affecting tissues and organs over and above that of skeletal muscle. For example, the timing, type and quantity of both macronutrients (i.e. carbohydrate, fats and proteins) and micronutrients (i.e. vitamins and minerals), alongside total body water content (i.e. hydration status), can all affect the daily function of our brains, gut, kidney, liver, immune system, bones, tendons, ligaments and so on. When considered this way, the importance of nutrition extends far beyond that of body composition or fuelling for game day. Rather, our daily nutrient intake affects our ability to make decisions, execute physical actions and technical skills, withstand mechanical load, fight infection, maintain training volume, promote sleep, reduce injury risk and so on.
From a human performance perspective, a poorly fuelled athlete is therefore likely to suffer from poor sleep quality, exhibit increased incidence of injury and illness and display impaired growth, maturation and recovery, all of which can manifest in your star player apparently suffering from a lack of responsiveness to training and a loss of form. It is through this lens that it is no exaggeration to say that I have witnessed transformations in athletes’ careers and longevity within their sport once they have embraced the principles of a performance approach to nutrition. From the performance director’s perspective, the hiring of a highly skilled performance nutritionist could thus be viewed as one of the shrewdest returns of investment across the organisation. For without one, the other key members of the ‘orchestra’ are unlikely to get the best from their athlete.
The limitations of the ‘consultant’ model
The practical delivery of performance nutrition has evolved considerably throughout the last decade. In the historical service model, sports typically employed an expert ‘consultant’, usually based on their academic and/or practical experiences. Despite the expert knowledge that a carefully chosen consultant can bring to the performance programme, the consultancy model has obvious limitations in that ‘face time’ is typically restricted to one or two days per week. In such instances, the consultant often spends their time in setting up generic team-wide systems and protocols (e.g. fuelling, recovery, body composition protocols etc), upskilling the knowledge base of existing staff to support practical day-to-day delivery, as well as managing specific athlete case histories. However, in considering my reflections from this model, I am not convinced that this type of approach yields the cultural change or attention to detail that is required to truly support the delivery of a high-performance service. Indeed, in many situations, the consultant may be responsible for the remit of improving performance in excess of 100 athletes, a task that clearly conflicts with the concept of creating and delivering highly individualised and multidisciplinary athlete performance plans.
The triangulation of practitioners, academia and the sports industry
Fortunately, with the increased recognition from both head coaches and performance support staff on the role of nutrition in supporting performance, the landscape of nutrition delivery is changing. This is especially prevalent across the UK and Europe and is beginning to be adopted across the big leagues of the US. As an example, most soccer clubs within the English Premier League now employ a full-time professionally accredited nutritionist to operate at first team level as well as an additional full-time head to focus on nutrition to the academy players. Such individuals typically travel home and away to ensure that nutrition delivery occurs at the heart of where and when it matters. In some situations, the nutrition programme is also supported by formal collaborations with academic institutions so that academic experts can also inform the creation of an evidence-based programme, the nature of which may extend to the integration of PhD practitioner-based researchers within the club. Given the requirement to adopt a safe supplement programme, a fully integrated partnership with a sports supplement provider specialising in banned substance testing is also an essential ingredient of an elite performance nutrition programme. Upon reflection, it is this triangulation of practitioners, academia and industry that could now be considered a model of best practice, one that can be dynamic and responsive to change as the performance questions arising on the front line are posed thick and fast.
Integrated performance nutrition
The increased appreciation from head coaches and performance directors on the performance effects of sound nutrition is particularly pleasing to see. In the 2020 Uefa consensus statement on nutrition for football, former Arsenal Manager Arsène Wenger, who currently serves as Fifa’s Chief of Global Football Development, contributed an accompanying editorial where he argued the case for nutrition to be integrated within a performance team’s activities. ‘It should be a fundamental part of the team’s performance and/or medical meetings, where the priorities for each individual player are discussed in detail’, he wrote. ‘When nutrition—like any other element of sports science—exists in a silo, answering only the questions or interests of a single practitioner (i.e. the nutritionist, him or herself), it is detrimental to the team.’
This integrated performance approach that Wenger calls for certainly resonates with how we approached Performance Nutrition during the four seasons I spent as Nutrition and Physical Performance Lead at Team Sky. When Chris Froome pulled back 3 minutes 22 seconds on Stage 19 of the 2018 Giro d’Italia to win his third consecutive Grand Tour, I knew our programme was in a good place. “Today was about fuelling, today was about making sure you can fuel a ride like that all the way to the end,” Sky’s Team Principal Sir Dave Brailsford told the media in the aftermath. “It’s fundamental really, so all staff, myself included, have been out at the side of the road putting together a fuelling plan for him so that he would absolutely not miss a beat, because that’s basically the game changer.” In the years to follow, the team (now known as the Ineos Grenadiers) have since employed three full-time performance nutritionists (two of whom are integrated practitioners from the Science in Sport Performance Solutions team) alongside three full-time performance chefs. There is consistency, clarity and a performance-focused approach across all training camps and races.
Athletes are starting to ‘see’ nutrition
As a result of this increasingly adopted integrated and full-time staffing model, athletes and staff are now ‘seeing nutrition’ on a daily basis. The role of the nutritionist is now considered much more important than the mere organisation of food services at both home and away games. It is no longer a consultant who appears and disappears in the flash of an eye. The nutritionist now sits at the top table, having visible dialogue with the most influential decision makers in the organisation. The culture is changing.
From both a theoretical and practical perspective, perhaps the biggest leap we have made is in the recognition that nutritional needs are not static. In the same manor that physical load and performance objectives are periodised across the micro- and macro-cycles at both team and individual athlete level, nutrition should subsequently follow suit. It should no longer be a one-size-fits-all approach where every day is the same. Rather, the entire performance team and athlete roster should recognise that nutritional needs will change between and within each individual depending on the development and performance goals at any given time. Every meal should be carefully considered because it can impact the work of the whole performance team.
In this regard, the remit of the nutritionist has developed to be the:
“Strategic periodisation of energy, macro- and micronutrient availability (alongside targeted use of supplements and ergogenic aids) to improve body composition, training adaptations, performance, recovery and athlete health.”
The outcomes of such an approach will produce an athlete who is ready to win consistently.
This article first appeared in our latest Performance Special Report – Winning With Nutrition
Long relegated to the side lines, nutrition is finally getting the attention it deserves when it comes to helping athletes achieve peak performance. Download Winning With Nutrition, produced in partnership with Science in Sport and featuring NBA champions the Milwaukee Bucks, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and English Premier League club Aston Aston Villa.
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Though it might seem like an obvious question, there is not always a consensus within a team or organisation, and even where there is a consensus, astute organisations will seek to continually iterate definitions that everyone in the building can support.
When the Carolina Panthers appointed Tish Guerin as the NFL’s first Director of Player Wellness in September 2018, their aim was to ensure that wellness was built into their team environment.
“Are we making sure that we’re building a culture that subscribes to making sure we’re all in good mental health?” asked Guerin when she spoke at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Charlotte in February 2020.
Guerin, who has since departed her role, was firmly at the intersection of mental wellbeing, resilience and training. Elite sport continues to promote wellbeing, it remains at the heart of the discourse, but there is a sense amongst Leaders Performance Institute members that teams can be doing more to promote wellbeing at an organisational level.
The Australian Football League [AFL] took a step in the right direction in 2019 with the publication of its first Mental Health Framework, which views mental wellbeing as the cornerstone of general wellness.
The Leaders Performance Institute discussed the topic with Kate Hall, the AFL’s Head of Mental Health, in 2020, when she spoke of the work being done behind the scenes for their women’s league [ALFW].
“We put together a best practice guide for our player development managers,” said Hall. “They’re a designated development role and they’re not for the development of craft or any on-field aspect. It’s all about the growth of the individual athlete.”
The guide has not just been lifted wholesale from the men’s game either. Hall added: “What we didn’t want to do was just repurpose the pillars of player development that are used in the men’s competition because it’s a very different journey as an athlete and the competition’s very different in terms of it being a part-time competition. After extensive research, we worked with the players and the player development managers to develop a best practice guide to outline pillars of how you should lead player development in the women’s competition. Essentially the things you should focus on when you’re growing the whole person, not just an athlete on the field.”
This encompasses the earlier stages of the talent pathway too. “Our designated wellbeing coordinators are working with our under-18s, who are hoping to be drafted this year. They articulate a curriculum for our young players that illustrates the mechanisms, tools and strategies they can use to build their mental fitness. That’s quite explicit, we measure at baseline on these types of qualities and we measure them at the end of their talent year as well.
“Our concept of mental fitness is get in early. The sooner you get in and empower young athletes to really grow in this space, then their demanding this of their coaching staff and leaders within their club.”
‘Getting in early’ characterises the approach of Zach Brandon, the Mental Skills Coordinator at Major League Baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks. “Building a robust, systematic, and preventative approach to employee wellness requires that leaders address policies, practices, and perspectives in their organizational culture,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in August.
“Perspective begins with organizational values and addressing if, and how, employee wellbeing is prioritized in the culture. This requires that leaders and staff be intentional and progressive with their language surrounding mental health.”
Brandon added that leaders play a pivotal role in showing that self-care is not selfish. On that note, Gareth Southgate, the Head Coach of the England men’s football team, has set that example to his players.
“What I recognise about myself is that if I feel in a good place, that my own wellbeing is in a good place in terms of sleep, exercise, then in actual fact I feel stronger to take those things on and less affected by it,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in June. “If I’m not sleeping well and I’ve been travelling a lot, if I’m rundown, I’m not physically in as good a place, I find that can affect my mood a little bit more and then I’ve got to be careful with my decision making.
“I’m very aware of my own personal state and [I am] able to control that and react to that a little bit more and put things into perspective better as I get older.”
The hope is that it will rub off on England’s players and support staff. At the Diamondbacks, Brandon advocates a similar approach. He said: “In reality, supporting wellbeing and resilience for your employees is really a competitive advantage, especially with the ever-increasing uncertainty and complexity found in work environments, which often lead to stress. Leaders should aim to install comprehensive prevention strategies within their organizations rather than rely on reactive support as issues arise.”
Both Brandon and Southgate spoke of the notion that wellbeing goes beyond the mental and it was a point picked up by Tom Patrick of the Royal Australian Air Force [RAAF] during a Case Study Members Virtual Roundtable in August.
Patrick, the RAAF’s Performance Optimisation & Wellbeing Lead, stressed the need to educate each squadron with the understanding that there is more to wellbeing than mental health. To assist in that continuous process, the RAAF is training what Patrick called ‘wellbeing advocates’ to support its proactive approach.
He said: “We are identifying people in the unit and squadron that have that real trust relationship with everyone, who might be the first person to reach out and check-in. We’re focused on developing others to get better in this space, before having to think about more medical-based models around wellbeing.”
Download the latest Performance Special Report – Winning With Nutrition
Long relegated to the side lines, nutrition is finally getting the attention it deserves when it comes to helping athletes achieve peak performance. Download our latest Special Report, produced in partnership with Science in Sport and featuring NBA champions the Milwaukee Bucks, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and English Premier League club Aston Aston Villa.
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Wendy Borlabi, the Director of Performance & Mental Health at the Chicago Bulls, has spied a noticeable shift.
Less than a decade ago, she says, there was a desire for, “having a coach with the credentials to take you from point A to point B. [Athletes] were looking for coaches who could do that; they hired coaches who could get you from A to B, it wasn’t about the relationship.”
“Now,” she continues, “I see more of the connection with the coach; they want to have that relationship. In my opinion, a lot of it has to do with the age. In the NBA we’re seeing younger players; they’re coming into the NBA at 17 years old. They’re babies, they need that nurturing, they need someone who’s going to take them under their wing that’s going to help them do the everyday pieces, that’s going to look after them, that’s going to ask about them, come and visit them at their house and be there to sit with their parents. They’re looking for that because they’re so young and when that’s there and that trust is there then I think that they’re able to expand on that, that they’re able to ask them to do things outside of their comfort zone and challenge them because now they’ve got a trust and it’s built on more social and emotions than [the question] can the coach move me from Point A to Point B.
“This shift is happening and I know we’ve talked about it that we used to see it a lot with female athletes as opposed to male athletes, but not now I think it’s more age-related as opposed to gender.”
As those coach-athlete relationships shift, so too does the role of the sports psychologist, which was a major theme of Borlabi’s appearance at June’s Virtual Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership alongside Kate Hays, the former Head of Performance Psychology at the English Institute of Sport [EIS]. The duo joined moderator Dehra Harris, the Assistant Director of High Performance Operations at the Toronto Blue Jays, to discuss the stability of an athlete’s confidence as well as the athlete’s ability to root confidence in a firm understanding of their strengths.
“For me, there’s been a real shift in sports psychology and how it’s delivered,” says Hays.
“When I think back to when I qualified, the focus was still so much on mental skills training and a lot of work at individual level and there’s certainly been a huge shift now. A lot of the work that the psychologist is doing around the team is facilitating environments that are psychologically informed and working alongside the coaching, sports science and sports medicine team as a collaborative effort; and I think that talks to the culture of people as well.
“It requires an entire sports organisation to be aligned in terms of the mission, behaviours, the philosophy around coaching, whether we take strengths-based approaches etc. when it has worked really well and you have athletes that have given the opportunity to learn, develop and grow, it’s because you’ve got a collaborative group of people that are coming together and working really effectively; and I think these things are difficult to do in isolated pockets.”
Borlabi also elaborated on the ways in which her work has changed. She says: “My role is so different now to when I first started. I need to teach athletes some very basic pieces of socialisation and emotion before we even get to the performance piece, because there’s these things that they don’t even know that.
“Besides working with the Bulls, I have a consulting business on the side and work with [Olympic] athletes as well. I think of so many times I spend the first four sessions just helping them understand that we’re not returning a call or text to their coach.”
Mental skills and learning to problem-solve
Harris asks Borlabi and Hays a question about the mental skills that athletes need to be working on. Both have already discussed emotional intelligence and self-awareness and it is a theme to which they both return.
“In working with younger athletes, it is establishing who they are,” says Borlabi. “One of the things I’ve always wanted them to try to figure out is how they like to be coached. I don’t think that they know that or how can they improve, and when do they listen the most, and what is the aspect they value the most in a coach and teammates.
“You miss that piece when you’re younger, so when they become professionals, I want them to try and think about that. It’s definitely something we learnt with the Olympic [athletes], they’d think about the coach. How are they coached? How will they work with their teammates? And how do they work at their best?
“Another aspect of that is their support system. Wanting them to be able to know who is in their support system and who gives them what kind of support and who do they gravitate towards? Who reinforces what they’re trying to do and who brings them down? I think that’s important because they don’t know that at a young age and it’s helping them to figure that piece out that helps them to grow as athletes.”
Hays shares her own experiences on the matter. “I’ve learnt a lot in diving [she worked with British Diving for more than a decade], which is an early-starter sport,” she says. “You’re quite often working with young athletes, aged 9, 10 etc. Obviously their cognitive ability is not the same as an adult and one of the most important things, very gently and slowly, is getting them to start to self-reflect.
“Quite often, they’ll go in, and the coach will direct them in what they’re doing, they’ll execute the training session, they’ll have a great one, and then they’ll get in the car and tell mum and dad how brilliant it was. But then they’ll go in the next day and the same thing will happen. It’s because they haven’t necessarily taken the time to take a step back.
“It’s a slow process, particularly when you’re dealing with younger athletes, but that process of self-reflection, the earlier that can start, the more robust athletes are in terms of what happened today; ‘why do I think that happened, and what does that tell me about what I need to do tomorrow?’ It encourages that problem-solving, that reflection, and that thought. Essentially, it’s a cyclical process, you get to that point where you’re able to recreate the things that you do well and lose the things that you’re not doing as well.
“With the youngsters, it’s about getting them into the habit of just asking questions around ‘why?’ and then figure out how they’re going to problem-solve and how they’re going to figure out the different things that they could try. So that the failing becomes part of the learning process rather than something to be worried or scared about. It’s that real message around failing smart and learning fast. How you make sense of your experiences and utilise that information. At this stage, it’s not about performance.”
Download the latest Performance Special Report – Winning With Nutrition
Long relegated to the side lines, nutrition is finally getting the attention it deserves when it comes to helping athletes achieve peak performance. Download our latest Special Report, produced in partnership with Science in Sport and featuring NBA champions the Milwaukee Bucks, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and English Premier League club Aston Aston Villa.
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Gera, a former US Marine and NFL coach, is ideally placed to moderate a session that brings together Lance Stucky from US Air Force Special Operations Command, Will Lezner, the Director of Mental Performance at Major League Baseball’s Los Angeles Angels, and Ty Sevin, the Director of Human Performance, Research and education at Keiser.
“I always found the one common factor between elite athletes and warriors is acceptance,” Gera continues. “Elite warriors just accept that ‘here is the bar, this is the requirement, this is the stuff I have to do in order to get there so that I don’t let my team down.’ Elite athletes love practising; and practice is mundane.”
Stucky, who also spent time working with the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, argues that few groups can meet the grit of Special Forces operators – not even athletes – but, “both expect that they’ll not only meet the standard but exceed the standard, no matter what it is. It’s that mindset of ‘I’m better than you and I’m going to prove it to you.’ Both elite athletes and operators have that type A mentality.”
As part of the Leaders Athlete Optimisation Series, the panel explored trends in the physical and mental preparation of elite performers across sport and the military, beginning with athlete signatures and wrapping up with a discussion on the transferability of training programmes in different environments.
A training ethos
As ever, the key consideration when individualising training is the demands of the task. Coaches must identify the athletic movement needed by the athlete and then reverse-engineer those demands to be able to train and test for them.
“I understand when they say the art of coaching is the pragmatic experience applied with your scientific background,” says Sevin, who has decades of experience coaching both Olympic and professional athletes.
He shared his training ethos:
‘Strength coach’ is a misnomer
In explaining his ethos, Sevin reveals his dislike for the term ‘strength coach’ and why he prefers ‘human performance coach’. “‘Strength’ only encompasses a very small portion of what we do as performance coaches,” he says, which is true when it comes to individualising training programmes.
He cites renowned management thinker Peter Drucker, who once said: “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”. “The process I use is a procedure many people call ‘test, evaluate and prescribe’,” says Sevin. “In my mind, that is taking the subjectivity out of it and that’s why I use signatures because I want to be very objective.”
Sevin achieves that objectivity in part through force-velocity profiles that highlight unilateral imbalances. “These play a large role in enabling people to generate force, power, and speed and it also plays a large role in the durability of athletes, and it also contributes to a lack of endurance. You can create power, force and speed baselines.”
On the theme of individualisation, he points out that on all the Premier League teams with whom Keiser works, goalkeepers have the highest velocity outcomes – more than their outfield peers. “We try to understand the key performance indicators for every sport and the improvements that specific individual needs to make to match that signature.”
Similarly, in US Air Force Special Operations, there are differences depending on role, team and mission, although, as Stucky illustrates, operators need to be prepared for all eventualities. “One team might focus more on long-range movements where they’re carrying that heavy rucksack,” he says. “They might be in austere environments for an extended length of time. How can we generate that energy system to be able to keep up with that work capacity? And can they actually be explosive and be able to move and do what they have to do tactically? I want to say that we really have to train our guys to be a jack of all trades.
“I also equate them to wresters or UFC fighters, where they’re going to have a high demand of quick spurts but then they have to be able to recover while they’re still moving. You train the energy system and musculoskeletal system.”
It is a growth area in physical performance, but Lezner’s experience in Major League Baseball is that there are currently few available tools on the mental side of athlete optimisation. Testing is banned at elite level and the only opportunities for collecting biofeedback are in scouting and developmental contexts. “That was the most tangible opportunity for them to understand, OK, this is where I can integrate some sort of arousal regulation techniques.”
Developing self-directed athletes
Having explored athlete signatures Gera steers the conversation towards those times when the athlete or soldier is away from the coach, perhaps at competition overseas in the case of sport or in various theatres of operation in the military.
Sevin explains that athletic signatures build in a level of sustainability. “[Athletic signatures] protect me and allows them, when they’re away from me, to not get caught up in listening to people on the side, he says. “It protects them when they know ‘this is my process’. They don’t have to think. I want to take the responsibility off the athlete so when they’re on their own I’m trying to keep them on target without having distractions.”
There is an educational component too. Sevin continues: “My approach is that it teaches them how to think like a coach, to understand their body and how it adapts and what the plan is.”
In sharing his views, Stucky returns to the question of baseline testing raised by Sevin. “We’ll individualise it for the unique soldier to the unique situation. At the end of the day, it’s always about controlling the controllables. There’s places that we go and we know what we’re going to have. We can actually build a programme and we can keep that in our programme bank and manipulate that for the guys when they’re away.”
For the most part, service personnel have access to well-appointed gyms while on deployment. “The biggest thing is educating the individual after the test. If we have 20 workouts or contacts, how big a relationship can we create with them to believe in what we’re doing, to have that teamwork between our team and the actual operator that we’re training and how much does he believe in what we’re doing and can he improve on that in those austere environments?”
To bring the focus back to the mental side of the equation, Gera asks Lezner about the differences in working with players at spring training versus in-season and there is a clear distinction. “That spring training period, those 45 days-plus in some cases, is critical for upskilling athletes,” says Lezner. “It’s really dependent on the staff support that you have not only at major league level but at minor league level.
“The critical juncture is when you get to in-season, now you’re working with just the major league guys. You do have dedicated time available on the road, at home, however, at that time, these guys get into their routines to the point where the operational tempo of games and everything they’re doing starts to accelerate, so if they’re not self-directive at that point you might be trying to catch up with them.
“There’s a couple of things when being proactive that are very helpful. One is to have the staff so that these players are learning these habits and behaviours at the minor leagues and doing their upskilling there. My No 1 goal for all athletes that I work with is for them to become self-directive so that I become obsolete, to an extent.”
The best do not always buy-in
To wrap up the main discussion, Gera asks Sevin if the best athletes buy into the concept of athletic signatures.
“No, actually. It’s a mixed bag. Everybody’s an individual,” says Sevin. “The greatest athletes in a lot of cases are very narcissistic. They’re just the lions and tigers of the world. They’re pretty relentless and they’re almost violent in the way that they think about things and very aggressive. Sometimes the relationships are outstanding and sometimes it’s a challenge and I don’t think I can pigeon hole one particular way to do it.”
All in all, Sevin has worked with 24 athletes who have competed at the Olympics or world championships. “They were by far never the most talented for the most part. It all came back to lifestyle, a relentless drive of placing priority on what they were doing.”
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