By John Portch

It is common for athletes to spend much of their time trying to please the coach.

While not a bad thing per se, if the athlete is overly focused on doing what their coach may see as the ‘right’ thing, they’re not focused on performing to the best of their ability. Performance can be suboptimal if the coach imposes a creative straitjacket.

There are parallels between the athlete-coach relationship and the actor-director dynamic in the performing arts, as British actor Michael Fox explains onstage at the 2024 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

“It’s about quality listening,” he says. “The director’s role is to lead, to steer the ship, but the frustrating thing is that you can lose answers if the actors are not able to voice their opinion and put it out into the room.

“It’s good to be heard, and the director can do what they want with it, but if you’re allowed to voice it then you can let it go. You can lose people’s creative instincts if they’re not able to voice their opinion.”

Fox, who is best known for his work on Downton Abbey and Dunkirk, has also appeared in numerous theatre productions and voiced characters in several video games since graduating from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

On occasion in his subsequent career, he has encountered directors who see themselves as “gurus”. “You can make people really shrink around you,” he says of such characters. “Am I just an instrument for you to share with the world how amazing you are?”

Fox’s observations struck a chord with the coaches in the room at the Kia Oval and raised several questions:

Does the responsibility sit solely with the director?

No. In fact, as Fox says, “you have to still value the things that you need to do to make sure that you’re at the top of your game.” His routine includes yoga and meditation and, since he “spends a lot of time unemployed” he must do whatever it takes to ensure he is ready to go following a successful audition.

It sounds quite insular. How does that translate to a company setting?

“You do the work separately and then come and be crafted,” says Fox. “You’re taking the edges off to push in the right direction. You don’t want the director to do all the work.”

Speaking of directors, surely no two are alike?

Not at all. “That first week we just don’t know what we’re expecting,” says Fox. “You have to adapt to their way of working.” He appeared at the summit during the London production of The Fear of 13, which was unique in its genesis. “We were up on the first day and we nearly staged the front half of the play, which is madness, but it was amazing. But most directors talk over a coffee for the first few days.”

What qualities define the best directors, in Fox’s opinion?

“The directors I like working with are the ones that come into the first day of rehearsals and say ‘I don’t have all the answers – we’ll find them together’,” says Fox. “I respond better to that sort of mentality because I think it’s more honest. We don’t have all the answers. The best idea can come from anywhere in the room.”

However, it is still common practice, as he explains, for film call sheets to rank actors by importance on any given day. “That kills creativity, personal agency and instinct,” adds Fox. “They feel like their voice is less important.”

Therefore, “the best directors can give trust and individual agency to the actor over what they’re doing, their artistry, then you feel like you’re growing as an individual.” Critically, “in the moments where you need to be instinctive onstage you’re not thinking about getting it right for them or making a mistake.”

How might this look in practice?

A good example is Sinéad Rushe’s 2023 production of Shakespeare’s Othello in which Fox played the character of Iago.

It was notable for the fact that three actors played Iago onstage at the same time and Othello was given a more prominent role than in traditional stagings.

“We wanted to take Iago’s complicity with the audience away and put Othello much more at the centre of that play,” Fox told The Uncensored Critic Podcast earlier this year. Iago’s famous soliloquys became dialogues between the three aspects of his character rather than the usual series of knowing asides to the audience.

Rushe, who also taught Fox at Central, facilitated creative discussions from the off. “We’ve had two periods of development just of ten days each just to begin to workshop this idea of three actors playing Iago,” Rushe told The Theatre Audience Podcast on the eve of the second preview.

She also wanted to protect actor Martins Imhangbe in the titular role. “There’s a racial dynamic there that’s very problematic and there are these very interesting histories of actors who’ve played Othello over the years of finding it actually quite a distressing experience of feeling like the entire audience is laughing at them through the vehicle of Iago.”

Imhangbe himself also spoke at the time of the company’s work “dismantling” and “reconstructing” the play. “We’re trying to do something different with it, so it means we have to see it with fresh eyes,” he told The Rendition. “We’re trying to bridge the gap between what was written and how it’s relevant today.”

Rushe added that the production provided “a feeling of kindred spirits and people up for working in a collaborative and ensemble way.”

Fox agrees. “It was an unusual take but actually it meant that people could hear the play anew. And I loved it.”

What to read next

How to Transform an Underperforming Environment into a Thriving Hub

By Joe Lemire

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.

* * * * *

Right-handed starting pitcher Griffin Canning pitched five up-and-down seasons with the Los Angeles Angels but has excelled in his first year with the New York Mets, going 6-2 with a 2.90 ERA over his first 12 starts.

The 29-year-old Canning, a former second-round pick out of UCLA, has credited the Mets’ pitching lab and its tech-savvy coaches as part of why he signed with the club in the offseason — and why he’s off to a strong start to the season.

On how the Mets’ pitching lab has helped…

Personally, probably the biggest thing has been the KinaTrax. It can show your body, just as a skeleton moving through your delivery. I feel like it’s a little easier to look at just the skeleton, instead of maybe video of yourself to really dissect how you’re moving and maybe where your mechanics are off a little bit. And then obviously every team has the Edgertronic to see how the ball is coming off your hand and be able to tweak your pitches a little bit there and see just how to make them more consistent.

On the tools he uses in the offseason…

I threw some on a force plate mound at Banner Health in Arizona. It’s super helpful to see where you’re at and get some validation for maybe how you’re feeling. It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of comparing yourself to ‘the hardest throwers have this.’ So I think it’s a double-edged sword of understanding who you are and knowing yourself, and then just trying to maximize that.

On his use of the Oura ring…

Going to bed early is definitely valuable for me. Trying to getting to bed early and then hitting that [lowest heart rate before] the midpoint — those are usually the nights that I get my best sleep. It’s a little harder in-season with different schedules, traveling.

If anything, it’s probably more of a tool to hold you a little bit accountable because you don’t know exactly how accurate it is. Sometimes you wake up feeling great, and your sleep didn’t match all. So I think it’s more of a tool just holding yourself accountable, wanting to see a good score when you wake up in the morning. You don’t want to put too much stock into it because if you wake up on a day that you’re pitching, you don’t want to let that get in your head.

On why he embraces tech…

You’re always trying to find an edge of how you can feel your best consistently every single day, just with how long of a season it is. We’re here every single day. It’s just about checking all the boxes — your nutrition, your sleep, your recovery — just to feel your best and be able to go out there and perform.

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.

By John Portch

“Our mission is simple: to find and develop the world’s first female F1 champion within ten years.”

Fran Longstaff, the Head of Research at More Than Equal, reminds the audience at April’s Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey that no woman has competed in a Formula 1 race since the Italian Lella Lombardi in 1976.

This is despite motorsport being one of the few mixed gender sporting domains where men and women can compete on equal footing.

“Our research rates show that females make up ten per cent of participation rates in motorsport,” adds Longstaff. “That goes down to four per cent at the elite level.”

More Than Equal’s mission is certainly bold. The organisation was founded in 2022 by former F1 driver David Coulthard and philanthropist Karel Komárek, The pair recognised that even the most accomplished young female drivers are behind on the development curve compared to their male peers.

Longstaff was drafted in to better “understand the problem behind the problem”. “Research and data runs through our Driver Development Programme like a stick of rock,” she tells the audience at the Royal College of Music. This approach is critical when the end point is still unknown.

The programme itself is divided into four pillars:

1. Identify

Their search began in karting. They trawled through the race results in a sport where it is notoriously hard for girls to take the next leap.

“That sounds like an easy task but karting race results are often stored as PDFs,” says Longstaff. “It is objectively the worst way to store data.” They also had to gender mark race results, which took time.

Additionally, more than 500 young female kart drivers heeded More Than Equal’s call to apply for their Driver Development Programme. The drivers with the most potential were invited to follow-up interviews, which extended to parents and families. “That way we could understand what activity they’d already done to enable them to get the results we were seeing on the track. This is where you could have some interesting conversations and even say the driver was over-performing their level of activity in that sport.”

Six drivers, all aged 13-14 years old at the time, made it into More Than Equal’s first cohort:

2. Monitor

To understand the problem behind the problem, More Than Equal, produced its Inside Track report in 2023:

“There were fewer than 30 research papers on the human factors related to driver performance,” says Longstaff, who explains that they are “building the road as we walk”. Data is even more scant when it comes to female drivers or their experience behind the wheel. “We’re looking at how we can optimise and adjust cars to ensure that females can perform at  their best without being hindered.” Longstaff underlines that this will not come at the cost of performance decrements to the car.

Additionally, the Driver Development Programme takes a 360 approach, taking in the physiological, psychological and technical elements of racing in an effort to better address the difficulties young girls face in karting. “We want to make that transition as seamless as possible,” says Longstaff.

There are regular coaching contact points. “We have camps every six to eight weeks where we come together as a community.” The girls recently had the opportunity to spend time with Coulthard at the Red Bull Ring in Austria. “They asked a lot of questions about his experiences and could really start to understand what it is to be an elite racing driver.”

Longstaff also explained that More Than Equal’s research is freely shared with F1 teams, which is a break with the usual secrecy that governs their interactions.

3. Compare

Benchmarks simply don’t exist for female F1 drivers. “We don’t know what a racing car driver should be doing and look like at 16 versus 18,” says Longstaff.

More Than Equal has commissioned two PhD students at Manchester Metropolitan University to help establish those benchmarks. “One student is going to be building physiological, psychological, cognitive training and anthropometric profiles from drivers all the way from karting to F1.”

The research into male and female differences will kick all tired and unfounded assumptions about female drivers into the long grass.

The other PhD student will research how hormones impact performance, particularly when it comes to cognitive function.

4. Predict

This work will help More Than Equal to build was Longstaff calls “the largest data lake on the planet on the predictors of female racing driver performance”. She adds: “All of those PDF race results get pulled into one central pool and we start to overlay that with the physiological, cognitive and psychological data. Once you have that, you can start to make predictions and we can understand who may have a greater chance of success at the next level of competition.”

It will also help to widen the talent net. “Once we have these driver profiles, we may be able to start to understand whether there are certain populations where we can spot talent.” Longstaff suggests the world of esports. “It’s a 50-50 split in terms of male-female players, so there’s a huge population we might be able to pull from.”

On top of that, digital twinning technology has the potential to enable teams to optimise how they adjust cars to the needs of their drivers with recourse to expensive testing. “You don’t necessarily need to be on the track,” says Longstaff, “but we can only do that by having all those data points in one system.”

What to read next

‘Some Skills of Adaptive Leadership Are Obvious, But That Doesn’t Make them Easier to Learn’

By Rachel Woodland

Given the recent increase in women choosing to not delay having a family, and the subsequent increase in athletes competing during and after pregnancy, sport systems need to adapt in support of this growing demographic.

Our recent Women’s High Performance Sport Community call featured the UK Sports Institute sharing how organisations can better support athletes returning to performance postpartum.

We were delighted to be joined by:

• Esme Matthew, the Head of Physiology at the UKSI
• Dr Kate Hutchings, a Sports Medicine Doctor working with the UKSI’s leading clinical services for all world-class-funded Olympic and Paralympic athletes
• Dr Richard Burden, who leads the Female Athlete Performance Programme at the UKSI

The conversation focused on the structures UKSI have put in place to support athletes, including the role multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) have, which practices are having a positive impact on athletes, and what was learnt in the most recent Games cycle.

Six core themes emerged around what is involved in guiding an athlete successfully through pregnancy and their postpartum return. We also discussed what can be done where resources are limited.

1. Preparation and planning are crucial

The timing of when an athlete chooses to inform their coach and support team of their pregnancy will vary, but having conversations as early as possible during pregnancy is essential to map out return-to-performance plans. It’s advised that athletes establish support networks and define expectations with their teams before delivery. This could include what they expect in terms of communication from their coach, when they’re hoping to train, and how they’d like to stay connected to their sport or team. The panel recommended putting this in contract form and falling back on the initial discussion when necessary.

In their experiences, Matthew and Hutchings have found that Performance Lifestyle Advisors play a pivotal role in helping athletes navigate logistics like childcare, breastfeeding, and travel. It might also be that the Performance Lifestyle Advisor is the team member the athlete lets know first of their  plans to have a child, and signposted the athlete to the resources offered by the Female Athlete Performance Programme.

Deciding what will be monitored before giving birth will help with this planning process and ensure shared expectations postpartum. The monitoring plan will also help shape MDT support. More on each to come.

2. Multidisciplinary support teams

It won’t surprise you to hear that effective return requires collaboration between many people, including but not limited to:

• Doctors (such as Hutchings)
• Physiologists (such as Matthew)
• Nutritionists
• Pelvic health physiotherapists
• Mental health professionals

That being said, the athlete must be central to all decisions, with support teams adapting to their evolving needs. It also won’t surprise you that no athlete return is the same as any other, even if it isn’t the athlete’s first child. Ultimately it comes down to who they trust to help them make decisions. Even if the goal is to have the athlete make final decisions, they’ll seek input and guidance along the way.

A key learning from more recent years has come from athletes wanting to test and push the boundaries of what’s possible when pregnant. For Matthew and Hutchings, the health and wellbeing of the athlete and baby are the first priority. But athletes are not used to that being a default mindset. It’s not that they don’t care about their own wellbeing or the wellbeing of their baby, but they are used to continuously thinking about how they are going to be better athletes. How can they return faster? How can they get themselves in the best possible shape pre-delivery so that their postpartum period is as easy as possible. Alongside this, MDTs will need to come together to help support an athlete through some really difficult questions. For example, ‘can I go on this training camp in warm weather?’, ‘can I still compete at this week of my pregnancy?’ or ‘can I still do  my sport?’ The reality is that you are not going to find an answer to these questions in a research article.

A further reality is that these questions will always be asked, and that a standard FAQ section won’t suffice. Instead, the duo recommend talking through the risk.

Typical questions:

• What’s the risk of falling?
• What’s the risk of impact?
• How far along in your pregnancy are you?
• What risk are you willing to take?

The aim is to have the athlete answer these question for themselves. The MDT needs to be able to provide guidelines for athletes to be able to consider that for themselves, given that some examples, such as ‘can I go on this training camp to Australia, where we know it’s going to be really hot?’ and ‘can I still do a competition while it’s still really hot if I feel OK?’ can’t be answered ahead of time. They have to be able to answer it on the day given how many factors might change. But we should be educating them in how to make that decision.

One way to approach this is to talk through the theory with the athlete. With the heat example, that’s explaining blood flow and where else blood will be directed beyond the placenta. If they understand the theory of it, it can make it easier for them to make decisions for themselves.

Beyond this, a couple of things to definitely avoid were shared too:

1. Anaerobic exercise.
2. No supine exercise later on in pregnancy.
3. No lying on your stomach during exercise.
4. Towards the end of pregnancy, although still up to the athlete, avoid any risk of falling. For example, avoiding contact sport.

The UKSI are also really clear with the athletes that they don’t provide any sort of obstetric support. So they’re not there to be midwives or health visitors.

Then there are additional considerations to think of for who might be part of the athlete’s support team. For example, Hutchings is working with a Paralympian and she had to leave a meeting because she was going to a session where her hearing dog was going to be trained to listen for a newborn baby’s cry. There are situations where the planning for post-natal is even more considered.

Involving a partner can also be an excellent addition to support teams. It gives them more information for when the athlete needs them to fight the traditional athlete mentality to push through. There can also be a discussion about how hard this transition might be and that the athlete is going to need support through their decision making. It can provide another check and challenge for them when questioning if they really need to push that hard today or offer observations such as ‘I can see you feel really tired. Why don’t you just have a day off?’ It’s not an athlete’s mindset. Their mindset is more likely ‘I feel a bit off, but I’m going to carry on anyway’. Matthew shared that, “having someone that’s there with them on a day-to-day that can really help with that has been really useful”.

It’s also important to train staff. Matthew added that ahead of the Paris cycle, the learning module for staff across the UKSI was rewritten. Para athlete support was interwoven across the module rather than being a separate section, as it had been previously.

On the call, we also spoke about any instances where an athlete might prefer to talk to Matthew or Hutchings about her pregnancy, rather than her MDT in her sport and her coach, and everything that goes with it. Both have found this to be quite rare. If it has happened it’s normally been where they are the only female support they have, or when the team haven’t known about the pregnancy yet. In response to this,  they’d focus on brining  everyone together to be aligned with the initial message to the athlete being a reminder that Matthew and Hutchings are there as an extra layer of support for both the athlete and their support team within the sport. This is usually followed up with an MDT webinar. This would cover what their training and pregnancy would look like. Talking through training plans postpartum with all of their support team with the athlete in the room. Typically this gels and brings everyone together.

Matthew and Hutchings were quick to point out that some of the best examples of support teams have been all male apart from themselves. They’ve been incredibly understanding, and couldn’t do enough for the athletes. It’s just trying to bring everyone together and get them on the same page.

The other time this can happen is before an athlete is pregnant, but they would like to talk about what training might look like during pregnancy or what return  timelines might look like for them in their sport, and they might not want to talk to the sport about it yet because they don’t feel comfortable.

So Matthew and Hutchings would always encourage them to tell their sport as early as possible, but it does at least give like a bit of a safety net for that.

3. Pelvic health as a game changer

When asked around practices that have a positive impact on athlete return postpartum, pelvic floor education and support before and after birth was repeatedly described as transformative for any female athlete, given its impact on incontinence and strength training.

From research around the Commonwealth Games in 2022 one in five athletes reported urinary incontinence. They were planning for adapting to this through kit changes or fluid restrictions. The stats for urinary incontinence postpartum, regardless of mode of delivery, is at one in three athletes; and faecal incontinence is one in 10. “It’s such an important area for us to get right and that’s why we always work very closely with pelvic health physios,” said Hutchings. “If you keep up and do all your pelvic floor exercises, if you’ve got good pelvic health antenatally, you reduce your risk of urinary incontinence by 40 per cent postpartum, regardless of the method  delivery.”

Athletes are encouraged to use tools like the NHS Squeezy app and see a pelvic health specialist pre- and postnatally if something bespoke is needed.

As a group we also discussed being careful with the interrelatedness of symptoms of pelvic floor weaknesses and REDs. With it being important to stay diligent around REDs given changes to nutritional needs, if breastfeeding; plus changes in bone density linked to giving birth. All with the added complexity that athletes remain on the register for drugs testing in their sports and will need to be sensible with supplements.

4. Individualised return plans

Given that no two athletes’ journeys are the same. Plans must be flexible and responsive to daily changes in health and energy. Monitoring will play an important role here, with the likes of readiness scores, subjective wellness, sub-max testing guiding training and return.

It’s important to have awareness about each athlete’s training environment. Especially as each athlete will stop full training at different stages antenatally for a variety of reasons. That could also impact when they reengage postpartum too. This awareness, allied to open communication, is even more important if they’re the only pregnant athlete in a squad or sport.

This is important for thinking about athletes feeling disconnected, and how we can continue to keep them in the same spaces as other athletes, but with a different programme, for example in the gym, or continuing to attend squad meetings, even if they’re not training at the same capacity.

As mentioned earlier, having some really clear markers as part of an athlete’s individualised plan is also helpful. This would include discussing what you would like to measure postpartum before you get there. This can useful for the coach too. Matthew and Hutchings also always work hard on helping the athlete connect with detraining while accepting that some of the markers that they would keep track of normally are going to go down. There are also conversations about things like blood volume and endurance levels. For example, some endurance athletes will panic about losing fitness and when these conversations happen, Matthew and Hutchings talk about the physiological principles that sit around pregnancy that actually support a maintenance of economy and supporting systems. So having those markers lets the athlete and MDT talk through the pregnancy, what are you expecting to see, and managing those expectations and then, postpartum, what would you look to be monitoring when you come back and when would you look to do that?

An example where this work well, is in rowing and Jack Brown’s work with Olympic double sculls bronze medallist Mathilda Hodgkins-Byrne. They included clear physiological markers and sub-max testing to guide return. Together they put some good markers in place around sub-max testing to look at economy. They had some clear markers in the sand that the sport wanted the athlete to meet but did some nice monitoring around that. This included morning monitoring, which is quite tricky to get done when the athlete is having to get up and look after her child. Her first thought is to talk about what can work and potential practical solutions that you can look at. It could be that starting with just a readiness score for training for the day can be tracked and then over time you can start to build others back in. For example, resting heart rate in the morning when that feels really important, say, six months postpartum.

We discussed options to support training, including blood flow restriction. However, there are other things that can be done that are just really sound training principles around muscle hypertrophy postpartum that could be harder to implement than previously; therefore focus could be on those first. It could be as basic as doing good training and recovery. It can be quite difficult for athletes to do the training postpartum when they’ve got so much going on, like getting to training, being able to take the time out to do it, finding childcare, sorting all of their nutrition. So that’s a really big focus for the UKSI postpartum, the planning and organisation. With nutrition, this might be have you got something in the car that you can eat on the way home? Because once you get home the baby is back to you and you’re in full-on Mum mode.

Further, if an athlete or coach wants to use methods such as BFR because they want to accelerate their return, it’s known that from a pelvic floor point of view the UKSI doesn’t get people running much before 12 weeks anyway. Thus, you could accelerate other areas such as muscle development, but it’s the pelvic floor that you want to engage. And that takes time.

5. Mental health and identity

Both Matthew and Hutchings advocate for mental health support, and work with a psychologist for pregnant and postpartum athletes. The change they face is vast, likely moving from a very regimented and structured training life to one full of unpredictability and many unknowns and firsts. There can be a struggle with the dual identity of being a new mother and an elite performer. As Hutchings said: “I think that’s really important for us to recognise and have those conversations and then feeling comfortable to say to their team. Actually, I don’t feel all right today or I’m a bit tearful, I’m struggling or I don’t feel like I fit in.”

It’s important for the MDT to recognise that an athlete might feel disconnected as they return to their sporting environment. They might be the first (or only current) athlete to be pregnant.

6. Peer support and mentorship

A simple support mechanism has been the creation of a WhatsApp group for pregnant and postpartum athletes to foster peer mentorship and shared learning. This informal network has been highly valued for emotional support and practical advice.

What about those with fewer resources?

Smaller sports often lack in-house expertise. UKSI fills this gap by offering bespoke support and education.

• Practitioners are encouraged to upskill using resources like:
  • IOC Pregnancy Guidelines
  • 6R Framework (Gráinne Donnelly)
  • Greg Whyte’s Bump It Up

How might you take advantage of the UKSI’s experiences in athlete return postpartum?

• If you’re in the GB Paralympic and Olympic system your sport can utilise the UKSI Female Athlete Performance Team through Dr Kate Hutchings.
• If you have research and innovation questions, and you’re in a position to do so, (Paralympic, Olympic or professional sport), you could work with the Centre of Excellence for Women in Sport, which the UKSI collaborate with alongside Manchester Metropolitan University through Dr Richard Burden.

Main photo: iBrainTech

By Joe Lemire

Neurocognitive training tool i-BrainTech has always commanded large crowds at its conference booths for its novel setup: a video game played entirely through visualization.

Users wear an EEG headset, which monitors brain activity and translates intention into action on the screen. The goal is to help soccer players sharpen their decision making and execution. It has been adopted by clubs in Serie A (Juventus), MLS (Orlando City SC and formerly Atlanta United), LaLiga (Real Sociedad) and the Portuguese Primeira Liga (SL Benfica). Longtime MLS star Jonathan Bornstein was an avid user.

Now, i-BrainTech is seeking to broaden its reach to academy and youth players. It’s a well-trodden path for performance tech to prove themselves with the elite before reaching the larger consumer market. But i-BrainTech has both the advantage of its inherent gamification and the challenge of making complex tech more frictionless.

“All transformative technologies should be ready and willing to become accessible, to validate the impact on the top level of performance and then to allow access of youth,” i-BrainTech Co-Founder/CEO Konstantin Sonkin said. “You need to be ready to cater your value to the young generation, and we are so lucky to be an engaging game at the end of the day.”

Sonkin has been working on this technology for 15 years to balance high signal quality with ease of use. He described a remodeled product as “a top-level, consumer-ready headset.” The goal is not only to improve the performance of younger players but also to encourage more athletic participation and unlock new revenue streams for clubs, such as with a co-branded cap or content.

“We want to drive them from Instagram back to the pitch,” Sonkin said. “Because when you exercise your mind, you’re so eager to execute in the [physical world] because your brain got so excited. It’s called neuro-priming. It has excessive, let’s say, electricity. It wants to utilize that in real-world actions, and that is the connection between their content created by clubs and then a long lifetime value.”

Michita Toda previously used i-BrainTech with rehabbing players as a physical therapist at Orlando City, where he saw value in keeping injured players mentally sharp while physically recovering. He recently joined the North Carolina Courage as its Head Athletic Trainer and is hoping to bring the product there, both for the NWSL club but also for the associated men’s USL team, North Carolina FC, as well as for the large youth academy system in the area.

“Being on the medical side of things, we talk a lot about youth sports specialization and how the more they play at a younger age, that might make them more susceptible to injury,” Toda said. “Well, using technology like this to supplement what they’re already doing, but not overdoing it physically, they still get the mental reps and get the quote-unquote ‘practice’ without having to tax their body.”

Members of the Juventus Residency Academy train with i-BrainTech. (Photo: iBrainTech)

Limited studies have shown promising results with the transfer of skill from the i-BrainTech product to the pitch. Real Sociedad B — the LaLiga club’s reserve team, which competes in the Spanish third division — completed a 15-player case study that spanned three months and 12,500 visualized actions. Those using i-BrainTech improved 12.4% in the accuracy of long kicks compared to 2.6% in the control group. Five of the eight players using i-BrainTech’s neurofeedback training also reported better concentration in matches.

“When we actually repeat all the actions on the pitch, most of the time we train our mind-body connection,” Sonkin said. “We train our muscle memory. Muscle obviously doesn’t have any memory. Memory lives in the brain.”

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.

A vodcast brought to you by our Main Partners

Miranda Menaspà is wary of using technology for technology’s sake.

“One of the things we’re trying to figure out, particularly for fresh graduates coming into high performance, is that sense of pressure to utilise technology because that’s what’s seen to be done in high performance,” she tells Teamworks’ Andrew Trimble and Leaders John Portch.

Miranda is the Director of National Performance Support Systems at the Australian Institute of Sport and a practising physiotherapist, which made her an ideal guest on this special Teamworks Vodcast, particularly when it comes to sharing her perspective on the way the Australian sports system uses technology.

“The next step is ensuring practitioners have got the critical thinking skills to understand why I am using this and what is it adding. What is it telling me? It’s getting that ability to analyse.”

Her words bring to mind High Performance Unpacked, the Teamworks Special Report that spoke to the importance of the practitioner optimising a given tech product to the final user.

It resonated with Andrew too. “When you haven’t got a centralised mechanism for presenting and communicating data, it shines a light on how important it is to be done correctly,” he says. “The greatest dataset in the world, if not communicated correctly, is nowhere near as effective and may be detrimental.”

Elsewhere in this episode, Miranda and Andrew discuss the idea of the physio room as the heartbeat of the team; the balance between system and individual performance [29:30]; why the physiotherapist is a ‘life coach’; and bridging the evidence gap in female athlete health.

Check out Episode 1, with Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers:

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Main photo: TOCA Football Inc

By Ethan Joyce

TOCA Football went live with a new user platform near the end of April called MyTOCA. The youth-focused soccer app is a go-to space for players to keep up with their training, but also create a connected experience in the communities at the 37 TOCA Soccer training centers in the US.

“We’ve been collecting more and more data, but there really became this gap, if you will, from a customer’s perspective,” TOCA Founder Eddie Lewis said. “We had a lot of really powerful training data, but we made it really difficult to consume and collect.”

Lewis said a clear goal emerged to make an app that was engaging, but also one that easily displayed the value of TOCA training session. He told SBJ that the entire process to build the MyTOCA app started with a complete teardown of its existing platform, which struggled to collect data. The re-engineered setup creates more personalization for players but also helps TOCA stay more engaged with their soccer trainees outside of the facility walls.

 

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“The ability to take a player, use the data to not only understand where they are — but also understand insights that would be very difficult to see necessarily from the naked eye unless you spent a ton of time with these players, and then attack those strengths and weaknesses from a training perspective — we think is really valuable,” Lewis said. “And not only that, we want to share that progression along the way. At the end of the day, we believe the higher the training, the higher the customer satisfaction and obviously, the longer retention.”

The app has a trophy room for players to look at their accomplishments, as well as a community leaderboard and internal booking feature. Lewis also mentioned that this is the first phase of MyTOCA, setting the stage for more rollouts like a planned TOCA Score metric.

The deployment coincided with the start of the second annual TOCA Skills Showcase, an event rolled out in partnership with the MLS that spans two months in a competition across 22 TOCA Soccer centers. TOCA Football entered a 10-year partnership with the league at the end of 2022. Lewis added that the pairing has created both “validation and certainly credibility in terms of what we’re doing from a training perspective.”

Regarding the opening of the first TOCA Social site in Dallas, Lewis said there’s no specific date to share yet. But the goal to open ahead of the 2026 World Cup remains in an effort to capitalize on the nationwide interest that will build as kickoffs get closer.

“Everyone’s going to be interested in a in a soccer-related story, or understanding what’s going on with soccer in the US,” Lewis said. “And I think if we’re not ready to step into that spotlight during that window, we miss a once-in-a-generational opportunity.”

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.

By John Portch

Nine in ten elite female athletes admit to having low levels of menstrual health knowledge.

This is despite a reported 93 per cent of female athletes experiencing negative symptoms associated with their menstrual cycle and 51 per cent perceiving that their training and performance is negatively impacted by their period.

“These stats are widely known,” said Matt Green, the Brisbane Lions’ High Performance Manager for AFLW, but, at the same time, as he explained, “the menstrual cycle can be a taboo subject, even if it’s starting to get significantly better.”

Green was the first guest on the Leaders Performance Institute’s new online Sprint Session series, which enables coaches and practitioners from across the community to share insights into their work in a concise fashion.

“I’ll talk about what we’re doing at the coalface,” continued Green, who leads Brisbane’s efforts to better support its female athletes, from 13-year-olds in the academy through to the senior list.

Here, we detail the club’s approach to tackling those taboos, plugging gaps in knowledge, and empowering their female players.

As an organisation, the Lions focus on five key, interrelated areas:

1. Pelvic health. “This is of primary importance,” said Green. “We want to give women and girls information around what’s normal, what’s not, and what we can actually do about it.” Services include a women’s health specialist physio. These help bring conditions such as stress urinary incontinence to the fore “when a lot of female athletes may be dealing with these issues in silence”.
2. Breast health. Annual breast-screening and bra fittings (plus the provision of a bra) are now standard. “There’s some damning statistics that more than 50 per cent of female athletes wear an ill-fitting bra,” said Green, who alluded to the increased risk of breast injury when an athlete is not wearing suitable equipment.
3. Gynaecology. The Lions now have a gynaecologist embedded in their program and the club is “starting to get players thinking about family planning”. This helps normalise the conversation and provides a safe and supportive environment for all athletes thinking about family planning.
4. Menstruation. Services include providing access to expertise, education and resources with a view to normalising conversations about menstruation. Sanitary products are provided by the club and this is a particular focus for academy players because, as Green explained, “there’s been too many stories of young girls not telling their fathers, for example, that they are bleeding profusely on their way to training”.
5. Injury trends. “Female athletes are too often overlooked,” said Green of the limited existing research into female injuries. The Lions focus on research into knee, tendon, foot and ankle injuries in particular.

These five key areas inform the Lions’ delivery on the ground:

• Everyone knows they have a role

The Lions needed a club-wide approach to not only break down perceptions of female health being solely an AFLW issue but also to deliver the structural support outlined below. The creation of their Female Health Working Group was a major step. “This is a multidisciplinary group that enables a holistic approach,” said Green, who added that the working group also includes past players. “We also removed the word ‘athlete’ before ‘female health’ so that support is delivered across the board, from female staff in our football department through to the all departments within the football club”.

• There is empowerment through education

The club created a Female Health Hub, which enables 24-7 access to a range of resources. “If someone delivers a presentation, it is quickly made available to all athletes and staff,” said Green. The Lions’ female health education complemented by a range of multimedia resources, including podcasts and player vlogs. “Death by PowerPoint is not a thing anymore.”

• Health screenings and menstrual tracking are standard

Obstetrics and gynaecology services are fully integrated, with biannual health screenings with the club doctor now the norm. The AFLW players can check-up on issues including their cervical health, skin health, breast health and nutritional status. This then leads to questions about fertility and family planning. Green said: “We want to open up that conversation to ensure they feel supported.” Players and staff also have access to psychological services.

Additionally, the Lions introduced a new athlete management system 18 months ago, which has enabled an increase in collaboration for menstrual tracking, providing a user-friendly interface, and enables better scenario planning for performance staff and players. “This tracking gives us a significant insight into how they’re managing their symptoms. We then integrate this information with our standard wellness questionnaires.” The players have welcomed the real-time feedback and they have become more reflective. They are encouraged to keep journals, which further aids scenario planning. “It’s about getting them to understand their body and the changes they might be seeing.”

• The pregnancy policy is tailored to the individual

The Lions adhere to the AFLW’s Pregnancy and Parental Management Travel Policy, which states: ‘The AFL respects the rights of women who are pregnant, breastfeeding or the carer of a child to participate in the AFLW competition, and is committed to providing supports to assist them to do so.’

Green said: “The AFL have an excellent pregnancy policy that allows us to support our players. We are continuing to evolve our support and contextualising our pregnancy policy with the timings of the season, when the athlete returns to play, and what that looks like rather than them thinking about having a baby at the ‘right’ time of the season. It’s more about what’s right for them”.

• There is promotion of positive body images

“Puberty and body image is particularly important for our academy players, aged 13-19,” said Green, who has heard a few hurtful insults thrown around in his time. “We’ve put in a lot of time and effort with our dietitians and performance psychologists around what that looks like.” The club can also call upon senior players. “Most do vlogs about what they eat in a day and it’s helped us to navigate issues around body image.”

Together, the Lions hope these elements are shifting the narrative around female health.

“I want it to be performance-oriented rather than chasing ‘why female athletes are limited’,” said Green. “We want to give them access to things they can embed in their daily practice.”

Matt Green featured in our recent Special Report

Performance Special Report – High Performance Unpacked

Main photo: Getty Images

By Joe Lemire

Portland Timbers captain Diego Chará made his 400th MLS appearance, making him the first player in league history to reach that milestone with just one club.

The 39-year-old Colombian ranks in the top-10 in MLS history for games started and minutes played, and as he has gotten older, Chará has made training and recovery more of a priority. He recently became a brand ambassador for Omorpho, which places micro-weights on athletic apparel for training.

An Oregon-based company, Omorpho is a partner of Tracktown USA in Eugene and counts Olympic track and field athletes Michael Johnson and Vashti Cunningham among its other ambassadors. In May, Omorpho also partnered with Orangetheory Fitness.

On his introduction to Omorpho…

Last year I saw one of my teammates, Larrys Mabiala, using one of the G-vests from Omorpho, and I started looking for the shorts. I received a pair of shorts from Omorpho last year and started using them in the preseason. I was talking about the shorts with the fitness coach, and he told me it could be a good opportunity to start using those shorts in preseason. I got used to it, and I really like it because it helps a lot to keep the same fitness level, which is important for me for every game.

Diego Chará joins Olympic track and field athletes Michael Johnson and Vashti Cunningham as ambassadors for Omorpho. (Photo: Getty Images)

On how it feels to wear them…

They have micro-weights so in warmups it really brings that effort. I usually use those short for 30 minutes and warmup session. Once I take them off, I start feeling kind of light and that continues into the practice during the day.

On the effect of wearing them…

I saw they helped me a lot to keep the physical level. Because I play as a midfielder, I have to be a powerful guy, and I feel with the shorts, I find a way to keep the same level in the games as during trainings. At the same time, I noticed the shorts —after using for a period of time — helped me to improve in my bone density. This is trying to prevent injuries, and at the same time that density gives the players [the ability] to do harder loads and work out.

On why he tests new tech…

For me, it’s really important and more in this moment of my career because I just turned 39. It is a little bit harder to keep in the game. And for me using now the technology for Omorpho has been really good, amazing, and that helped me to keep in the game.

Chará, 39, ranks in the top-10 in MLS history for games started and minutes played. (Photo: Getty Images)

What else he has tried…

In my career it is many things right now. It’s not just the technology. It is used getting good health habits — sleeping well, getting diet — and now the team is using the [Oura] ring to [measure] how you sleep and the recovery process. I think that technology helps a lot.

On what he’d tell a younger version of himself about career longevity…

It’s no secret formula, but I think the effort, the discipline, has been crucial in my career. Giving that effort and at the same time be mentally strong that helped to get a long career.

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.

Main photo: Getty Images

By Joe Lemire

After a recent practice, sprinter Gabby Thomas was shaking her head while recounting her block starts, describing them as “arguably some of the worst in track and field.” She is, of course, a five-time Olympic medalist and reigning champion in the 200 meters, so she knows how that sounds.

“Obviously, it’s fine,” Thomas added, “but it really frustrates me because I am a perfectionist, and I want to get better.”

Training used to be done by feel, with some help from video. Now, however, USA Track & Field — in collaboration with the USOPC and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) — is able to offer its athletes a markerless motion capture tool called VAMA (Video Automatic Motion Analysis) to analyze athletes’ biomechanics, both at the start and at top speed. Small changes can have big impacts at the boundaries of performance, especially in short sprints.

VAMA has become part of many American sprinters’ weekly routines over the past few years and, by the USOPC’s estimate, directly contributed to nine Olympic medals in Paris — not only by Thomas, but also by men’s 100-meter medalists Noah Lyles and Fred Kerley, women’s long jump winner Tara Davis-Woodhall and more.

Spearheading VAMA’s implementation is Tyler Noble, USATF’s lead sport science and data analyst, who visited Thomas at her final training session before heading to the Paris Olympics. At the time, Thomas said her starts had been “a little wonky.” Noble can use an off-the-shelf GoPro camera that costs about $200 and shoots at 240 frames per second, then run the video through the VAMA algorithms and receive biomechanical feedback.

Noble and Thomas’ coach, Tonja Buford-Bailey, focused on her stride length and the number of steps it took her to reach 10 meters, a measurable cue that helped Thomas focus on performing.

“I always welcome new data, and when you’re trying to be the best and get better by such small margins, all of that counts,” Thomas said. “Working with Tyler and their program is so helpful, because I can see in real time what I’m actually doing, and then take that feedback and make corrections immediately.”

Among the metrics VAMA — a finalist for Best in Athlete Performance Technology at the Sports Business Awards: Tech — is able to collect are joint angles, ground contact times and vertical force production. Essentially every elite American sprinter has undergone at least one assessment, helping build a library to improve the algorithms and the understanding of what matters.

“Because we use VAMA, we’ve got this very rich data set of our best starters, and so we can actually model where the first seven steps for any athlete should really be relative to, say, their height or their leg length,” Noble said. “We take a holistic approach to the demands of the race, given the constraints of the athletes, and then try to model the perfect plan. VAMA plays a huge role in that, because you’ve got to be able to get to those insights quickly.”

The technological origins of VAMA reside in diving — where Phil Cheetham, former USOPC Director of Sport Technology and innovation, first applied motion capture with the SwRI — and also in the expertise of Ralph Mann, a former world record-holding hurdler who later earned his PhD and pioneered biomechanical analysis in sprinting.

Noble described Mann, who passed away at age 75 in January, as “the grandfather of USATF sports science” and added, “He had this beautiful, unique blend of PhD book smarts with ‘I won a silver medal at the Olympic Games.’ He could speak the science and coach the athlete.”

USATF used Mann’s CompuSport technology for years, but during the pandemic, budgets were decimated. Needing an alternative, it repurposed VAMA from diving to running. The analysis helps inform the conversations that “each coach-athlete pairing needs,” Noble said.

USOPC Performance Innovation Lead Elliot Schwartz praised Noble’s combined expertise in data analytics and sport sciences — not to mention that he’s a former college runner — to steer the project. Noble travels regularly to visit coaches and runners, but they can also upload videos for VAMA analysis on their own.

“Having an analysis tool like VAMA means that, one, you get much more accurate measurements, but also you can support so many more athletes,” Schwartz said. “A big part of what this technology is doing is it’s really democratizing who receives performance support.”

Sometimes that support can be a little inadvertent. Noble had two cameras set up to capture data on Olympic silver medal-winning hurdler Daniel Roberts prior to the Games. In the background, long jumper Davis-Woodhall had an absolutely perfect jump that her coach, Travis Geopfert, measured at 7.17 meters, a couple of inches longer than her eventual gold medal-winning distance in Paris.

By a “lucky circumstance,” Noble said, the last eight steps of her approach to the jump were captured by the second GoPro camera. That enabled him to share her step lengths and pattern as a final reinforcement of what Davis-Woodhall should do in competition.

“That was just a quick, off-the-cuff [analysis] that would have been very difficult and time-consuming to do in the past,” Noble said.

Lyles and Kerley won gold and silver in the Olympic 100, but their predictive modeling needed to take into account that Lyles, at 5-foot-11, is four inches shorter than the 6-3 Kerley. When Noble assessed them shortly before the Games, he knew Kerley would reach 10 meters first, but Lyles would get there while moving at a faster speed. Given each race strategy, Noble projected Lyles as a slight favorite — and indeed he won in a photo finish, edging Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson by five-thousandths of a second and Kerley by two-hundredths.

“There’s not much you can really tweak or change a week before the 100 final,” Noble said, “but you can go up and you can show Noah the iPad, or you show Fred the iPad, and say, ‘Look, you are ready to go.’”

VAMA technology helped the U.S. win nine medals at the Paris Olympics by USOPC estimates (Photo: USPOC).

We take a holistic approach to the demands of the race, given the constraints of the athletes, and then try to model the perfect plan. VAMA plays a huge role in that, because you’ve got to be able to get to those insights quickly.

Tyler Noble, USATF lead sport science and data analyst

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.