Ryan Alexander of Atlanta United came on the People Behind the Tech Podcast to discuss understanding the demands of the team, player profiling and brain training.
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“Understanding how the physical demands and fitness is going to be interpreted on the field as it is going to relate to the technical and tactical execution of a certain style of play.”
Alexander, the Director of Sports Science at Atlanta United, was speaking to John Portch and Joe Lemire on the People Behind the Tech podcast ahead of the new MLS season, which began in late February.
He also spoke about the club’s groundbreaking work with i-Brain Tech, a neurofitness training aid that has transformed their skills and cognitive training and led to players having “higher levels of conversations with their technical coaches”.
Elsewhere, Alexander explored:
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The sports scientist behind recent British and Irish Lions tours discusses the real value of finding the right tech and the balance between domain expertise and leadership.
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The question is posed by Brian Cunniffe of the UK Sports Institute [UKSI], who is Joe Lemire and John Portch’s first guest on The People Behind the Tech podcast for 2024.
Brian, a performance lead at the UKSI who works primarily in canoeing and who also served as the British and Irish Lions’ sports scientist on tours of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, is discussing the power in gamifying training, particularly for younger athletes.
“There’s a slight irony in there but how do we bring it back to the stuff that matters, not just for players but for staff as well?” he continues.
“How do we help coaches on a journey to understand not just the stuff that players have completed but maybe some of the decisions that we need to take on a journey and learn from that so that we’re not replicating or duplicating and can be more efficient with our time?”
Elsewhere, Brian delves into:
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Rod Ellingworth, the Deputy Team Principal of the Ineos Grenadiers talks to James Morton about talent development in modern cycling.
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“A lot of experienced people have been through life but they’re not perhaps listening to these young people enough. You’ve got to listen to their ambitions and, when they say things, there’s a lot in there. And if you ask the right questions, open questions, getting into the guts of it really, really getting under their skin about how they want to go from A to B, I think you can learn a lot from people.
“Try to follow people’s ambitions and dreams. And as long as you’ve got the programme and the space, you can keep working with people, because the talent will come through.”
Ellingworth is a former cyclist who now oversees talent identification at the Ineos Grenadiers and, in this latest edition of the Science in Sport Industry Insight series, he sits down in conversation with his former colleague James Morton, the Director of Performance Solutions at SiS.
Both men spent five year working together under Ineos’ previous guise, Team Sky, and here they delve into advice for talent spotters as well as:
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John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn
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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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