By John Portch

David Dunne recalls a conversation with a player from his time serving as Performance Nutritionist at Harlequins.

“It was the day before a Premiership game and I remember sitting down with one of the players,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “He knew exactly what he needed to do regarding his nutrition and had every opportunity to do it. He just looked at me and said: ‘look, I know what to do’. The food is literally in front of him and he said: ‘I’m not going to do it’.”

At this point it dawned on Dunne that education alone was not enough to influence the food choices of an athlete.

“It’s a gaping hole in academia,” he continues. “All these practitioners– myself included – are able to give others the correct information but do not necessarily know how to coach and influence change.”

Back in 2015, Dunne decided to explore the worlds of behavioural science and intervention design. “It doesn’t make me a world-renowned expert,” he is keen to point out, but, “what I would do on a day to day basis now would be completely different to what I would do back in 2014.”

Dunne worked at Quins between 2013 and 2020 and his current day job is as the CEO of Hexis, an AI-powered personalised nutrition app that he co-founded. Additionally, he serves as a performance science consultant for golf’s DP World Tour and Team Europe at the Ryder Cup.

Here, we explore the question of interventions and delivery as well as the need for nutrition and other disciplines to “play the game differently”.

Too much focus on education

As we speak, Dunne touches upon the pioneering research of Louise Burke and Ronald Maughan (“the mother and father of sports nutrition”) dating back to the 1980s, as well as the initial wave of sports nutrition, where the emphasis was once on supplements, to the more contemporary focus on food. “If you look at the last 20 years, there’s been a huge increase in knowledge generation,” he says.

“As a discipline we’re young. We’re like an infant that’s just learned to walk and it’s probably just at that stage where we’re starting to understand the intersection between not just knowing the information but understanding how to deliver that information. People may disagree with me, and they’re welcome to, but that’s my stance on it.”

How does Dunne feel this tends to manifest in sport? “The biggest problem is that education is our main tool. So we go into a classroom, we stand in front of a group of people or we sit down and we have a conversation with somebody. Essentially we give them information, but we know that education has little bearing in many instances on someone’s actual behaviour. Like that player, you might know exactly what to do, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to do it.”

In addressing the issue, he cites the examples of Meghan Bentley of Leeds Beckett and Dan Martin of Liverpool John Moores Universities. A strand of their research investigates the means of nutritional intervention and delivery beyond education. “But it’s a minority at the minute,” says Dunne. “I think that’s just a reflection of where we are as a discipline.

“We’ve started to recognise that behaviour change is important, and maybe implementation science more broadly, but we still haven’t fully understood design science. If you were to go to any conference now, I’m confident we’d see a little bit of behavioural science, which is great, but I’m not confident we’re going to see design science.”

Dunne sees both as useful for addressing performance gaps from different angles. “Behavioural science is looking at it from a more theoretical perspective; ‘this person needs to do X’. Design science starts from an empathetic perspective; ‘what does this person feel, say and do?’ I think the integration of those things is incredibly important if we are to avoid past mistakes. How do we bring to life what we’re seeing in the lab with real people who have real emotions that vary consistently across environments, across contexts, and across the time of the day?”

The growth of performance nutrition in professional golf

Dunne explains that there are certain sports, such as cycling, where nutrition has long held a seat at the top table of performance. Golf, however, tended to be agnostic until relatively recently. He says: “I think it’s growing and key players are starting to recognise it, which is really important.”

It was in his role at the DP World Tour that Dunne was first approached by Europe’s 2018 Ryder Cup captain Thomas Bjørn to serve the team. “He wanted to bring more of a performance focus to the environment. He wanted more sports science, nutrition, strength & conditioning, physio etc. It was very well-received by the players.” Dunne and his colleagues will remain as service deliverers ahead of the 2023 edition of the Ryder Cup at Marco Simone Golf and Country Club in Guidonia Montecelio near Rome.

The nutrition-related issues facing golfers, who may travel to 20-plus tournaments per year, are manifold, from executing travel strategies and the realities of restricted food availability (at hotels, courses and airports) to general immunity and the maintenance of energy levels. Says Dunne: “A 7am tee time might mean a 3am start and a round can take five hours. How do they fuel before and during that to maintain the correct energy and not suffer cognitive decline during the round?”

There is, however, the problem of scale in the delivery of nutrition services on the DP World Tour. “In any tournament week you could have approximately 150 players,” he adds. “For some, it might be their first event, for others it might be their 500^th, so naturally you build relationships with people you see more regularly but, ultimately, there will be missing data.”

He believes that some of these key questions can be addressed through technology. “We should use computers for what they’re good at and free coaches up to do what they’re good at. For a nutritionist, that’s being human, listening, building relationships and having conversations with individuals. The technology can then deliver that support at scale.

“Imagine athletes come to me on the DP World Tour, we could sit down, we could have a really good conversation, understanding what their problem is that we need to work on. As they leave, the technology maybe something that can travel with them consistently for as long as they need it. They may still have a question and they may come back, but they’ve now got more information than if they had just left with a PDF.”

It is not just golf that could benefit. “Athletes desire a high level of personalisation but the problem facing practitioners is that of both time and scale,” says Dunne. “They could be dealing with squad sizes of up to 60 individual athletes and, to deliver daily, personalised, periodised plans that can adapt in real time as training schedules get modified, becomes an impossible task.

“That’s where technology is ready to step in and help enable and empower athletes to be able to get that level of detail on a consistent basis while supporting practitioners by freeing up their time.”

His app, Hexis, uses AI to support athletes, coaches and practitioners at scale. “If we look at what we’re doing, which is helping people to understand how to fuel their bodies according to their demands, that’s where artificial intelligence can be powerful.”

Simply put, it’s easier to open an app at any time than call your nutritionist. This could make all the difference given how people experience both peaks and troughs in motivation on a daily basis.

“So maybe I’m preparing to train this evening and I wonder what I should eat now to help me perform. At that time, a nutritionist might not be available at the end of a phone. You can’t rely on being able to call somebody at all times of the day and, being a practitioner who’s received the WhatsApps, who’s received the phone calls, it’s not fundamentally scalable across large squads. So we need to find a way to enable and empower the athlete to understand what to eat at that moment and make the most of that motivation peak, so when that motivation is a little bit higher, the barrier to entry is much lower because you just pick up your phone, you can click on Hexis, and just go ‘OK, this is what I need to do’.”

Nutrition, like any other performance discipline, needs to demonstrate its value and show a return on investment. Dunne believes technology and AI will be crucial to fulfilling that aim.

“No one wins and loses in nutrition, but we do need to find ways to play the game differently and evolve.”

An Industry Insight Series Podcast brought to you by our Partners

“You’ve got to listen to these young people,” says Rod Ellingworth.

“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:

• Why it is important to ‘throw grenades’ at young riders when it comes to developing their resilience [14:00];
• Geraint Thomas’ champion mindset [16:00];
• The importance of creating programmes that excite youngsters [18:30];
• Misconceptions around fuelling and weight loss [26:30]

James Morton LinkedIn | Twitter

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

An article brought to you by our Partners

Interview by Sarah Malone

Dr Conall Murtagh, the First-Team Fitness Coach at Liverpool FC, will soon be celebrating a decade working with the English Premier League club.

Murtagh joined as a sports scientist while studying for his PhD in 2012. He then became the Fitness Coach for the men’s under-18s in 2014, and joined Head Coach Jürgen Klopp’s staff in early 2016. His tenure with the first team coincides with one of the most successful spells in the club’s history.

“When you come through the door each day there is a desire and expectation to be world-class,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “Working under this philosophy is the ultimate motivation for me.”

Recipe for success

Liverpool, who won the League Cup and FA Cup this season, have played the maximum number of games possible – 63 in total and the most of all teams in the Premier League – the first time an English team has competed in every possible match in a single season since Liverpool themselves completed the feat during their FA Cup, League Cup and UEFA Cup-winning 2000-2001 campaign.

The Reds ended the season with almost a full complement of players thanks to the work of Klopp and his multidisciplinary staff which includes Murtagh, a former footballer himself and UEFA A Licence-qualified coach. It is a demanding environment. Murtagh’s fascination with sports science and physiology began long before his own playing days.

“I was obsessed with how the human body worked, particularly how it responded to training and games. That led me down the study of physiology and then sport science. When I was playing as a professional, I had no real knowledge of sports science until I started studying and playing semi-professionally. The individual response to training always intrigued me. How the day after the same session, some players would turn up fresh as a daisy, while others arrived feeling sore and stiff. We could also all do the same gym intervention programmes and yet some players’ sprint or jump performance would shoot through the roof, while others’ stayed the same.”

Murtagh believes that different players inherently have different capacities for physiological adaptation from physical workload. Therefore, they require a stimulus tailored to their individual needs in real-time; something that is very difficult to provide consistently in a team sport environment. That is the challenge Murtagh embraces, as he and the wider staff strive to keep all squad members in peak condition.

Zone7 adoption

Liverpool, much like any Premier League club, has an array of player monitoring and intervention tools at their disposal. For the 2021/22 Premier League season they have also enlisted Zone7, a data-driven artificial intelligence risk forecasting system, to support their development of personalised player workload management processes.

The collaboration, amongst many other important cutting-edge processes adopted at Liverpool, has been a success. Under the watch of club practitioners, Liverpool’s first team – according to Premier Injuries – have seen a 33% drop in days lost to injury this season compared to last. When narrowed to ‘substantial’ injuries (long absences marked by 9+ consecutive days lost), this drop increases to 40%. Goalkeeper and illness-related absences are excluded from the breakdown.

In essence, Zone7 empowers human decision-makers who oversee athlete workloads. These professionals are often tasked with making recommendations in highly pressurised situations. By analysing the extensive, disparate datasets generated and collected in elite sporting environments, Zone7 can detect injury risk patterns that may otherwise be invisible. In some instances, it can go a step further by making proactive recommendations to mitigate the identified injury risk. Importantly, Zone7 will often suggest increasing workloads in particular areas to lower risk. Reducing workloads or simply prescribing rest is not always the right solution.

“We know that adaptation for the human body is a dynamic process,” says Murtagh. “Every time the player performs a training stimulus we must reassess their body’s adaptation balance.”

“As a multidisciplinary team, we assess every player every day. Zone7’s AI works alongside our extensive internal monitoring processes by effectively identifying more complex data patterns that could indicate whether a player has good rhythm or has deviated from it. If our monitoring system identifies that the player is not in optimal rhythm, we intervene accordingly from a multidisciplinary perspective.”

The productive use of Zone7 requires pragmatism. No credible AI solution will claim it is correct all the time and periodic false flags are a natural consequence. Murtagh, however, is unfazed.

“You can never say [a Zone7 risk alert] is a false positive when you’re flagging the player,” he says. “Some players do receive flags and we do not detect anything to suggest they are at an elevated risk. There is such a fine line between someone getting injured or not, we try to identify when the player has sub-optimal rhythm and we intervene appropriately.”

Zone7’s data science team has evolved their solution this year by introducing a new ‘Workload-Simulator’ component, which enables practitioners like Murtagh to input projected workloads and simulate players’ future injury risk in advance.

“The thing I like most about Zone7 is that they’re constantly updating the algorithm, constantly evolving, constantly on the front foot in this field,” added Murtagh. “To have the AI working in our environment to support our internal monitoring system gives us a certain sense of safety around our player management recommendations. The simulator is a brilliant feature, which will be used more and more as the system evolves.”

With a full season behind them, and tangible success metrics to point to, Liverpool and Zone7 have extended their working engagement by another two years, a move that also includes Zone7 adoption across the Liverpool Women’s and Under-23 teams. Rich Buchanan, Zone7 Performance Director, says that “working with Murtagh and Liverpool FC is hugely important to Zone7. It shows that our technology, in the hands of progressive and experienced practitioners, can exist and evolve, in one of the world’s most elite sporting environments.”

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

“We’re going to be talking about the tools that are used to not only assess athletes and warriors but to optimise them over time,” says Steve Gera.

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:

1. Do no harm – he refers performance specialists back to the Hippocratic Oath and identifies the need for athletic signatures in every sport. “We want to create durable people, we want to work on injury prevention, prehab and rehab, and that always takes the forefront of my thought process in how I create these signatures and why they’re important.”
2. “What I really want to do is maximise the genetic potential that equates to the task at hand.”
3. “I’m trying to build the right human engine for the task.”

‘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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