CoachMePlus Podcast Episode 5 with Carl Valle
Opening: From out of the lab and into the gym, it’s the Applied Sports Science podcast. Hello and welcome to the Applied Sports Science podcast. In episode 5, Kevin sits down with one of the most influential voices in the sports science world, Carl Valle, who is the director of innovation for inside tracker. You can follow Carl on Twitter @Spikesonly, a wide variety of topics touched on in this episode, one of the main themes is the approach is to working closely with coaches and athletes on a sports science approach. Remember you can listen to every episode on iTunes or at CoachMePlus.com and now to Kevin and Carl.
Kevin: Welcome to CoachMePlus podcast, the Applied Sports Science podcast number 5. We are here with Carl Valle over at the Central Virginia Performance summit. We’re going to have some people coming in and out of course while we are doing this. We also have Ethan Owens in the room, former Catapult, now CoachMePlus employee and
Derek: Derek Hansen one of the speakers at the Central Virginia seminar
Kevin: Yeah, this is going to be great and you know what honestly the way when we started this podcast I was like I want to go as low on the format as possible so that we’re not really sticking to something so actually having guys come and creep in and might actually work out for us so they might steal your sunshine.
Carl: Hey that’s fine as long as it is funny and at least entertaining during the commutes that some of these coaches have to deal with
Kevin: That is the feedback that we got that some of these guys listen to this stuff while they are on their treadmill and running around and they’re driving into the office and they got those long commutes so they are doing it that way and if we’re making it easy on people, we make it easy on people. So this is the first podcast that we actually did a little bit of prep for and Carl, you basically reached out to people to ask questions ahead of time, right?
Carl: The questions, some of them were very specific to their situation and they’re like 500 words and it’s like okay, you’re dealing with an individual athlete and an individual problem and sometimes it is nice, like little case studies but what you want to do is have something more universal and more systemic that you can help more coaches that are in the same situation and there is a lot of things that you can learn from just having very good bread and butter questions.
Kevin: Got it. We do have some questions that you put here in front of me and I think it’s going to be good to kind of shape the conversation but I also want to keep it a little bit natural. We just got out of a really good couple of seminars or a couple of speaking engagements here at the conference and the energy is still high. The last one there was a lot of feedback and a lot of questions coming back of how you’re getting athletes to comply with monitoring and how you’re getting athletes to actually do things in an environment that is constantly flowing and constantly changing. What would you say are your biggest question that maybe wasn’t answered in that would’ve been?
Carl: I think we’re talking about Randy Ballard’s presentation and what was great about Randy’s and I’ve known him for years is that we’re cut from the same cloth. Some of the same mentors that have influenced him are the people that were my USA track and field level 3 instructors or level 2. I really find that there is a lot of similarities of what Randy comes into conclusions but obviously coming from a medical perspective, even though he has an influence from coaches, I think one of the things that were a little bit puzzling and that is why there were questions is how to get it done. I felt like a lot of the coaches were really impressed or excited but left a little overwhelmed saying how do I get this done? Anytime I see some type of presentation I always ask are those screenshots or are they representations of someone’s philosophy. My presentation, since I am doing something at 8 am is going to be a little bit different, I am not going to change my presentation based on what Randy is projecting but I am also going to build upon that and the ability to adlib with resonate with coaches because I say hey, I am in the same boat you are. One of the things that was a little bit of an enigma is alright, you’re telling me this stuff but show me, do a demo, okay go right now to find an athlete, look him up and whether it be a different term of the KPI because obviously there is a difference between limitations and things like that but show me what that looks like. You wake up, open up your laptop, you’re not having a conversation with 500 student-athletes at once and I think that was one of the things on Twitter.
Kevin: One of the guys asked, I’m one coach, I’ve got 500 athletes, how do I do this?
Carl: Yeah and so, and I think about a week ago, I was tweeting at you or tweeting at someone was talking about hey the best way to relate to an athlete is to talk to them and I’m looking at them and I hear that every single year. I don’t get upset about it, I know the people’s intentions, I do that. The first thing I do is I text some of the athletes I work with
Kevin: But you work with much smaller groups
Carl: I work with a tiny group. I always say to people and say don’t do what I do because of first of all the amount of hours I put in is not realistic to individual athletes as a guy who has an art background I treat people like a sculpture and you don’t have scaled Michelangelo, even he might have had some people help him out when he was doing his work but the whole idea is like here’s what I do and you’re a super coach and you work with 3-4 athletes and that is great as an Olympic sport but that is not what the average high school strength coach deals with.
Kevin: So this is a reoccurring thing that we see over and over again where what you do as a consultant, you get to scratch the surface, the latest stuff and you get to do it in a way because you’re working with a 1:5 kind or a 1:10 or even 1:1, where you are working directly with people. In the NBA we see similar coach to athlete ratios which is why the NBA pretty easily adopts new technology because you have this 1 for 1 type of relationship. Now you take it into, let’s go really over the top and go to research where you have guys in lab coats doing all of the research and looking up populations and they have the stat to be able to manage it. Now, that works in your setting, that works in the setting where you have a low ratio of coach to athlete like the NBA and it works well in a setting where you have researchers doing it. Now you get to the applied setting and now we have two coaches, 500 kids, one coach, 300 kids. That breaks down, right?
Carl: Yeah, the rules change when the rubber hits the road and also if you look at a high school, the average coach, unless you’re the big powerhouse football programs in the south, you’re probably dealing with some who are very part time. When you hear all of these discussions of okay, this is what I am doing for monitoring or getting data, I always say okay, that is great but is that going to work with someone that is maybe the guy is a blue collar person that is coming off and he’s doing a double shift. Is he going to go and say okay I am going to wake up at God knows when to go and manually take data from an excel spreadsheet that was sent from an athlete, that is not going to happen. When things do break down, that is when I begin. Everything sounds great on paper, that is why I always like to say show it to me, open up your laptop and let’s see it. As soon as you say it can’t be done for a larger group that is when I said that’s your problem, not necessarily scaling it but you didn’t get in more depth with the smaller population. A lot of coaches think well, I need to get a questionnaire in, low hanging fruit topics, I hate it. My job is to take maybe a N of 1, which was an example by both Bob and Randy and go deeper but once you go deeper then you know what is good and what’s not useful. I like width, depth, and then getting the information immediately so you can actually use it and my concern is that I had in the hallway soon as I left, you saw that high school coach hey, what do I do now? I think that what people need to know is in respect to someone else’s calendar, what are you’re available times to do your job? Someone in college, that is their job. Someone in high school, which is 30,000 high schools, you need someone to be able to do something for 15 minutes a day tops, otherwise it is just not going to be done. The same rules apply for coaches as they do for athletes, if an athlete says this is going to take me 18 minutes to do, they won’t do that. A coach is also going to say, if I have an athlete taking 18 minutes to do, I don’t have 18 minutes times whatever amount of athletes they work with. That is why, as a technology, in a sports technologist, I look at scaling things. You got to be able to see is this liquid and can this move very quickly and it doesn’t have these typical barriers. Import exporting is my biggest pet peeve and it is taught because I feel for the coach that says hey, my wife and I have to do a bake sale just to afford uniforms, I understand that. I have been in the same situation where we had a cookie drive in high school. I have been in college settings where you know that kids are missing meals because they are not on scholarship and a lot of it is volunteerism in terms of participation, I feel bad, the free stuff usually gets to 90 percent perfect and they always say that last 10 percent will find a way to upload the data later, it doesn’t work that way.
Kevin: Well nobody ever does. It is kind of like you sit on a pile of stuff and we’ll get to it, we’ll get to it and next year comes and you have to get back into it again and you forget about the pile of data that is sitting back there. You’re in a ton of, I’m handing this over to Ethan, you’re always in a ton of a middle conversation on Twitter about anything that is going on, right? Let’s just stick to this subject and talk about athlete monitoring and actually doing it in a practical and applied way.
Carl: No that is a good point, this is live and unscripted so anything that comes out, unfortunately, especially with Periscope, there is no filter so there is no redo. For those listening, I am not saying that I am Michelangelo, far from it, that is probably why I am here now talking about surveys and wellness questionnaires
Kevin: Somebody said it best, they said Carl Valle makes you think, you don’t bullsh*t and ask the question for the sake of asking a question and calling people out. You actually ask a question because you’re curious and you want to know and you want to see what is out there. With all of the things that are thrown at you on this subject, you get to do surveys and things like that on a micro basis. You get to see that scenario happen and work really well and we get to see it on a research basis, what have you seen that really works? We got 150 people walking out of the room going now what? What have you seen that actually really works on a scalable level when I’ve got that 1 to 5 hundred or that 1 to 3 hundred ratio
Carl: So that is a lot of stuff I look at right now is the N of 1, a team which is between like you said with a basketball team, anywhere between 15 and maybe 50. And then we have the enterprise mode which is if you deal with large high schools that have JV and Freshman squads, you’re dealing with hundreds, a large college, hundreds. Even an academy, some of these larger academies that are in Europe, you’re dealing with satellite locations. What works is starting off as speed, the first thing I ask is how long does it take to do and from there, you want something that is more agile, that is going to give you as much data width
Kevin: So if I’ve got 150 kids coming in, a 90 second time period for each one of those kids, way too long.
Carl: Yeah I mean what is the bottle neck? When you look at doing any type of quote monitoring and I am going to get into modeling later is I always ask, what is your work flow? The kids daily life and Randy did a wonderful job showing yeah, the time that you ask the questions, you’re going to get little information. I came up with a time pyramid which is a way to say hey, how do you use 24 hours? Sleep, everyone is talking about it, we will use the mythical 8 hours because everyone is getting all this sleep because it is not a problem. In a high school situation then you have 6 hours that you must physically attend school, right? And then you have study which is between 3 and 4 hours. Sport? 2 to 3 hours and then I have social which is kids playing Call of Duty with their friends and that is about an hour. How you organize that, there is drive time and other stuff that should add up to 24 hours. The most important way for coaches to really understand someone’s life is to create a calendar longitudinally and then what their daily grind is when they wake up to go to sleep so they can say hey, when is my opportunity to get information
Kevin: I think that it’s a great point because everybody thinks well the time starts the minute you walk in the gym, the minute you’re out of the gym, we hope you stay on your diet, good luck, see you tomorrow, but you’re saying sprinkle it.
Carl: There are no rules, that is the first rule. Monitoring is very who’s doing what, let me copy them, it is very top down. If this elite club is doing this then it is somehow trickle down, especially the people that are winning so like Derek said, whoever wins the national title, that year strength program is going to be used on every single high school program there
Kevin: It was a great point too because Joe Kenn wins the NFL Strength Coach of the Year award at the NFL Strength Coach dinner and Howard Nash, gets let go and it is because Carolina performed exceedingly well, had nothing to do with the talent, it all had to do with the coaching. That is the perception. Kenn is a great coach, powerhouse, he is awesome but is he the strength coach of the year? Or is the talent around him? Are the W’s tied to what guys are doing here? or do you have to find another metric that actually shows that you’re successful? When you’re trying to weight the value of what you’re doing and sprinkling these things in again, applied, how do you sprinkle in the right stuff that forget the winners of the Stanley Cup and forget the champions of this and that. What have you actually seen in a true working environment where you just go yeah man that’s it, that really works well?
Carl: As you know, we overlap a lot of clients and we work with teams and I work with a handful of consultants that do work with teams and the first thing that I look at is when you’re using a leverage something as elegant as a smart phone, it is a service industry. I was on the plane and what we were comfortable with is you press the light if you need some help. I think that it is a perspective, a lot of coaches say hey the athlete is not willing to do this, we have a problem with compliance, I said you know what if it was a concierge service. The difference between big brother and a guardian angel is all about how you create a perspective. When I work with my athletes they feel like wow, he is organized, he can call a massage therapist, I can input, there is SMS messaging, there are alert systems. They feel like there is someone there for them, it is the attitude. If they are worried that you can’t get data from people, guess what? You’re not going to get data from them, they’re going to smell it, the athletes always smell it.
Kevin: It sounds like you’re telling me the first step should always be some sort of communication platform whether it be text message, email, phone call.
Carl: Yeah and we all know that the smart device is probably the easiest way to do so. I think you have to rotate, there is nothing wrong with saying hey, we’re going to grab some food at whatever hot lunch place and then do the face to face time, I think you have to match a little bit of the human element so that we’re not just staying in there playing Pokemon. I also feel like there is a way that technology is about efficiency, that is why it is beautiful and I think that the technology gets a bad rep because it’s amazing people are saying well this guy is a keyboard warrior and they are tweeting this on their smart phone. I am like okay you just called someone a keyboard warrior using the irony so thick that you can choke on it, using a mobile device and obviously a touch screen.
Kevin: But that mindset flips all of this on its head because everybody is like data first. Everything that we are talking about here is data first and we are capturing information, tracking information, we’ll use it and all of this other stuff but everybody kind of skips past that part of I’ve got to be able to talk to my guy first
Carl: Yeah and I think that is the issue is if I was to take a pool of money that a team is working with, the first thing I would do is to say okay, what do you know you can do like what is your knowledge? What are you trying to do and then what are you getting done? And each gap represents probably an area where culture and I always say this and Lans Ivanovic just posted it like a year ago, it’s not what you know, it is what you can get your athletes to do. So many people ask me how did you get involved with coaching? What did you do for a sport? I did swimming and track and it is a tale of two cities. I had an amazing set of coaches in swimming and I had some really well-intended coaches in track. Got injured in track repeatedly, swimming obviously we won three state titles so I think it is the attitude towards things and the first thing you have to do is say, what is it like to be an athlete? I say this with wellness questionnaires all the time, I said do you do wellness questionnaires if you’re like a lawyer. Could you imagine a lawyer waking up and getting really boring questions or a survey that is excessively long? User experience so the most important rule with data collection is athlete user experience. When you’re evaluating, you see people looking at brain and heart and they’re pulling patches off and hair is coming off and things like that, what is it like to do that? Myself, I actually use the equipment on myself first and say hey here is a guy that lives with the stuff, on IndieGoGo I am probably dropping tons of money or whatever. I don’t even like to do this, there’s no way that’s not engaged that is going to do this so I think what we need to do and Doug talked about the bell curve. A bell curve, you’re going to have a majority of the athletes are going to be like, I’ll do it if it’s low friction. Then you are going to have the people that are you have to put their face on a milk carton to do anything. Where are they? The guy took a shower in his portable limo, he doesn’t even want to go into the weight room. Then you’re going to have the guys and sometimes they are on the bench, are willing to do anything to get better. I focus my energies actually on the divas because if I can succeed there, everything else is super easy. What most people do is try to aim in the middle which is okay to do if you want to get some success but if you can really do an amazing job convincing, selling, pleading to get data even if it’s passive methods, a video camera, whatever. You can go and get a lot of information without having that friction and I think that is what people need to think about is how to make the experience better for the athlete versus how to convince people.
Kevin: So if we are making the experience better for the athlete, you mentioned wellness questionnaires I think that it is a good common theme that comes up over and over again session RPs and wellness questionnaires because it can be done without a budget. I can’t afford CoachMePlus team builder whatever is out there, athlete monitoring, whatever it might be. What can I use?
Carl: Obviously if you look at the free products, the google products and be careful what you ask for. A lot of people say, oh wow Carl, you’re customizing stuff, and this is also a hobby so not only do I have it as a profession, it just doesn’t stop. If anyone knows me they know it is like 8 pm, you’re soldering something. For me, it is my passion and I am happy but I think if you want to start off, you start with the google products and that is the easiest thing to say okay, can you do a simple survey, 5 questions, 1-10 whatever. Just doing that is a way to maybe leave a little bit of a bubble and I think that sometimes the surveys when you’re only answering questions and you’re not letting the athlete express themselves. I don’t need to see a haiku poem but what you want to do is say okay, what if we took all of the little few sentences that they put in, that is fascinating. A strength coach with the Kansas City Chiefs, his name is Ryan Reynolds, he is not the actor. I always say Ryan Reynolds, some of the women walking by and their ears perk up but he is a guy who worked with the national champion softball team when he was with Arizona State. He had a very nice rudimentary solution of analog, pen and paper and what was so beautiful, he had a heavy training session, I don’t know if it was because the coach was having a double or something like that. Instead of filling in 1-10, they wrote their own little scale, like 15
Kevin: Back to scalability and actually monitoring your date over time, that is not scalable, right?
Carl: True but that was a design issue versus what type of modality you’re using. What we have learned from that is sometimes it wasn’t necessarily that it was pen and paper, it was just the fact that there was a way for pen and paper to express by writing on top of it versus a little dialog box where you can go and put in a handful of sentences. So sometimes just having to say free expression, let the athlete drive a little part of the process versus this whole big blue, old 1984 ad where everyone feels that they have to do the same thing. So I think that is a great way for people to express themselves and that is what athletes do artistically in sport just having it 1 through 10 it gets monotonous, what do you do in three weeks, they get bored.
Kevin: Interesting
Derek: Do you think there should be some sort of intervention even if it is some sort of, not going to say made up intervention, but to show to there is some…
Carl: Okay so that is a good question
Kevin: Why don’t you introduce yourself real quick to the laptop here
Derek: I am Derek
Carl: Okay just so you know Derek Hansen and I have known each other for over a decade
Derek: For better or for worse
Carl: For better or for worse, mostly better so obviously both speed and power coaches. He’s got some of the same mentors and influencers, Al Vermeil, Coach Francis, some of the great people that are out there. And this other question, let’s just repeat that is okay, you’ve got to give feed back to the athlete like hey, thank you for giving me the information, right? I have a 3:1 ratio concept. If an athlete gives me something, this day and age of entitlement, I try and give three back and you can say well you’re kind of feeding into the problem well for me I just think it starts off with just making sure that thank you for doing this. Maybe giving them something a little more personalized like an SMS message with the nickname. So they know it is not this robot on the other side or this algorithm, they know it is me. The second part is like here is what I am going to do differently if necessary or tell them hey I got your information it is okay that we are training heavy, this is the beginning of the GPP, I am not going to react to this. The biggest problem I see with a lot of these teams they do all of these surveys and the guy is like agh, my hamstrings are bleeding, I am murdered, I am tired, I can’t sleep and they pour their heart and soul for a couple weeks then what happens on the field, the team coach is like we need to build fourth quarter endurance. This is whatever, you insert the name of the University pride, everyone has their own pride because apparently no other college team has pride so they have the hills, the Navy Seal puking, I have been there too. I just told you that I have a shoulder problem from doing 10,000 meters, I was on a swim club and I just told you that before practice yet you put me in the lane that is the endurance lane to get me more volume, I am like it is not making sense. Same thing with the GPS, it doesn’t matter that you’re collecting all of this stuff and you’re the guy literally sitting next to the team coach and he’s like I just told you all of this information, you’re right next to the guy, can you tell him that we are going hard? I think that is what they need to know is that yes, we are listening and it is hard when you are only in taking data.
Derek: I think that is what is happening with GPS too, you’re strapping a hockey puck to your chest and you’re like where is this going and the practice doesn’t change and the volume doesn’t change, the intensity doesn’t change, and you go why am I doing this? Then you do the Happy Gilmore and throw it across the field, right?
Kevin: That is always the promise of the intervention with GPS. I always talk about it is not the data, it is the intervention but the intervention with GPS is modifying your next session based on the information or using the GPS information to actually plan your sessions. What would you say, just gut call, the percentage of the coaches that are actually doing that the right way as opposed to just looking at top end speed and odometer?
Derek: Uhm zero comes to mind, there are people that are telling you that they are doing it and then I don’t know if they are just justifying their position. The communication is being made like hey, we are on the red or our loads are high but is there a systemic effort to change things, organization-wide from the top down to make sure they are complying to those recommendations, I don’t think so.
Ethan: You hit the nail on the head I mean I think a lot of the issue that I have seen is our culture with sport is at the end of the day, the head coach is the one that makes the final decision, not the preparation coach. You’re going back to putting in some sort of modification to the program based on the data you have collected but in colleges, in the NFL, even the NBA a lot of that doesn’t happen because the head coach is still the guy that is making the call
Carl: I will respond to that. In the winter meetings or NFL combine, let’s say you have 30 head coaches where are the white boards, what is your weekly setup as a team coach, and how do you look at the information that you are getting from your strength coach
Ethan: Nobody is saying that in front of 30 people
Carl: I understand that. No one is going to say I am going to share my secret sauce, right? But let’s say you do it internally and there is a hypothetical question, could you see it happen internally? Do they take their coordinators and say hey here is our winning model for the Albuquerque Rough Riders? You are not going to see that, Bill Walsh has passed away obviously and I would love to say okay Bill…if Bill had the technology now and he came from Al Vermeil influenced and obviously Dick Vermeil, that whole connection, what would they do and say in terms of, would they leave a little gas for the strength coach on Wednesday and say you know what I know your strength coaches are worried about getting enough gas in your tank for the weight room. We are going to cut off by 30 minutes and only do certain patterns or type of strategies, I have not seen that. I think that San Antonio if you look at someone that understands that I think there is a lot of intuitive coaches that understand work. Finding the Winning Edge by Bill Walsh he talked about fatigue, he says you are doing too much. An easy, convenient metric is minutes but you can see how bad people are messing up minutes. We all saw what happened with Kobe, everyone saw it a mile away, even the sports writers like hey, they are using the same terminologies that you would hear with a strength and conditioning coach, volume, density of schedule, travel, and then what happened? Achilles rupture. Humpty Dumpty couldn’t get back again, he had a great ending with his last game and that is great but he still has five rings and Jordan has six. If things were different, what would the Lakers be if they had the situation where Dwight Howard and obviously with Steve Nash if those guys were all healthy not to say that would’ve worked, I am just saying what if?
Kevin: So then between the three of you guys, just quick hit what would you say is missing in the gap between the promise of what this information is supposed to tell us and the actual usage of that information, Ethan?
Derek: The big thing is the coach, the head coach did not bring in the technology in any case
Ethan: It has to start from the top, no doubt
Derek: So if it comes from somebody else and they impose it on them, it is not going to work
Ethan: I think that is what has happened to GPS is you have, it is either like team x got it so we have to get it because team x got it or it is the strength coach saying team x got it, we got to have it
Derek: We have got to catch up and the next thing you know coach is getting all of your sports and you’re like I don’t care, dude like we are still winning games and that is the hard part too there are a lot of teams that are very successful and they are successful because they have great talent. You can be the best-paired team on the field, a quarter or whatever but if the other team is more talented than you, the chances of you winning, I don’t know
Carl: I am just going to repeat what Derek said and I am still waiting for that info graphic or that really succinct summary and say hey this is what you need to do head coach and that is why I always talk about modeling, what does it look like in a weekly setup so they can understand the technical, tactical things and handling a body in terms of recovery and the training needs of what got them great. Everybody drafts people from the combine but there is no sophomore combine year one or year two, wouldn’t you want to see that data all of the time? It is amazing, I write for simply faster and you would be amazed. There are very few people time because it is such a pure measurable way and yeah the context is different than the combine but I think that is the issue is that the coaches, no one wants to educate the coaches. Randy talked about that, very few coaches that are in the leagues come from, where is the NFL level 4 sports physiology course. You have this a little bit with other sports and you see a lot more integration and we are going to see more of that I think but it is too slow. It is so slow; it is glacier speed.
That is what Meg Stone and a lot of those folks down there talk about is trying to bring up our coaches in this country up to speed with education on training and some basic understanding of physiology.
Kevin: So who educates the coaches? Like who’s job is it to educate the coach? Is it the company selling the GPS product or the monitoring system? Is it the industry who is coming up with the USA W certification level 1 for weightlifting, why not the same thing for technology? I think that Exos is trying to do something like that right now. So who is responsible for the education of the industry because I’ll tell you what if anyone in this room had access to that technology and all three of you know how to actually apply it and actually get the right value out of it but you guys are all so on the top percentage of people who actually use this stuff. So for everybody else who is going to show them the best way to use this is to plan your Tuesday practice and your Wednesday practice
Derek: Somebody who doesn’t care about being fired. I mean it has got to come from them
Kevin: The hardware company or the
Derek: No the head coach. It is nice to be able to say like we are going to educate the head coaches but it is all natural selection, right? They got the job because somebody thought they were good but it is not because they go through a process of education by any means. It is a process of succession like oh you coach with him so
Kevin: The North American coaching tree
Carl: Also the inbreeding tree. That coaching tree is usually like-minds and that is not what you want. You’re not going to have wish bone NFL teams anytime soon but I think there needs to be okay, everything is secret too. A sensible idea is that someone who is going to be a voice of reason, I think it is going to have some sort of federation or some sort of way per sport, I mean no one is going to be, for example, baseball America’s past time. You’re not going to see an Eastern block manual on baseball performance. There is a cultural gap that would be there
Kevin: Well let’s leap frog a little bit. We are stuck at the high elite level with a gap in education and actually what to do with the technology. One of your questions here and that came in from Twitter were the problems with technology at the consumer to the high school and college to the pro side. If the promise of these companies we take a look at what Catapult just did with their acquisition of players, the promise of these companies is to eventually get to the pro sumer market and potentially the consumer market, the regular consumer market. They are going to have to educate these people on why they are buying this and why they are purchasing this so do they kind of like skip right over the pro teams and then start educating the general public on why it is important and through that maybe the pro teams learn?
Carl: I think that a good company to learn from is Training Peaks because there is a combination of the average person can go trial it and it is catered towards triathletes and it is a diverse amount of hardware so the consumer accountability, it is almost like crowd-sourcing forces an evolution to accelerate. That is one thing to think about, I also think that the more people are, and this is with social media, it is the strength, more people that are voicing their opinion in a healthy manner whether it be frequently asked questions and there is already some light education, it is going to naturally stir up the pot. What we are trying to do with Player Tech for example, you have a device that is 300 pounds, I look at the website and euros or something I am not sure what their price point is but with that price point it allows a high school kid to say I am going to bring my own device. I think my coach is making us do a lot of work and that creates a natural measurement to say, mom, dad I don’t want helicopter parents but there needs to be some transparency
Kevin: But again, you are leap-frogging the pro teams, you are breaking it wide open and you are telling the consumer this is the best way to use this stuff
Carl: I think there is a combination and this is where the quantified self-movement is that it is very bottom-up. Hackers, the first thing they do is they get the piece of equipment and see what they can do with it. So you want to have a combination, you want to have a vision of someone that has that talent of Steve Jobs, you are not going have a huge crowd that is as talented as that man was. You want to have the vision from top but you also want to have the crowd give some natural checks and balances and you know to say, for example, the joke about and Ryan Horne was showing pictures of his Catapult custom shirts, that took years for a company to say hey the bro is not something that is not very popular with athletes. It is just because there are not enough users, Catapult they might have a huge saturation in the pros, it is still compared to a Fitbit because they almost had a monopoly for a while.
Kevin: A company like Whoop, and we were talking about those guys before we started here, appears to be trying to get the athlete to buy in first. A company like Zephyr when they work with Major League Baseball the pitchers can wear the devices in game but it is their data first. So do you see a trend and again this is going to flip on its head and these companies begin to work with the pro sumer or the educated athlete first because the teams haven’t been acting on the information or
Carl: I will give you a very personal side. Look at Inside Tracker, when I first saw them I remember as a coach the suffering that it took just to get a simple blood test for vitamin D and this is the late 90s. 2010 and 2011 they came aboard an individual athlete that is just curious, he talks to the sports scientist and he has a little bit of a curiosity could go on his phone and with white gloves service like an Uber coming to your house or whatever you are, you can get a pro sumer experience. You’re getting the very effective thousands and thousands of clients to shape a product but then you have the high-level quality. We are seeing that all of the time now, you have agents that are trying to make sure that they are protecting their assets. You have the individual athlete that says I don’t trust anyone, I just need to make sure I can control my own destiny and they well what if I was with this team. Social media, I saw a Twitter tweet of a private handbook on nutrition from a soccer athlete and you could tell because there was the logo and the coach. They are saying hey do you believe in this so there is a community, an underground community where the athletes are talking and saying what do you believe about this
Derek: Think about all the retirements that have happened by guys who have potential CTE issues or guys who have just quit and they still have a lot of career left based on what guys have done in the past. You have Marshawn Lynch, you have the receiver in Detroit, Calvin Johnson so these guys are quitting and people are like hey, these guys still have a career but I think education has taught them your bodies can’t take it, your brains can’t take it and they have made that assessment themselves rather than being dictated by the convention of the league
Kevin: So if I am a pro athlete and I am looking to protect my own interests, what choices do I have besides consumer products? Where can I actually step up and do something? What leverage do I actually have to actually do this?
Carl: Yeah they have money, that is the first thing is
Kevin: But I can’t buy a one-unit Catapult system, I can’t buy a one-unit Whoop system, I can’t buy a one-unit Fatigue Science system
Carl: That is what we think we know and a lot of times you can say, okay, for example, the Suunto Ambit Watch. I have athletes that are just casually wearing the watch and that is a GPS tool and you can see the heat maps, the data. It is not 99 percent of the more enterprise products but it is pretty darn close to what the data that you can get so there is a point. It is not like James Bond where every athlete has cue but a lot of athletes like that. They like the fact that they get stuff that no one else has. I was talking to the guys from Fatigue Science and the fact that you can go and get a Jaw Bone or a Fitbit, that’s interesting to an athlete but if you have something that is exclusive for only elite athletes, that is very intriguing.
Derek: I watched the Women’s Wimbledon finals and Serena Williams has a commercial with IBM Watson and you can go onto the IBM Watson website right now and have your own Watson site that you can upload your own CSV data into and I think that it is reassuring what you are saying is athletes are the informed self. You were bringing up Calvin Johnson, you said you have money but he also probably did his own googling and he sought out his own advice through google or his own medical staff or his own doctor and probably did his own research because they are going to make their own decisions that is best for them
Kevin: How dangerous does this get when…ten years ago I walk into my high school coach or even my college coach or even my pro coach I am like hey man, I read Men’s Health that blah blah blah I should be doing this workout for my buff arms. Now you take that to a deeper level, hey I wore this 9.99 wearable device that is telling me that you are working me too hard.
Carl: We experience that. What happens when you have the private coach whispering in the ear of the elite athlete, you have the athlete say, okay I had a former strength coach that I really liked in college, I like what he did but he is not available to help. You have the one assistant and the one strength coach with the team now that might have different opinions. There is a little bit of a power struggle internally, I think it is okay, it is naturally going to happen but that is going to force people to address what I consider the biggest elephant in the room, is everyone is worried about self-preservation. All of these leadership books that we see on social media, you see everything, just go to any Barnes and Noble and you see a coach that is very famous and then he has the winning edge. I am guilty of this, you pick it up and say, what is Phil Jackson doing? Well it is nice to have Kobe, Shaq, and MJ but on the other hand okay what can we learn from a guy who is dealing with some amazing athletes and managing them so I don’t think we know what the answer is but I do like the fact that I would rather people talking about training and having an agreement issue. You are going to have that regardless, you had that way before the internet. In the 1980’s an athlete’s training in Italy, they see the other group of sprinters doing certain exercises, how come we are not doing that? Well maybe it is because you only have two years of development and they have five years or those guys never make the finals because they blow out their backs doing something that might be a risk so I think it is good that people are talking. I think the real issue is people are not talking.
Kevin: That I would totally agree with. We get back to the things are being told in secret behind the scenes and not actually sharing information and there would be an amazing amount of teams that we would sit down with and we are simply a data
Derek: I have to handle my own self-preservation
Carl: He is actually doing the intervention. His wellness questionnaire says have you eaten, have you fueled lately? I came prepared thanks to your Powerbar, whatever your Builder’s bar. I think we are wrapping up and probably going to question 2. It is a little easier now because Derek always adds a great perspective and usually he is very blunt
Kevin: We need more of that and so many people are afraid to break the shell and talk about things, so many people are afraid to say that either in settings like this where you’re actually up on stage. Social media where you get branded as you are a A guy, B guy, C guy and you simply just want to have the conversation and people are afraid to ask the questions and like Derek said because you might get fired. I just don’t see an answer to
Carl: The conference is just one of the answers
Kevin: Well they are for having you know the social events and everything else like that and hanging around afterwards but during the conference when the guy is on stage
Carl: Again if you don’t have a way for someone to create a gathering and someone brought it up finally, someone spoke up after years of saying what everyone is thinking, Randy broke the ice and that is what we need to do more of. I think it is because of guys like Jay who are facilitating this and I think the trend is going to be better. BSMPG for example, literally merging sports medicine and strength and conditioning. I can’t blame Art; he has just had a kid but I think those are the things that create a way for people to talk.
Kevin: So Ethan you mentioned personal Watson websites which gets us into the next question we have on here, why modeling is the future and what does it mean? Modeling, modeling, modeling, and this could be a 2-hour podcast all on its own so let’s just set the stage in the difference between modeling and monitoring. Monitoring being just tracking the information and modeling being using the information in an informative way. We can get into, oh if you’re using questionnaires or you’re using this and you’re using data. In the pure sense, if someone is listening to this for the first time and they hear the word modeling or predictive analytics or machine learning algorithm or something like this that really sounds sci-fi and techy and wiz and everything like that
Ethan: Artificial intelligence
Kevin: Let’s get past the BS and actually talk about what’s real and what is applicable
Carl: I think it is important what is real and what is applicable and I am going to say that again, what is real, what are people really doing and what is something that you can actually do in a setting that is chaotic? I hate when people start talking about neural networks in these round table discussions because I always ask well, and I have the ultimate metric for athletes that aren’t fitting the perfect model if you will which is what time of the morning are they driving, at what speed, with what blood alcohol level? Where did the sleep education work out? Where did all the predictive analytics, did you actually have a giant safety cushion so they wouldn’t crash? C’mon. I think it is really damaging. The reason we are not making progress is because there is a lot of smoke in mirrors. Underneath the hood you hear all these starts up and they are saying, we have, the typical term and I use it all of the time, the analytic engine and it is really easy to say you have this magical backend. When people think about modeling and I don’t want to bastardize the term but it is usually a composite of measuring things and having a plan. Periodization, a fancy word for a glorified calendar and then monitoring is just measuring things and observing. The issue I am seeing with monitoring is that it became a reactive world where we are waiting for the sky to fall, we are waiting for someone to always get tired. Yeah, we understand people get tired so I think modeling is more of a positive term in saying hey, we are going to manage these variables, we are going to take these inputs and we are going to have better decision-making that we have already kind of scoped out. We know that people are going to get tired in the playoffs. We know that attrition happens in football where you are going to have to get people off the practice squad. We know that when a guy has an ACL tear, it is going to be tough getting him back by a certain time and maybe it makes sense to do some trades. I think we are going to see more of that and modeling is, don’t be scared by it. A lot of strength coaches, especially at the lower levels become paranoid when they see some sort of pop culture book and it is always something that has nothing to do with sports but it is an expert. It is always the further away the expert is, the more of an expert they are. For example, and I like outside the box learning. Yuri dreams of Sushi which is a great thing, it is like craftsmanship it is great but then you will people spend a year promoting this idea, anti-fragile. Well, you know what, I like the idea what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, it is hundreds of years older than that and let’s not try and reinvent the wheel. Let’s not try to sexify things, let’s not try to pretend we are smart, let’s deal with the real core issues. I think we should move on; I think that is enough to get people’s appetite’s wet
Kevin: I am a coach who is listening to this for the first time, I have heard all of these cool words, I know that they are techy and interesting and maybe even in my statistics class I was interested in it for a little while. What can I do, practical real-use application, to begin my first modeling experiment? Like I want to take a look at and find two different data points that actually correlate to each other
Carl: I think the easiest thing for a strength coach to look at is strength and conditioning, old school. One conditioning metric that is very easy to capture, very valid and then balance that off with…it is simple, conditioning and strength, find a strength or power type, find a conditioning type variable that you might not have to test it but you can kind of track some things. Do these inputs matter? Body composition, right? A really good friend that says fat doesn’t fly. What he does and this for body types, his father was at a race track, horse racing, I love anything with a stopwatch so I love the horses, but he said I can look and say this person probably has a chance to run fast because they are lean. I think you have to take a couple data points and say what is it worth? You see these guys with a 150 to 200 thousand dollars’ worth of vibration platforms and what person says, okay this vibration platform is worth a tenth in the 40. What is it worth? So that is what I think people should do is to take two really crude metrics and say how do these things carry over throughout the season. Can you sustain it? Can you just check on it?
Kevin: And that is where we get back to the applied side of it because so much of this is like big data, we need a lot more information, we need to test all of these things and so on and so on where it is like well look, you can get started with, as you were saying, two metrics that actually turn into some value and then begin to test your different conditions and your inputs to actually find out whether or not there is effect to those
Carl: One of my favorite coaches that I have coached with and he was the head coach for, I was with him for two years and I was the assistant and I was just kind of there for the ride, this was five years ago. Coach Tommy, we did the very basic program and all I did was measure someone’s smile because if you deal with sprinters sometimes the personalities, in any athlete talented people sometimes have a little bit of baggage. All I did was measure how many times did the person smile, how many times did she get a big smile and I just rated it 1-5, this is when I was experimenting with facial coding. I said I can guarantee that his program is going to illicit a really good response. I was shocked, I said do you know what? It is working and I wouldn’t do what he is doing and she became an all-American, set the record and it was amazing. I think that people need to have something they believe in and to say hey, does it actually correlate. Now causation does not mean correlation but at least have something that is an early warning system or something that says, hey something is jiving here
Kevin: Don’t we always talk about this at the office? That one book that is like all of the correlation between two different data points that mean nothing. Like government domestic
Carl: Ice cream and crimes or something like that, yeah. It is usually crime because as the summer comes up, there is more youth out and then up to no good
Kevin: But the fun part about this is that everybody is talking about building these systems into these software packages and platforms and even…
Ethan: To me, you are talking about just finding a relationship not necessarily building some artificial neural network or some logistic regression. If we had that ability there are a lot of smart people in this industry that would have already done it in my opinion. So to me when you talk about modeling, back in the day people with longer arms do less pull-ups than people with shorter arms, it is something like that. Can we measure two things and do they relate to each other? Not necessarily building some ginormous machine algorithm in R. That to me is what you are talking about with modeling
Kevin: And that is why I wanted to clear this up because I think that a lot of people take a look at what Twitter is such a small, you can only fit so many characters, you throw a thing out there. There is no emotional context, you have to explain yourself and it just evaporates so quickly and people just hang on one tweet. When you say modeling, they just go oh, machine learning and I have seen insurance modeling system and there are thousands of inputs and hundreds of variables. We can’t do that in this field because we don’t enough information, we don’t have enough data.
Derek: I sent Kevin an article yesterday that Google Health is mining a million images a day to catch eye diseases earlier, that is big data. That is unstructured, big data. Having 50,000 rows by 150 fields isn’t big data
Kevin: But you can get to basic modeling if you’re looking at a single variable and then looking at what inputs effect it.
Carl: The simplest modeling that you can think of is are you maxing out trimp? Everyone has moved on to everything else like it has been around for a long time. Polar is not like it is a start up and people have to realize they keep moving to the next big thing so they don’t understand modeling because their foundations aren’t historical. So there is no history with sports technology because people think oh, three years ago it started and I am like no, technology starts when Grog the caveman scratched on a bone to keep attendance. I think that with modeling, the sports that you can learn from, it starts with the most basic. Cycling is really strong there, obviously there is a doping issue. That is the final number but there is still training, they are still trying to get better so there is still a lot to learn from even from any sport. The high level, there are drugs and it adds another variable but we kind of know what the drugs are, we know what they do so it only augments the scores. Formula 1, I hate going to these huge sports analytics conferences because you see this typical recipe. You have a general manager from a random team, you have a coach who is retired, he is on a speaking circuit and they always bring in Formula 1. Formula 1, I am a huge fan and everyone knows that and you can learn a lot from that but what is happening is you’re getting people that are on the proxy that sometimes are speaking and they are not doing it justice. Now on the other side, Redbull, they spoke at the Fleer conference in Nashville last year and it was like finally, someone is showing the bridge of applied sciences. I think that is what we need to see more of is like okay, cross pollination but not trying to be sexy, say oh I am learning from all these other fields. We tend to see that is where you can get the books, the more outside the box you are, the more of a smart thinker you are and I deal with a bunch of really shrewd coaches that are very old school. I was at a conference, it was like a speed conference, NASE and the guy had been coaching longer than I had been alive and he had so much wisdom because history trumps theory and when somebody goes, I have all of these ideas I say, go to Wikipedia and work backwards. Who is winning and why? So I always say this, if you’re looking at any information specifically on the Olympic level just go to Wikipedia and see who is winning and if there is a pattern with coaches versus hey I have an idea. I am getting onto a rant, I promised I wouldn’t do that because I was warned about it. It is therapy
Kevin: He is called the Ranter, did Bob Alejo say that? Carl Valle the ranter but he cleaned it right up and goes no man, you ask the questions and there is a lot of 144 character arguments out of there out there and some of it is constructive and some of it isn’t but I think it is one of the rare places that we can actually ask the real questions. We got to wrap otherwise we turn into a pumpkin, I think at midnight it has been over an hour and Annette basically starts cutting us off.
Carl: Let’s go rapid fire
Kevin: Rapid fire, yes
Carl: Yeah I think that is the easiest thing to do, the one-minute drill.
Kevin: What are we not measuring?
Carl: I think we are not measuring things like personality and sports psychology very well. Pat Davidson is a really bright guy and maybe he should be putting on a podcast is that I don’t think we understand sports psychology. It is strength and conditioning, then nutrition, and then really on the far outskirts is sports psychology in terms of what people value. I think that if you can do more there, I think we saw that ace questionnaire, I think we need more there. It is a really hard area to make sure to vet who is good and who is not but I will just leave it like that, we need to do more sports psychology
Kevin: Wasn’t very rapid. Big news this week, Catapult purchases like a couple of companies and one of them is Player Tech. Who are they and what does it mean for high school?
Carl: Player Tech is a player tracking company that is in Ireland. I have been using their products for a while now because I wanted to brace myself not only for GPS and accelerometry but I am bracing myself for some of the IMU stuff. That is what I am seeing is that it is a company that just got acquired and I am really excited that it is going to help high school and we are going to see a big explosion
Kevin: Yeah we are excited about it too. Number 5 what is the key to getting compliance with data?
Carl: Athlete user experience. Start with working with addictive behaviors and then throttling it down, that’s it. Natasha Shul is probably someone you might want to think about and that is how my perspective is. Throttle down addiction versus trying to move from the very bottom of the heap which is trying to beg and plead
Kevin: Can you say that name again so we can look it up?
Carl: Natasha Shul, she is an MIT professor
Kevin: What is in the future?
Carl: The future is going to be getting data from the eye, amazing organ system and we are going to see more there. Alright, that is it. There is literally a security custodian throwing us out so we are good.
Kevin: Thanks Carl, thanks to Derek, and of course Ethan. Podcast number 5 CoachMePlus applied sports science podcast, thanks everybody
Closing: Thank you again for listening to the CoachMePlus Applied Sports Science podcast. Remember to sign up for the CoachMePlus newsletter and hear every episode of the Applied Sports Science podcast as well as our sports science minutes over at coachmeplus.com