Last month a colleague and I attended and presented at the Performance Summit co-hosted by Notre Dame University and Australian Catholic University on the ND campus in South Bend, Indiana.
It proved to be an excellent two-days of learning and connecting. Therefore, I wanted to recap this event here so I could revisit it often and in hopes that readers can gain something from it as well.
The two-days were filled with excellent presentations and discussions but in the words that follow I will speak to those that stood out the most.
Beginning with Dr. Damian Farrow and his presentation on Skill Acquisition….
Farrow defines Skill as Technique + Adaptability / Pressure and lists the common causes of error as technical, perceptual, and decision-making based.
His presentation was centered around S.P.O.R.T. – specificity, progression, overload, reversibility, and tedium.
With specificity, representative design should be utilized out of respect for the context of performance environment.
With progression, we must determine the ‘challenge point’
Dr. Farrow mentioned that we learn from our mistakes but are motivated by our successes. Therefore, we need to attempt to hook the athlete’s motivation to learning. Farrow brought this point home by highlighting video games and how they are easy to learn but hard to master – and subsequently very addicting!
In promotion of learning, a random practice organization has proven to be successful. Any important consideration to take into account with this and subsequent load monitoring that Dr. Farrow mentioned is that random practice, due to the cognitive load associated with it, has a greater overall load than blocked practice.
With this, Farrow recommended the NASA Task Load Index as a monitoring tool. This index includes components such as mental demand, physical demand, time demands, effort, performance, and frustration level.
With overload, the main mechanism of action being looked at is arousal, which “links stabilization to actualization”. This is a key consideration of mine when teaching sprint technique to athletes. They must be able to execute appropriately at very low levels of arousal prior to gradually increasing the arousal and checking for stabilization and, lastly, actualization.
For example, this means they accelerate well individually before lining up next to any teammates or competitors and attempting to accelerate. They must earn the right to be exposed to greater and greater levels of arousal.
With reversibility we are talking about a mastered skill reverting back to pre-mastery levels. I find this to be a very interesting topic of discussion and is something I need to look into further. We often talk of detraining effects of various weight-room abilities but in terms of skill I don’t see this being discussed as much.
Lastly, tedium speaks to the monotony of training at an elite level.
Building from this, Dr. Jeremy Sheppard presented on Technology & Innovation and stated that, “Elite athletes see performance gains as innovation”.
This got me wondering…
Is this a necessity at the elite end of sport? Must elite athletes find motivation in the slightest performance increase to endure the monotony of training? What responsibility do we take as coaches in making sure an athlete is not bored?
I tend to think that at elite levels athletes will ideally fit into Dr. Sheppards quote in that they are satisfied and motivated by each and every performance gain. Enough so that they are fully bought-in to the process.
If an athlete has to rely on their coach, teammates, or training partners for motivation more often than not, than they may not be well suited for life at the elite edges of sport.
*as an aside, Dr. Sheppard and his team are currently looking into ‘flow state’ and the ability to ‘find’ it – definitely something to be on the lookout for!
Switching gears, the last presentation I will dive into came from 3 members of the Southampton Football Club – Alek Gross (Head of Sport Science and 1st Team Fitness), Matthew Sayce (Lead Academy Strength and Conditioning Coach), and Iain Brunnschweiler (Coach Development Manager).
Their presentation was titled, Potential into Excellence and discussed their approach at both athlete and coach development as one of the smaller budget operations in the Premier League.
From a Performance Team standpoint, one thing they do to ensure an integrated team that speaks the same language is have all staff, including Sport Scientists and Physiotherapists, complete the FIFA Level 1 accreditation.
This creates a common ground from which to build upon and I thought it seemed like a simple, yet effective, strategy.
Furthermore, they utilize internal audits to track the nature and quantity of coach-athlete feedback. This allows them to check if their actions match their intentions and forces critical thinking.
On the athlete side, four pillars serve as the scaffolding to their operation – Physical Dominance, Talent ID, Availability, and Readiness. An interesting point they made within this is that, on the academy side, they don’t have to win games to develop athletes.
Oftentimes I believe we tend to think these two go hand-in-hand but that’s not always the case.
Recent insight into the English Premier League structure, from first team to entry-level academy, has been very interesting to me. Referring to players as “assets” and “investments’ and with club ties initiating as early as 8 or 9 years of age is somewhat unique.
The closet thing to it in America that I am aware of would be Baseball with its varying levels of play. These are certainly two areas worth looking into more regarding Long Term Athlete Development.
There were many more great presentations at the ND-ACU Summit including Dr. Jack Hickey on the role of pain in Return-to-Play and Dr. Shona Halson on Water Immersion and more. More information on each of this can be found on the Pacey Performance Podcast, episodes 243 and 244 respectively.
Lastly, the presentation Dr. Jas Randhawa and I gave will be available on ALTIS 360 in the near future.