Context will always be King

First thing I wanted to cover off in this blog series was to highlight the importance of context in all sport science disciplines.

Although sport science, strength and conditioning, mental performance, and many other areas of sport performance have come such a long way in the past 20 years or so, it is important that the information and programming prescribed to the athletes is applied within the context of their chosen sport. Sport performance has four elements that are imperative for performance – physical, technical, tactical and mental. Athletes must master these skills in their respective sport to be successful.

In an elite sports environment, each of these skills often have dedicated practitioners to help athletes improve these skills individually e.g. Strength and Conditioning coaches for the physical, Sport Psychologists for the mental etc. The individual focus on each of these elements is important for honing in on, and building strengths and improving weaknesses for the athlete to reach the best of their capabilities.

Firstly, these practitioners must be able to help their athletes within the context of their chosen sport. There’s no point applying a cookie cutter method to every athlete out there, while disregarding the specific demands of their sport. It’s about combining that perfect mix of art and science within a specific sport. An obvious example of this is trying to apply a heavy strength program that a rugby player would complete for an artistic gymnast. Yes, it’s true that all athletes must undertake certain strength and conditioning programs to ensure they are able to reach the peak of their abilities and help reduce the risk of injuries by becoming more robust athletes BUT if you can’t relate your programming back to what that athlete will do during competition, then you probably won’t get the desired results.

The second, and perhaps more technical point, is how sport scientists, performance analysts, and data scientists report on the metrics they are collecting. Advances in sports tech has contributed to the exponential improvement of sports performance over the past few years, especially when it comes to things like GPS tracking, hawk-eye, and video analysis software. These things have contributed greatly to helping coaches and performance staff plan, prepare, and monitor athletes to ensure they are available to compete at their highest level possible, as well as providing critical trends and insights into their athletes or team’s performance. But the important thing to remember with sport scientists and performance analysts is that they’re not technicians who simply operate the equipment and spit out pages and pages of reports and numbers (at least they shouldn’t be!). The best scientists and analysts are the ones who can take the numbers and the stats from the weekend’s game, and look beyond them to see how effective the athletes were in contributing (or not) to the outcome of the game. Just because an AFL midfielder ran 200m in their highest velocity band, doesn’t necessarily mean that all 200m of that contributed towards an effective outcome during the game. Some of those metres may have been from sprinting off the field for an interchange, or running to switch positions with a player playing in the forward line. Similarly, how much of this distance is players being reactive to their opponent in an attempt to chase them down and tackle them, and how much of this distance is spent in offence trying to break through a pack and away from their opponents?

If you can’t provide context to the numbers, then the meaning of the information gets lost and becomes devalued by the athletes and coaches. The numbers cannot just be taken at face value – they need to be able to tell a story. That’s why context will always be king.

Gee Vee