Assessing and Monitoring Performance Indicators

The preceding two articles discussed the various limitations to range of motion, and the 8 key factors influencing sport performance, respectively. If you missed them, you can check them out here:

Today’s article will build on these by presenting a few simple strategies to assessing and monitoring key performance factors. As a quick review, these 8 major factors were:

Genetic Capacity
Movement Capacity
Physical Capacities
Technical Skill
Tactical Abilities
Fuel State
Psychology
Readiness

You can further bucket these concepts by their modifiability and whose responsibility it is to assess and modify them:

Nonmodifiable: Genetic capacity (although if you eat, live, and train like garbage your epigenetics will express the worst version of you possible…so this can be negatively modified I suppose)
Sport Coach Modifiable: Technical Skill, Tactical Abilities
Support Staff Modifiable: Movement Capacity, Physical Capacities, Fuel State, Psychology, Readiness

Because of the positions I work in (Director of Performance at Endeavor Sports Performance, Strength and Conditioning Coach/Manual Therapist for the Philadelphia Flyers Junior Team and Assistant S&C Coach with the US Women’s National Team), I tend to focus on those that fall within the “Support Staff Modifiable” column, as these are the ones I have the ability to influence. Below is a list of assessments that can be used for each of these categories:

Movement Capacity: Selective Functional Movement Assessment (SFMA), Functional Movement Screen, Postural Restoration Institute (PRI) tests, Y-Balance Test, traditional orthopedic assessments for range of motion (We use seated hip rotation, lying shoulder rotation at 90° abduction, FABER, Quadruped Rock, Craig’s Test, and Seated T-Spine Rotation). Within these options, SFMA is most appropriate for an individual in pain, whereas the FMS is more suitable for individuals not in pain to get a basic assessment of movement quality. I believe PRI has value within both of these circumstances. The traditional orthopedic tests mentioned above are largely encompassed with the SFMA “breakouts”.

An outstanding tool to get a quick glimpse of how people move and to pre-qualify them for certain exercises.

Physical Capacities: Vertical Jump, Broad Jump, Lateral Bound, Multiple-Jump Tests, Olympic Lifting Variation 1-3 RMs, Major Lift 1-10+ RMs, Continuous Conditioning Tests (e.g. 12-Minute, 6-Minute or 2-Minute Run, Bike or Swim), Intermittent Conditioning Tests (Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Tests, Beep Tests, Repeat Shuttle Tests, etc.), and Cardiac Parameters (General: Resting Heart Rate, Heart Rate Variability; During the Test: Average Heart Rate, Maximum Heart Rate, 60s Heart Rate Recovery).

Fuel State: This is tougher to measure without blood, urine, and/or saliva tests, but a 3-Day Food Log will give you a pretty good indication of what the athletes are eating on a regular basis.

Psychology: I’m sure there are a lot of these out here, but I like the “Grit Scale” questionnaire from Angela Duckworth at UPenn.

Readiness: Resting Heart Rate, HRV, Daily Recovery Questionnaires (See Below), Perceived Exertion Questionnaires, OmegaWave.

This is a great questionnaire stemming from the research of McClean & Coutts (International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 2010) that Patrick Ward introduced me to. There are plenty of others, including the “Profile of Mood States”, that have some merit.

We don’t use all of these at Endeavor, primarily because we don’t have the budget for certain pieces of technology and/or because some of these assessments are redundant. I don’t think it’s necessary to perform the world’s most comprehensive testing battery with every athlete. I do, however, think it’s worth the time and effort to do enough that you can identify outliers and red flags.

Wrapping Up
One of my inspirations for writing this series stems from several conversations I’ve had with athletes and coaches over the last few weeks about why they (or their athletes) aren’t able to perform up to some desirable standard. Sometimes the answer lies in not possessing the necessary movement or physical capacities, in which case there is likely a training solution. Often times there are underlying nutrition/lifestyle causes for droughts in performance or a failure to maintain a high level of play consistently throughout a single event or across multiple events within a fairly short amount of time (e.g. a week or weekend). Insufficient or inappropriate fueling, for example, can mask itself as poor conditioning. Poor sleep quality can mask itself as “overtraining”.

The big take home message here is that if you don’t have some means of assessing these buckets, you don’t really have a way to identify whether someone is trending in a positive or negative direction for any of the individual factors. It can be easy to identify decreasing performance, but the goal is never to just point out when someone is playing poorly; it’s to make targeted adjustments to help get them back on track. Utilizing a few basic assessments can provide extremely valuable information to identify the primary factors contributing to performance plateaus or decreases, and therefore provide a foundation for making the necessary changes to improve performance moving forward.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

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Dissecting Performance Limitations

The last article touched on the various limitations to range of motion (ROM) and presented the idea that it’s not always desirable to improve ROM. If you missed that post, you can check it out here: Understanding Range of Motion: More is not better

Today I want to expand on that concept by taking a broader look at what drives athletic performance in general. Simply, if we want to improve performance, we need to have a construct of what’s limiting it.

Diving right in…

While there are inevitably more than what’s presented here, these are what I consider the 8 major determinants of sport performance:

Genetic Capacity
Movement Capacity
Physical Capacities
Technical Skill
Tactical Abilities
Fuel State
Psychology
Readiness

Genetic Capacity
To expand in a little more detail, Genetic Capacity describes an individual’s ceiling for movement and physical capacities, and although not listed above, probably intellectual capacities as well (this falls within the tactical skill bucket). This also speaks to how some individuals naturally excel at endurance OR power activities and why certain athletes may have an increased chance of success in certain activities versus others. This is certainly not to say that any given athlete should only pursue those activities in which they’re genetically predisposed to success. I’m a huge proponent of “playing the underdog” and utilizing the doubts of others as fuel for your own development. I also don’t think success can ever be wholly dictated by genetic predisposition. The expression of genetics can surely be modified (a field known as epigenetics has emerged from this idea), depending on the stressors placed on the body. That said, genetics can’t be ignored either, as they will certainly play a role in determining your peak capacities.

See 4:20 for a quick lesson on genetic presdispositions and sport performance

Movement Capacity & Physical Capacities
Movement Capacity encompasses qualities like range of motion and movement quality, which can be quantified with a variety of testing methods, including those espoused by the Postural Restoration Institute and Functional Movement Systems, among others. Physical capacities build on movement capacity by putting movement more within the context of sport requirements. This bucket includes all components of athleticism, such as acceleration, deceleration, max speed, multi-directional power across the full spectrum (high load/low velocity to low load/high velocity), strength, core function (this plays a role in movement capacity, but also in physical capacity within the context of transferring and dissipating loads), and conditioning.

Technical Skill & Tactical Abilities
The development of movement and physical capacities lays the foundation for the development of technical skill. One cannot improve, for example, a sport-specific skill that necessitates power the individual does not possess. This is a fairly obvious statement, but it’s one that is often overlooked by sport coaches who want something out of an athlete that simply isn’t there (yet). Tactical abilities, which refer to an athlete’s understanding of game-specific situations and the ability to read and react to plays, are similarly influenced by technical skills and physical capacities. In the case of the former, it may be more appropriate to say that the expression of tactical ability is influenced by technical skills. If an athlete’s processing allows him/her to know the perfect play to make, but doesn’t have the skill to execute, the limiting factor is technical proficiency, not tactical ability. In the case of the latter, there are several ways to link physical capacities to tactical ability, but an easy one to highlight the relationship lies in the effect fatigue has on mental processing. Fatigue is multi-factorial, as we’ll see, but it’s easy to see how poor conditioning could lead to earlier fatigue and compromised mental processing.

Fuel
Being appropriately fueled ensures the athlete has the resources necessary to express their current maximal abilities, physically and psychologically. This is one of the most overlooked components of maximizing performance in youth sports. As I told a team of HS lacrosse players last weekend, “All of your diets are terrible; some of you are just more aware of how terrible they are than others.”

Psychology
Sport psychology also has a lot of facets to it, but one of the major components that determines the success of an individual (or team) is what has been described as “Grit”. Grit can be more simply defined as “resilience” or “stickwithitness”. It’s the quality that determines how an athlete responds when things don’t go according to plan. Another major piece deals with the Yerkes-Dodson Performance-Arousal Curve, which illustrates that there is an optimal zone of arousal (think excitement) below and beyond which performance is compromised.

Readiness
Lastly, all of these factors intertwine and combine with all other forms of life stressors (environmental, lifestyle, relationship, etc.) to determine an athlete’s “readiness”. Within this context, readiness primarily refers to how recovered an athlete is from previous stressors to perform optimally at any given moment. The reason I’m suggesting that all of the aforementioned factors dictate or influence readiness is because they all, with the possible exception of technical and tactical abilities, place a stress load on the body or determine how an individual will tolerate/adapt to that stress load. Poor movement quality may increase internal resistance to basic movements foundational within a given sport, leading to increased internal stress for the same output. Aerobic fitness in general is correlated to an individual’s ability to tolerate stress (from all sources). Moreover, accumulated training, practice and competition loads will influence how “fresh” an athlete feels at any given moment. Eating low quality food can cause an inflammatory response within the body that increases internal stress. And finally, inappropriate or excessive anticipatory stresses related to an upcoming competition can initiate a hormonal response that alters an individual’s recovery and therefore their readiness.

As you can see, and this is very much the tip of the iceberg, there is A LOT that goes into optimal performance. As coaches, it’s important to recognize that someone may not be living up to your expectations because of any one of these factors. In hockey, for example, coaches always want everyone to be faster. The reality is that some players are going to be more explosive than others, and while I think we can shift everyone toward faster skating speeds with quality training, there will still be a speed bell-curve. From a sport coach’s perspective, the question then comes down to how this player, despite not being the fastest on the team, can make a positive contribution within your system based on the other things they bring to the table (e.g. “redeeming qualities). Not every Hall of Famer is the fastest athlete on the team.

The video below is of Tom Brady’s 40-Yard Dash from the ’00 NFL Combine. It’s 10 seconds, which is barely enough time to squeeze in the run.

I understand QB is a position that may be more forgiving for this type of physical profile compared to others, but it’s also a position that has coveted extremely explosive athletes.

The point being, Tom Brady has had an incredibly successful NFL career despite not being the most physically gifted. Every athlete has redeeming qualities; it’s up to the coaches when selecting a team to make decisions about whether any given athlete’s redeeming qualities have a place in their system. Once this is determined, an athlete cannot be faulted for, nor should a coach expend too much mental energy on, his or her lack of genetic gifts.

Optimal performance is dictated by a number of factors, many of which were highlighted above. In order to determine why an athlete may not be living up to their potential and/or the coach’s expectations, it’s important to both understand the various opportunities for limiting peak performance, and to have a series of assessments to monitor the modifiable factors. The next article will highlight several assessments that can be used to accomplish just that. Stay tuned!

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

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Understanding Range of Motion: more is not better

Last week I spent a few minutes talking to a goalie scout for USA Hockey about what limits performance, and therefore what we must assess and train. This will be the first in a series of posts, in which I hope to present our approach to training and how our underlying philosophy of assess-train/monitor-reassess influences our programming and results.

Understanding Range of Motion

Range of motion (ROM) is often referenced using other words like mobility or flexibility. It’s also largely viewed as a “more is better” quality and increasing ROM is often misunderstood as being protective from injury, despite research evidence to the contrary.

In order to understand whether it’s necessary or desirable to improve ROM, it’s first necessary to understand what can limit it. Each of these could be the topic of their own post (or book), but in the interest of providing a broad overview, ROM can be limited by:

1) Bony Structure
The shape and contour of articulating bones (e.g. the bones meeting at a joint) can influence ROM. As one example, I’ve written a lot about how the shape of the femoral head and/or hip socket can influence hip flexion and therefore squat depth (among other patterns): Training Around Femoroacetabular Impingement, Performance Training: Adaptations for Femoroacetabular Impingement. For another good example, check out this article from Dean Somerset on how pelvic structure can influence lateral movement (See: Pelvic Arch Design and Load Carrying Capacity

You can’t stretch your through bony blocks.

2) Passive Restraints
Every joint, to some degree, is supported by ligaments that “check” ROM in certain directions. For example, the MCL of the knee helps prevent the inside of the knee from “opening” too far. Collectively, the surrounding ligaments help create some stability around a joint, and also provide feedback to the brain about where the joint is, how it’s moving, and how much load is being distributed across it. It’s quite possible, albeit almost never desirable, to stretch these restraints to allow more range of motion. This is extremely common in athletes like figure skaters and gymnasts.

Unfortunately, when these passive restraints are compromised, accessory joint motion is increased, meaning there is a little more sliding, gliding, and rolling within a joint, which ultimately increases the stress placed across other structures meant to improve joint congruency like the knee meniscus, hip and shoulder labrums, spinal discs, etc. This is one of the reasons why there is such a high incidence of osteoarthritis among these sporting populations, especially at young ages (e.g. <35 y/o); they’ve compromised some of their passive restraints so there’s more progressive erosion-like wear and tear across the joint.

3) Active Restraints
The muscles around joints provide active support. There are many reasons why a muscle/fascia may restrict motion around a joint, but I generally think of them in two simple buckets:

The muscles aren’t strong enough to maintain stability in a certain range
The brain interprets a certain position/motion as threatening or dangerous.

While very different, both of these buckets provide very simple explanations for why the various PNF methods work for improving ROM. Whether you view it as strengthening a muscle in a specific ROM, or simply demonstrating to the nervous system that producing force in a certain ROM doesn’t necessitate a painful/threatened response, the end result in situations where this is indeed the restriction is improved ROM.

The Big Picture
Hopefully, from this discussion, it’s apparent that improving ROM isn’t always desirable. Simply, there is always a cost to making improvement in any quality, and restrictions in ROM need to be interpreted on an individual basis based on what their structure allows. Attempting to force improved ROM beyond an individual’s structural capacity will necessarily lead to ligamentous laxity, excessive accessory joint motion and inevitably breakdown/degradation in the future. This may be the necessary cost of doing business for certain sports that require hypermobility (e.g. gymnastics, figure skating, etc.), but it’s advantageous to be aware of whether you’re increasing ROM beyond an individual’s capacity because it’s necessary to be successful in the sport or simply because you associate more as being better. In the case of the latter, if the improvements aren’t absolutely essential to the individual being competitive in their position within any given sport, the pursuit is not only a waste of time, it’s deleterious to their progress.

This is rarely the goal.

More specific to the origin of this conversation, careful attention needs to be paid to whether a goalie’s performance is actually being limited by their lack of ROM and whether this limitation is structural or functional, or whether the desire to improve ROM is based simply on the assumption that, within this position, more is better. Every individual brings different strengths and weaknesses to a position; maybe one individual’s strength is ROM, another’s is his/her ability to read the play and to position appropriately. I think we enter a dangerous situation when athletes and/or their coaches try to make improvements in any given athlete based on the desired profile of another without consideration to the structural and physiological strengths and weaknesses of the given athlete and the “role model”.

To be clear, I don’t think this is an easy distinction for athletes or sport coaches to make. Frankly, I don’t think most S&C coaches understand the difference. That said, one red flag to suggest you’re stealing ROM from an undesirable place is if you feel a restriction on the opposite side of the joint you’re stretching. For example, when you’re stretching your adductors/groin, if you feel a restriction on the outside/back of your hip, you’re not stretching anything, you’re jamming against your own joint’s restriction.

Optimizing Movement: Our System for Assessing Movement Capacity and Programming

This can be a tough distinction to make. If you have questions about your own personal situation, please feel free to post them below!

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

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Sports Training Stuff You Should Read

I hope you had a great weekend. Last week was exciting, as I had an opportunity to grab dinner Tuesday and Wednesday with Mike Potenza, who was in town to play the Flyers. It’s always great to catch up with Mike, as he’s not only a good friend, but also one of the best S&C coaches in hockey and constantly learning more to get better. As always, I picked up some great ideas on ways to improve our programs. Thursday I was fortunate to score tickets to the Flyers game; unfortunately the Flyers got shelled 7-3. Maybe it’s me, but the last two games I went to they gave up a combined total of 14 goals against! Friday we had, believe it or not, our first off-season hockey player come back to get assessed to start his “Summer” training, which means 14-hour work days are right around the corner for me.

With all of that said, I wasn’t able to find time to get any writing done. Luckily, I did come across a few great resources that I wanted to share with you. Check out the articles below and please feel free to post any comments you have in the section below!

Conference Review: Assessing Movement with Stuart McGill and Gray Cook from Patrick Ward
This is a great summary of a recent seminar Patrick attended featuring presentations from Stuart McGill and Gray Cook. A lot of people, including very prominent authorities in the field, misinterpret the original intention of the Functional Movement Screen and over-emphasize the FMS’s role in predicting injury and under-value it’s role in pre-qualifying an individual for specific exercises. Patrick does a great job sharing his opinion on the topic, which is very much in line with my thinking.

Doing Simple Things Well from Patrick Ward
This is another post from Patrick that I really enjoyed. It was very “timely” as he and I spent 30 minutes on the phone discussing these same ideas days before this was posted. The more I learn about different assessment processes, the more I believe that part of the process is to identify outliers and make individualized adjustments to their stressors and/or recovery strategies to ensure they’re prepared to perform at the desired level. While there are infinite opportunities to “do more”, Patrick boils things down into a few very simple strategies to implement and interpret.

From A Child’s View, Parents Find Full-Ice Hockey No Fun from USA Hockey
This video from USA Hockey is both enlightening and funny. I’ve said before that parents and coaches with no understanding of the psychological development of kids really shouldn’t be making decisions about what’s in the kid’s best interest from an athletic development standpoint. Simply, their opinions are almost entirely emotionally driven without any consideration to the kid’s perspective. USA Hockey’s ADM guidelines are INCREDIBLY well-researched and thought out. I would encourage those that disagree with their recommendations to ask themselves whether they have the same background information as USA Hockey. If not, maybe do some more homework before you take an opposing stance. There’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.

What’s the Hurry? from Jack Blatherwick
Jack Blatherwick is a legend in hockey, as he’s one of the first to apply specific off-ice strategies to transfer to the patterns and energy systems of hockey. This is a very simple article telling the personal athletic backgrounds of the men’s hockey players coming from Minnesota that participated in this year’s Olympics. Those offering off-season camps and showcase tournaments have done an outstanding job of instilling fear in youth parents that their kids need to play year-round hockey or they’ll be left behind. The crazy swings in psychological, neurological, and physical development that characterize adolescence make it easy to misinterpret developing later with developing less. This article sheds some light on what the best players in the world did to reach where they are today.

5 Things Every Youth Athlete Should Know from meThis is an article I wrote a couple weeks ago that has been one of the more popular ones in the history of my site. The response this article has gotten makes me think I should write more about “the art of coaching” and maybe a little less about the science. The bottom line is that if athletes aren’t prepared to do what others won’t, and aren’t resilient and able to overcome adversity, it’s extremely unlikely they’ll be successful in the long-term. This post outlines several messages we try to send to all of the athletes that train at our facility.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

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“…a must-have for coaches and strength professionals at all levels of hockey.”

Powerful Nutrition Strategy

Nutrition can have a powerful effect on an athlete’s performance. Not only does it strongly influence body composition, but food can both facilitate and combat inflammation, strengthen or weaken immune systems, and enhance or impair sleep (as a few examples).

Today’s “Thursday Throwback” features a very simple, but incredibly powerful nutrition strategy from my friend Brian St. Pierre. While this was originally posted in 2009, I still believe this is the first change you NEED to make!

Last summer I was fortunate to work alongside Brian St. Pierre. He is a brilliant nutritionist that continues to get phenomenal results with his clients. Brian really knows his stuff when it comes to altering individual diets to help people shed fat, build muscle, recover faster from workouts, and improve their overall health.

In today’s post, Brian shares with us a nutrition tip that will have a large impact on your health and performance.

Brian’s Nutrition Tip:

“Eat Real Food!”

“It may seem trivial or vague, but if you sat back and really took stock of the food in your home, you would probably be shocked to realize just how much of it qualifies as a food product, not actual food. Increasing the amount of real food, defined below, and decreasing the amount of food products you consume is the easiest thing you can do to improve your nutrition and health. It doesn’t require counting calories, worrying about nutrient timing, calculating macronutrient percentages, or any of that, and it will have a far greater impact on your health.”

Real Food Conditions:

If you couldn’t hunt, fish, pluck, grow, or ferment/culture the food, you probably shouldn’t eat it.
If it wasn’t food 100 years ago, it probably isn’t food today.
If it comes in a box or a plastic wrapper, it probably isn’t food, it is a food product.
If it contains lots of industrial vegetable oil (canola, cottonseed, soybean, safflower, sunflower, etc) and/or added sugar/high fructose corn syrup, it probably isn’t food, it is a food product.

If your response to this is “I knew that already”, you should probably ask yourself “Am I doing this?” Most people know what they should be doing; few are actually doing it. If you know anyone else that you feel would benefit from this information, please pass it on to them.

Brian wrote what I still firmly believe is the best nutrition resource for hockey players, parents, and coaches available today. Not only does it cover the “why” of specific nutrition and supplementation strategies, it covers the “how”, which makes every strategy incredibly easy to implement. Check it out here: Ultimate Hockey Nutrition.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

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