Sports Sciencitis

Sports-sciencitis is a disease that I’ve made up recently (with no ill intended disrespect towards the sports science community or sports science students).

Having sports-scientitis is like someone having a thousand ingredients to make a pizza and not having the ability to make a well cooked margherita.

What do I mean by this and where did this made up disease come from?

This naming of this disease comes from multiple sources.

• Throughout my own journey in coaching, I keep finding new variables, metrics, methods, exercises and being caught up in fads thinking that any one of the aforementioned elements may be able to positively influence performance in isolation. This is foolish.

• At Track Speed Development, we have university interns complete their pracs with us. Most of our interns have no real background in track and field (as it’s an unpopular sport in Aus) however many of them, being sports science students, have a keen interest in the athletic disciplines as they’re a great expression of many things they’re learning in class. The questions they ask me sometimes show that there’s a disconnect between theory and practice; or just overall confusion as to how to help someone become a better athlete. An example of this was last week when one of the students, after watching a YouTube clip saying that we need more vertical force to be faster (this isn’t wrong, by the way), was curious whether if he ran 120m sprints, would it increase his vertical force production which would in turn increase his vertical jump and help him dunk a basketball. The logic isn’t necessarily incorrect, but it’s not entirely correct and I thought it was a good example of how confusing it can be to navigate such a complex system like the human body is.

• Many of the athletes I’ve coached have done sports science degrees or something similar and truthfully, they can be some of the hardest athletes to coach. Similar to how I don’t think I’d be a good athlete to coach because I couldn’t switch the curious and arrogant side of my brain off - sometimes sports science based athletes can use a sliver of knowledge to create a rational strong enough to undermine your training philosophy and that undermining may not even be a conscious thing with malicious intent (and this is more prone to happen when things aren’t going great). Oftentimes these athletes will be more worried about the ‘measurables’ (probably strength numbers) and struggle to find flow state (they’re probably overthinking running technique and are overtrained). I’m only saying this about this athlete archetype because I’m that archetype.

So back to the pizza analogy earlier - what does it have to do creating good athletic training?

When I visited Italy for the first time in 2019 (starting in Puglia, traversing across to Naples and the Amalfi coast and then making my way up through the country to Bergamo) I ate close to a million pizzas. Although pizzas change from city to city (each city arguing theirs is the best) - there are more commonalities than differences.

• Experienced pizza chefs.

  • The pizza chefs have incredible amounts of experience, sometimes their wisdom being generational. I distinctly remember a pizza chef in the city of Naples cooking pizzas by himself for close to one hundred customers, with my partner and I seemingly. being the only tourists there. In between throwing the pizza dough sky-high and then chucking the dough into the kiln, he’d verbally abuse the teenage waitress who I don’t think was writing the orders very clearly on the tickets (to which she’d laugh cheekily at his wrath). He was sweaty, greasy and his shirt was disgusting; he was decades beyond his physical prime; he was serving up pizzas to Italians who would be expecting a good meal and hurling abuse at the staff while doing it all. The pizza was incredible. That was a chef who has cooked thousands of pizzas in his lifetime and it was awesome to watch someone in an absolute flow state.

• Fresh and well cooked dough; well covered tomato base and the perfect amount of cheese

  • This is what I’d consider the essential components to a good pizza. If you’ve messed this up, there’s no point in adding the toppings. Moreover, when a pizza is truly outstanding, it’s quite rare that it’s the toppings that I find myself impressed by. It’s almost always the freshness of the bread.

• Seasonal and local ingredients

  • Besides avocados and mangos, it seems like everything is ‘in-season’ in Australia. You can go to woolies and buy ingredients year round, whether they’re good or bad quality. In Europe, it seems that locally resourced ingredients are more common and something that restaurants and grocers take pride in using or distributing. If something is laying upon your pizza, it’s meant to be there at that time of the year, in that city and finally, in your belly. Nothing is forced on there.

• The classics are always present

  • When I went into a pizza shop, the menus were rarely that long. Margherita, Marinara, Prosciutto e funghi, Quattro Stagioni, Capricciosa, Quattro Formaggi, Ortolana/Vegetariana, Diavola, Boscaiola, Frutti di Mare. Nothing was all that revolutionary and Hawaiian was certainly not an option.

I hope you’re able to connect the dots between this pizza analogy and the disease that is sports sciencitis.

Sports-sciencitis is a disease of confusion in which you have a surplus of information and an inability to make it cohesive. You may have an understanding of anatomy; of exercise selection; you may have just learned about more complex metrics, exercises or variables that you can improve through training, such as boosting your elastic strength index or increasing fascicle lengths - but when you have a human in front of you, you may feel disabled in understanding what the most important components (your pizza dough) are due to the vast amount of variables and metrics that exist while training. If sports-sciencitis is a disease of confusion, your cure is clarity. I still find myself coming down with regular bouts of sports sciencitis as I can’t help but read or listen to new knowledge and get excited about it as well as constantly question my own process. Anyways, here are some suggestions to vaccinate sports-sciencitis.

• Much like the pizza chef in Naples, you need to get in a million repetitions of coaching. I’m sure throwing a pizza into the air is easy in theory, but repeating it a thousand times a day is another story. Get your hands on as many athletes as possible to see whether you can translate theory into reality; and then whether your theory makes discernable positive difference to your athletes.

• Attempt to systemise your training. If you’re able to discern what you believe makes a good athlete in ‘x’ sport - you should be able to create a good enough training system that reflects that. What is the dough, tomato base and cheese for your sport?

• Acknowledge that sports training itself and technical proficiency are probably going to be the pizza dough. Sometimes there’s a temptation to view sports through some weird bootleg-physics lens and to think that everything is ‘force’ - typically, the amplitude of force. When you acknowledge technique as the most important factor, you begin to acknowledge massive amplitudes of force (developed in gym environments) become meaningless at a certain stage if its organisation and timing are inefficient. Take pride in making the softest, warmest and memorable dough possible.

• Be contempt that you cannot do everything, everywhere all at once. In the same way a good pizza has a finite amount of ingredients on top of it, same with a good training program. Furthermore, some ingredients may be more appropriate at different times of the year. Yes - there will always be some curiosity or experiment which is dangling in front of you to take (for me, I always just have this temptation to blow it up and go full tri-phasic for some reason) but if you do not stay the course and limit your variables, your athlete’s physical preparation will be poor. I’m not saying that all pizzas need to be a margherita, but you also don’t want to have so much junk on top you can’t see the tomato base.

• Use good ingredients. What are some ‘classic’ exercises or drills that have worked for others in the past? What are some tried and true combinations? Rocket and prosciutto sounds tasty. Squatting in some form sounds tasty. Some speed also sounds tasty. You probably don’t have to be insanely creative - despite being a young field, there is generational knowledge that has been passed down from the mid 1900s that is still resounding today. Don't be caught up in the rationale for their work as it may have changed as new information presents itself over time - just try to read between the lines and find the commonalities of what made their athletes better. To me, pineapple on pizza is akin to a Seedman 90 degree bicep curl squat - it resounds with some people, but to me, it’s completely unnecessary and has the potential to ruin a pizza.

• Seek guidance where needed and if you can, go to the source. Do you need to take a pilgrimage to Naples to learn how to make a pizza? Probably not - but if you had the chance, it’d be silly not to take it. Find someone or somewhere which can help you create clarity around coaching. If you have all the ingredients but you don’t know how to cook, find a master chef who can show you how to look after your ingredients and organise them on your puffy dough base. Every now and then, I go and pester a few people when my mind seems foggy. Even if they may not have the answers to my specific situation, those with experience typically help me figure out what concerns can be eliminated, in turn creating clarity.

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