Comments on The Science of Sport: Coaching and science: Asset or liability

Could'nt it be that the good coaches get new exper...

2009-11-01T23:21:58.393+02:00

Could'nt it be that the good coaches get new experiences (empiricism) from trying the theories that science shows could work. Would'nt this be a relationship between science and empiricism coaching. I agree that a good coach thinks (should think) like a scienctist though my lack of experince with coaching make my ideas just ideas, not theory nor experienc.

Martin

For a practicing athlete, solutions come from an e...

2009-10-28T19:20:02.689+02:00

For a practicing athlete, solutions come from an eclectic mix: the empirically derived ideas of Arthur Lydiard, which he developed by experimenting with training his own body; and the (very occasional) scientific study that employs actual training methods and evaluates the results in terms of performance. E.g., the study that showed intervals improve 10K race times far better than tempo runs.

Possibly the most interesting experiment in the world of elite running concerns aerobic metabolism, i.e., the Africans whose success is based on years of running up to 100 miles per week aerobically, in _elementary school_. This is Lydiard-style training. The best runners in the world train empirically; science merely tries, with very mixed success, to explain why it works.

For the individual athlete, the lab is the body, and the gauge of the "rightness" of training is the instrument by which the body speaks to us: the calm, intuitive feelings of the heart.

Ross, Thanks for posting this. I've had the oppor...

2009-10-28T16:30:14.218+02:00

Ross,

Thanks for posting this. I've had the opportunity to work in a number of settings where scientists and coaches are supposedly working together for the benefit of the athlete. In reality it's usually an unhappy marriage!

For mine, the issue is a partially legitimate pride and prejudice on the part of both parties:

The scientists are prejudiced against the coaches because their conclusions are based on gut feelings that come from general observations over a long period of time.

The coaches are (legitimately)prejudiced because the scientific perspective comes from making conclusions based on studies that work with folks (sometimes 'real' athletes, often not) over very short periods of time in the context of real world athlete development.

Neither of these are likely to change with the financial and bureacratic constraints that come with scientific studies but this is a problem not of the scientific method but of the nature of how science is supported. When it comes to application of the scientific method, the best coaches in the world are as accomplished as any 'white coat' out there :-)

Best regards,

Alan Couzens, MS (Sports Science)
Exercise Physiologist/Coach
Endurance Corner
alan@endurancecorner.com
http://www.endurancecorner.com/ac_blog

Very interesting and thought provoking..... with s...

2009-10-28T14:54:13.210+02:00

Very interesting and thought provoking..... with scientific training... the sportsmen would do a lot better....it seems to me that one area that science can have a real and immediate impact on coaching. keep posting. Will be visiting back soon.

Science hardly ever "proves" that one thing is bet...

2009-10-28T02:16:59.646+02:00

Science hardly ever "proves" that one thing is better than another when it comes to coaching. The area is so complex that one study hardly ever is so good that everyone says "boy, I need to start doing that."

However, it seems to me that one area that science can have a real and immediate impact on coaching is if research shows that something the coach is doing is detrimental to performance. Time is the enemy of every athlete and if a coach can be shown that with his practices he is likely wasting athlete's time or substantially increasing injury risk for no performance benefit, he is likely to say "Boy, I need to stop doing that."

I believe science and empiricism have to go hand i...

2009-10-28T01:35:23.938+02:00

I believe science and empiricism have to go hand in hand to get the most progress. At times, science can evaluate the best input parameters to obtain a certain result. But other times, because of the willingness of a coach to try unexplored possibilities, empiricism can end up suggesting science in what direction to look. It's up to both coaches and sport scientist to get the best out of both.

Dr. Tucker, Great post about a crucial issue. I'm...

2009-10-27T16:35:11.258+02:00

Dr. Tucker,

Great post about a crucial issue. I'm looking forward to the follow-up threads.

In my experience, the key to evaluating information - and more broadly, to improving practice through science - is to be disciplined enough to first consider the right questions; and then take a "best practices" approach to finding the answers. Best practices, in turn, takes us to a place that's principled as well as evidence-based - two extraordinary things to be.

This implies a few things that help put science into perspective for practitioners:

* Spell out a set of principles that you have enough conviction in to write down, post in plain view for all to see, and explain in terms a child could understand.

* Consider the body of evidence.

* Embrace the concept of levels of evidence.

That's the short version. Here's a longer one, from an article along the same lines posted on our site last month:
http://excelsiorsports.blogspot.com/2009/09/science-professional-practice.html

Best regards,

Steven Plisk
Excelsior Sports
Shelton CT (USA)

I wrote: "Certainly, none of the many chartered e...

2009-10-27T16:16:44.998+02:00

I wrote:

"Certainly, none of the many chartered engineers or the mathematicians of my acquaintance ..."

That's an exaggeration, of course. Should more precisely have written:

"Certainly, not many of the many chartered engineers or the mathematicians of my acquaintance ..."

Very interesting, and as always thought provoking....

2009-10-27T15:38:02.727+02:00

Very interesting, and as always thought provoking.

Through many years of learning about physics and philosophy, then teaching physics, chemistry and mathematics; and of trying to compete more effectively as an adult in running races from 3k to the marathon, I've been obliged to try to wrestle with the differences between empiricism, science and technology, and of course sports coaching.

Space prevents my full response here, but here's my take on empiricism and science (leaving technology and coaching aside for the moment) after the last forty years or so of ponderings on this and related matters:

Empiricism is the philosophical school which in this context, in a nutshell, argues that the collected data is paramount. When I was young and studying physics at school and university, I confess that I was very much a theoretician and not an empiricist. In fact, I intensely disliked lab work, as much for the straightforward reason that the experiments usually failed to work out the way the way they were supposed to! (A common problem for school and undergraduate physics the world over I suspect). Only much, much later did the importance of the raw data slowly dawn on me- data which could be transformed into a chunk of information, which in turn could be, sometimes, massaged further to add to, or confirm one’s stock of “knowledge”, or most excitingly suggest that the prevailing paradigm was wrong – see Kuhn etc for more on this.

So-called "scientific objectivity", I realised eventually, is really inter-subjectivity: the property of any given, well conducted experiment, which tests the truth value of an “If ... then” statement (a hypothesis), which allows the experimental data gleaned from that experiment to be reproduced again and again, by different observers at different times and places, within the experimental uncertainties inherent in the collection of any data set.

It’s of course quite easy to be scientific in this sense in physics. It’s much less easy to be scientific, in the definition I have suggested, in any field of enquiry that involves animals, including Homo. This is in part because once one tries to experiment on animals, there is an ethical dimension that the physicist usually doesn’t need to worry about. Secondly, reproducibility of the gathered data can easily become problematic with Homo and other animals. For example, whilst it might be fairly easy for an experimentalist to ask Bolt to run say, ten, 100m repeats each in say between 11.00 and 12.00 seconds, with a fifteen minute recovery between each one, it becomes somewhat trickier were Bolt to have to run the same number of repeats between say 9.8s and 10.00s under the same conditions.

Consequently, I would argue that sports science is not science in the same sense that physics is science. Rather, I would argue, even at the most fundamental level of sports science research, there are all sorts of methodological issues affecting the inter-subjectivity and repeatability of the raw data, that thankfully, physics researchers don’t have to think about!

There are other issues too to do with the over-simplistic way that data is often reported. By this I mean that every datum has a spread of values – an error that is the datum’s uncertainty. The uncertainty for each datum is estimated from the data and from the limitations inherent in one’s data collection equipment and from the limitations inherent in the human observer. In physics, the uncertainty in each datum is of CRUCIAL SIGNIFICANCE to the significance of the experimental outcome.

Few outside experimental physics recognise the importance of estimating the uncertainty for each and every datum in one's data set. Certainly, none of the many chartered engineers or the mathematicians of my acquaintance have ever been able to “get” the importance of plotting not discrete points in one’s graphs, but rather horizontal and vertical error bars through which one then (before computers, subjectively) draws one's best curvilinear lines (not line) of fit.