🏃‍♀️ Using data to identify patterns for athlete success

What’s up y’all? Cici here.

Welcome back to More Her Speed, a weekly no-BS newsletter all about women in coaching.

Starting off Strong

This week as we continue to map out our process for the upcoming NFL draft prep period, we have been really hammering home what the first week of training will look like.

Which tests will we administer to the athletes? How are we going to profile/bucket the athletes?

How are we going to manage the data?

We were lucky enough to have Drake Berberet from Hawkin Dynamics give us some free game about force plates and specifically how we can better incorporate some of those tests into our monitoring and programming.

We’ve narrowed down our testing panel to a series of countermovement jumps, rebound test, and a few isometric push tests to gather some metrics regarding power, force, and asymmetries.

It’s always nice spending time with people who are smarter than you, so learning from Drake was a great experience.

Patterns, patterns, patterns

Speaking of Drake, check out this tweet of his that mentions how we can use data to identify similarities and patterns in successful athletes.

Competition is a key factor in any sport… so we love utilizing leaderboards and data visualization to make the data more digestible to the athletes.

It also adds an extra competitive bonus for performance.

Our team uses an “outcomes, drivers, and strategies” approach to dictate which pieces of our programs are drivers to a specific outcome.

Drivers being what we are measuring, strategies meaning how we get there, and outcomes referring to the consequence or end result.

For example in a countermovement jump… jump height and jump momentum would be an output (how much an athlete can produce). Whereas, time to takeoff would be a strategy - how the athlete gets there.

One metric we got more familiar with is propulsion net impulse-which would be a strategy.

This measurement explains how powerful and for how long the athlete pushed before the actual takeoff.

We can also gather take-off velocity with this measurement with respect to body weight. Take-off velocity is directly related to jump height, so it provides feedback in multiple categories.

Hawkin does a great job at putting out educational resources that we can all learn a thing or two from.

Quote of the Week

“Whatever you're going through in your life, don't ever give up.”

-Mariah Carey

Appreciate y’all,

Cici

See you again next week!

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