Rugby League Coaching Manuals

Conventional “mainstream” Science and medicine are driven by the need to balance accuracy with time.

In other words, a scientist working to create new medicines to help cure serious illness is trying to balance the need for urgency (i.e. the faster he / she can create a new medicine to cure the illness, the more lives may be saved), with the need to meet the scientific conventions of accuracy, validity and reliability.

The nature of scientific and medical research demands the highest possible standards in safety and certainty and as such, both industries are conservative and cautious in research and practice.

Sports science is not about saving lives. It’s about helping athletes to win. It’s about improving training programs. It’s about enhancing athletic performance. And as such, the need for the standards traditionally applied to mainstream science and medicine do not apply in the sporting world.

Sports science sort of grew out of the science and medicine departments of the University system. Lecturers and researchers in the university system then applied the standards for accuracy, validity and reliability from their “world” to the elite sporting “world”- without really understanding the nature of high performance sport and the need for speed in accelerating sports performance.

So why is sports science different?

We are not splitting the atom. We are not curing cancer or heart disease. We are just trying to accelerate the rate of performance improvement in athletes. Sports scientists working in elite sport need to overcome their need to seek scientific credibility and respect from the Academic sector and just focus on getting the job done - in the shortest possible time - with athletes and coaches.

Sports scientists working with elite athletes - particularly those working in Academies and Institutes of Sport, should NOT have the need to publish articles in refereed journals in their position descriptions or in the KPIS. The Academic world is driven by the Publish or Perish paradigm - elite sport is driven by winning and performance.

Therefore the performance of sports scientists working in high performance sports environments needs to be tied to performance outcomes not publication listings.

Evidence based means TIME. And time is something elite sport does not have. The evidence based process demands a lot of time to ensure high levels of accuracy, quality control, safety, consistency of product (e.g. medicines). High performance means doing it now - it means finding a competitive edge today.

Medicine demands confidence limits of 0.01 - it’s all about safety, safety, and safety. Science demands confidence limits of 0.05 - reliability, validity, and accuracy. Sports science demands confidence limits of 0.50 - in other words - evaluate the research, look at the data then use your experience, instinct and intuition to make an intelligent, calculated judgement call.

As a sports scientist, ask the coach you are working with, “would you like the information 100% accurate in six months or 70% accurate in five minutes?” - no prizes for guessing what they would say.

High performance Coaching is about taking risks. You take some risks, you learn, you grow and you get a performance edge over your competition. The bigger the risk - the bigger the potential rewards.

If high performance coaches waited for their ideas, informed guesses, instinctive decisions and experience based risks to go through the evidence based process, progress and performance acceleration in all sports would be stifled.

The time has come for a fundamental shift in the way we do business - i.e. in the way sports scientists, athletes, coaches, elite sports institutions and universities do what they do.

Sports science has over promised and under delivered in high performance sport and it is largely due to the sports science community’s obsession for scientific credibility and the outdated drive to publish data in refereed journals.

If you want scientific credibility, if you want respect from the Academic world, if you want to be known by the number of publications…..go and work for a University. Or a research institute.

If you are about performance, if you want to push the limits of what’s possible, if you have an innovative mind that seeks to solve performance problems, if you want to work with high performance coaches and athletes and be respected as an equal partner in their quest for winning….then you have to think and act differently.