We have known and worked with Dave Martin since the early 90′s both at the AIS and though our work with Australian Cycling. I have to say that it’s always been an absolute pleasure working with him. He is one of those rare individuals who not only has brilliant ideas, but can artfully articulate them and inspire people to get behind them and make great things happen. We caught up with him recently and discussed a range of topics relating to athlete monitoring in elite sport, specifically Australian Cycling but we touched on other sports as well.

Hope you enjoy them.

Guest Post By Paul Montgomery

Methods for monitoring using Kinetic-Athlete

In 2008 , Kinetic Pty Ltd developed the Kinetic-Athlete program on the back of their well-developed GymAware platform. I have been using the system since its inception; on broader terms the system is comprehensive enough to store injury data and associated reports and scans, but I will only focus on the experiences I have had in the day to day use for monitoring. I have found some key aspects that create a seamless use of the data.

Daily monitoring of key muscle groups greatly enhances our understanding of the state of the athlete. Note the increased soreness reported after games(green bands)

Monitor daily

To ensure a comprehensive profile can be established for the individual and/or team, it is best to obtain data on a daily basis. This is critical for understanding responses at the micro- and meso-cycle levels; you need to be aware of the acute responses to daily and weekly training loads, but also a degree of longitudinal perspective of the chronic responses to training and cumulated competition, so post game data on the next day is critical to give resolution to a range of loads, from easy sessions through to competition. KA has a useful trend function that can be applied to any time period, and this allows you and the athlete to visualize these chronic responses.

Building this comprehensive database will also help with statistical inferences at the individual and group levels. The ability to monitor daily is very simple for players who you may not see every day, or when you’re team or athletes are traveling as the KA app allows questions to be completed and uploaded to the server from any location. Once it’s on the server you can do your own post processing by exporting the data.

Target key muscle groups for feedback

This may be very specific for each sport, but the critical component in running based team sports is minimizing soft tissue injury risk. Obviously the main locomotor muscle groups would be highlighted, but also including a question for shins may pick early stress response signs before they evolve into a stress fracture.

Ask wellness and lifestyle questions

Drilling down to those areas impacting on stress and wellbeing is a critical element in the monitoring process. Understanding these areas allows the practitioner to intervene with the appropriate action. It’s too simplistic to say “Jimmy is stressed today..” but much more useful to know:

• How long has he been stressed?
• Has the magnitude of the stress changed?
• How is the stress correlating with other indices such as sleep?

These are questions that can be answered from an appropriate monitoring platform, and then the intervention can be developed over and above a response that may be “get him to the sport psych..” That is an important component, but feedback to the coach may recommend that Jimmy be given a week away from the club environment, or sent interstate for a night or two to see family and friends. This psychological rejuvenation is critically underestimated in many organizations, and can be highlighted by answering questions related to stress, sleep, motivation, coping and general fatigue.

Educate athletes on the benefits of concise reporting

Players will often see the monitoring as a waste of their time, having little consequence to their daily routines or performance, this could not be further from the truth. The approach I have taken is to educate the players about how small changes and their responses can provide critical information to medical staff. Once they understand that it’s better to indicate a small change in soreness, rather than try to tough it out, may cost them one training session, but that’s better than missing 4-6 weeks and losing your spot on the team over a soft tissue injury that could have been managed early.

Question structure

The KA program has the flexibility to structure question answers in several formats. The numerical format which appears as a drop down list on the forms is the most effective when classifying muscle soreness. Individual preferences will dictate the use of a 5, 10 or 20 point scale, while in some other software systems there is only a yes/no check box of soreness. This makes it simple, but I would question the utility of such a process when you are looking for acute changes. A 5 point scale appears easy to administer with fewer anchors (response statement or descriptor) for each number; the 10 point scale similar to the Borg CR-10 is my preference as I think it provides more resolution to the linear increases in soreness. Not all numbers need an anchor, which enhances the resolution as a player can select a value between responses. Recently, Laurent et al. proposed a Perceived Recovery Status scale similar to the Borg CR-10 to subjectively assess an individual’s level of recovery (i.e. poorly recovered to very recovered) in relation to exercise performance; this aspect also allows direct correlations to training when a similar scale is used to determine training intensity.

Applying statistical analysis to interpret changes

Thorough practitioners will apply a reliability test to their monitoring to check the accuracy of responses between similar sessions. Progressive sports statistics now use magnitudes and smallest worthwhile change to determine significant variation; complete explanations, examples and templates can be found at http://sportsci.org/resource/stats/index.html. Once these parameters have been developed, then the data can be manipulated and assessed to determine if acute changes between days or after training sessions are above the typical response for an individual, above that expected for the group, or greater than the previous day. The data now becomes very powerful in determining the next course of action for individuals – train on, train less or don’t train, and the medical team can treat accordingly.

In the next post we will explore way in which all data from GymAware or training loads can be correlated with the monitoring data to provide a complete assessment of training readiness due to physical and physiological fatigue.

Laurent CM GJ, Bishop PA, Sjökvist J, Schumacker RE, Richardson MT, Curtner-Smith M. A practical approach to monitoring recovery: development of a perceived recovery status scale. J Strength Cond Res. 2011. 25(3): p. 620-8

See all of Paul’s articles here

Paul Montgomery is a sports science professional with extensive experience in team sport monitoring, management and rehabilitation. Having completed a PhD in exercise science related to team sport demands and 5 years with AFL club St Kilda. Paul has worked with the development of several sports technologies for team sport, including GPS, accelerometers.

As an early adopter of Kinetic-Athlete, Paul’s knowledge and expertise has proved invaluable in the development of the system for use in the AFL environment. 

Athlete Monitoring – Conception to Application

Quantifying and Understanding the Physiological Demands of Sport

Athlete monitoring has become an area of high interest and development over the past years as practitioners increase their efforts to understand psycho-physiological responses to sporting demands. If the demands of a sport are known, and the athlete responses to those demands are quantified and understood, then there is an expectation that appropriate action can be taken in the areas of musculoskeletal recovery, metabolic regeneration, and psychological rejuvenation to maintain training capacity and hence competition performance.

The key for the practitioner or sport scientist is identifying which parameters are important and quantifying the change in both the short, and medium term training plan.

Practical considerations

When daily responses from team sport athletes regarding their competition related soreness, fatigue and wellness are required, the investigation tool needs to be easy to administer and time efficient for both the athlete and the practitioner collating data. Questions need to be unambiguous in relation to soreness of specific muscle groups and have responses that indicate the type, and effectiveness of recovery for various psycho-physiological parameters. The most comprehensive assessment tool for determining athlete recovery is the Recovery-Stress Questionnaire for Athletes (RESTQ-Sport). However the extensive nature of the test is not applicable for daily assessments.

Indeed, there are many programs available that use a range of parameters to quantify an athlete’s training or competition readiness down to a single number. Although this seems appealing from a practical point, in reality there are many factors which contribute to pshyco-physiological preparation. The key for the practitioner or sport scientist is identifying which parameters are important and quantifying the change in both the short, and medium term training plan.

Creating A Performance Culture in Team Sports

Paramount in the daily management of your athletes is the understanding of the demands from training and competition, and how players respond to, and recover from these demands in preparation for the subsequent week’s training and competition. Indeed the next competition for some sports may be within 2-4 days, contributing to the overall demands and limiting the opportunity for optimal recovery and regeneration. The combined art and science in regard to managing this aspect is a skill attributed to the elite conditioning practitioners. Within team sport for example, one of the primary aims is to keep player availability as high as possible, this ensures healthy competition between players for selection, and that the best players are available for the greatest chance of team success. The importance of this management was insightfully shown by Gabbett and Jenkins. Although this work was in rugby league, the outcomes showed that increases in training load can have detrimental effects on injury rates. Additionally, Coutts et al. proposed that the 72 hour period following a rugby league game is critical for ensuring appropriate recovery for the next game, and small doses of additional training during this period can negatively influence performance. Therefore careful control of training load and periodization is essential, but also identifying risk in the post competition phase is equally important for understanding how athletes are tolerating the total exercise demand.

In future posts we will look at methods for monitoring using the KineticAthlete program, integrating KineticAthlete and GymAware data, the use of flag systems, question and form structure, and analysis and interpretation.

Coutts AaR, P. Monitoring changes in rugby league players’ perceived stress and recovery during intensified training. Percept Mot Skills. 2008. 106(3): p. 904-16.

Gabbett T, Jenkins, DG. Relationship between training load and injury in professional rugby league players. J Sci Med Sport. 2011. 14(3): p. 204-9.

Kallus K, Kellman, M. The Recovery Stress questionaire for coaches. in IXth European Congress on Sport Psychology in Brussels. 1995. Brussels: FEPSAC/Belgian Federation of Sport Psychology.

See all of Paul’s articles here.

Do you know the current training state of your team? Are they in:

• Full Training
• Modified Training
• Rehabilitation
• Rest Day

Daily Training State

On a daily basis this information is essential, as it tells you instantly what’s going on with your team, even if they are spread around the world. Armed with this information, you can plan your day based on the state of the team.

This information is available to you as soon as it has been entered by you, another staff member, or the athlete. Its all in the dashboard of your mobile device.

Monthly Training State

On a monthly basis its even more valuable. A full training training status report at the end of the month tells you a lot about the state of your team:

• How much full training was achieved
• How many days were lost to illness or injury
• Is the team getting enough rest
• How many athletes are compliant in their monitoring

  

View the full report pdf  file here.

How Do I Get the Training Status Report?

Its very easy for you to start monitoring training state. Just contact us and we’ll set it all up as part of your Kinetic-Athlete account. You can set up any training states you need, they’re fully customisable.

When its set up your athletes will see this button on their iPhones or you, as performance manger, will see it on your device to enter when you see the athletes.

Then to enter training state you just need to select the state.

Once you start collecting training state then you are good to go. You will receive updates in your dashboard and you’ll be able to produce training state reports with the reporting tool.

Contact us if you would like to try it out.

New in 1.7

The new app is available now on the App Store.

Check out some of the new features in this release. Click on the pics below for full size screen shots.

This is a great time saver as you only need to enter the type and duration once. Then you just select each athlete to enter their rating.

Need to add an athlete on the fly? No problem you can update athlete details or add new athletes from your iPhone or iPad. Athletes can also update their own details so you don’t need to chase them up.

Some users were accidentally creating multiple entries. This dialog will pop up to make sure the user is doing what they intend to do.

Illnesses and injuries typically require more than one day to recover. This is why these types of events need to be opened at the beginning and then closed when the athlete recovers. You can now do this very simply with a tap of a button on your iPhone.

Improve compliance with a personal message to motivate the athletes that are not meeting their monitoring obligations.

Now you can see new comments right on the dashboard. Simple and effective communication.

See your answers as you progress through the form. It’s a small thing but it makes a big improvement in usability.

No iPhone? No problem!

You can now log in with any mobile phone web browser to access a simple mobile interface to enter your data. When you log in just select either tablet or mobile entry after entering your password.

New login for Android smart phones and tablets

Simple Faster Data Entry

The new mobile interface uses HTML5 mobile browsing features to give you a streamlined screen to enter your data.

Browser Compatibility Tip

If you are having any problems interacting with the new interface it may be a problem with the browser you are using. You can always try a different one to see which one works best on your phone. Here is a list of the top 5 browsers.

Give Us Your Feedback

This is just version 1. Help us make it work for you. Contact us with any feedback, bug reports etc.

Is there a tool that does everything you want? With easy data collection and all the reporting and analysis methods you need?

If you are at the top end of sport then the answer has to be “No, of course not!” If there was, then we would have a level playing field with no place for innovation. We can’t build a tool that does everything simply because everything hasn’t been done yet. If you are a sports performance specialist then you will be constantly refining and developing your craft. You are in constant competition with your peers on other teams and your success is measured by results. Many of you are happy to share your successes with us so that we can adapt Kinetic Athlete to support the way you work. This is a two way transaction that helps you by speeding up your work and helps us by targeting our development.

By speeding up your day to day work, you get more time to spend on being innovative, more time to spend on beating the opposition! In order to try out new things you need to have easy access to all of your data so that you can manipulate it in Excel or your favourite stats package. We encourage our users export and experiment with their data and have provided a powerful export tool that gives you precise control of the data you want, from when, and how you want it formatted. If you are into Excel then this is the tool for you.

We encourage our users export and experiment with their data and have provided a powerful export tool for this.

Build kinetic Athlete into your performance program by branding it with your own logo.

Your logo adds a professional touch and gives athletes ownership. It makes them feel like they have a full support team behind them. It’s just one of the little things you can do that has a significant impact on the image your performance team projects to the athletes.

Contact us if you would like to brand your Kinetic Athlete app with your logo. For a small fee we will incorporate your logo into a design for the sync screen. Then we will load it on to the server so that then next time your athletes sync they will get the screen automatically downloaded and installed on their iPhone or iPad. It’s that simple!

We are very pleased to announce this major release of the Kinetic Athlete iOS app. This release incorporates dozens of user requested features and enhancements. The new features give you more access to your data and more ways to customise the way you collect it. On top of the list is the new athlete dashboard. This powerful new tab on the bottom of your screen gives you instant access to the information you need about your athletes.

Well have a lot more about this new tool in the coming weeks.

There also a whole lot of ways you can drill into your data to really see what’s going on with your team.

Get in touch with us

Existing users wanting help in setting up the new features can call us now!

Quick Overview of the new features in V 1.6

Personalised Sync page Own the application by putting your team logo on the sync page – contact us!

Form incomplete A list of players that have not submitted feedback today -select them and enter results.

Training state Groupings See who is in “Full training”, “Modified training”, Rehabilitation, or who is having a rest day - select a player and view their recent history.

Alerts Now in the dashboard with drill down so you can see all the data leading up to the alert.

Training load For each player – calculated from intensity x duration - Select a player and view a graph of the training load for past few weeks ( requires active internet connection)

Illness’s Any current players with illness’s are grouped and listed – you can elect to close the illness should the player be recovered -click the player to view the details of the illness.

Injuries any current players with injuries are grouped and listed – you can elect to close the injury should the player be recovered - click the player to view the details of the illness.

NOTE: Both injury and illness events now stay open (active)- so once an injury or illness is entered, it will say there until it is actively closed.
this differs form the previous method in that the injury or illness had to be re-entered each day

Comments Any comment in the past 24hrs from players within the squad display here - coaches can select the players with a comment and elect to reply to the comments, The coaches reply can be viewed by the player directly on their iphone via their individual login.

Medical notes Any players that have recent medical notes added with display in a list here.

History Coaches can select a player from the squad list and view the recent history for them. This section lists and displays all the key events and entries about the player for the past few weeks
Coaches can select a feedback form for example, then select a question and drill into it to view a graph. This feature is also available for training load and body mass entries
( requires active internet connection)

Dash Attachments Files can be sent to your dashboard or the athletes for viewing on the device, great for programmes and reports.

Muti-select option You can now set up fields to be multi select – greater flexibility in recording all the information you need

All events configurable You now have all the flexibility you need, everything is configurable!

We recently spoke to one of our clients about the relative value of objective vs subjective athlete monitoring. They currently have a strong focus on objective performance monitoring (using GymAware) but they had a number of reservations about the value of subjective athlete monitoring.

Their reservations centred around using athlete reported (subjective) information to dictate what the athlete should be doing or not doing in their training and competition.

Their concern was that athletes could misreport to gain rest days, softer training or other benefits.

Subjective feedback ..Naturally people look for the easiest path…Nobody wants to take the hard road… But the hard road is where you create your success. No short cuts.. Man up and train hard, it’s going to hurt and we expect you to feel sore…

We agree. If all you do is subjective monitoring and you base all your decision making on this data, then there is a high risk of athletes learning to ‘game the system’ to get what they want.

But when you add the skill and experience of your performance team in to the mix, you get a different story. Then subjective monitoring can be effectively combined with objective performance tests (power, sit and reach, sprint times, etc) observations and athlete contact to get a far bigger picture. Experienced staff will quickly identify athletes trying to game the system and will take action to correct ‘attitude problems’

Sports professionals use subjective monitoring to inform their decisions - not to make them!

Where Subjective Data is Valuable

Think about some of these reported results:

Poor sleep last night – no big deal

Poor sleep for last 5 nights and high level of perceived fatigue  - Hmm, could be a problem here, better go and talk to the athlete for see what’s up.

Athlete reporting soreness after hard training session – good! that’s what we wanted!

Athlete reporting increasing soreness over 5 days despite recovery sessions – Not so good, better look into possible causes and maybe modify training.

In all these cases there is no “get out of training free card”. Instead the performance team are given a quick snapshot of how the athlete is travelling, then depending on where they are in the training program, they can decide if any action needs to be taken.

Athlete monitoring is a tool for sports performance professionals.

Its primary purpose is to enhance communication and to inform decision making.