Seattle Sounders Sports Science Weekend: Building the Anti-Fragile Athlete: Dave Tenney
I just came back from the Seattle Sounders 2014 Sports Science Weekend on Building the Anti-Fragile Athlete, and if I can get my you-know-what in gear, I will share a little bit about each of the presentations, which overall were excellent. The first one, by Sounders Performance Manager Dave Tenney, presented a general overview of where the concept of Building an Anti-Fragile athlete came from (too many games lost to injury), what lessons we can learn from the most anti-fragile industries (airlines and nuclear power), and if we can in fact take a fragile athlete and change him into one that is injury resistant (it appears so).
They're happy because we don't make the same mistake twice.
In the field, the Sounders recognized for being at the forefront of obtaining and analyzing sport and performance data on recovery, nervous system readiness, relationships between injuries and compliance with certain initiatives, sleep, distances travelled by athletes and the types of loads the athletes experience. Two metrics jumped out at me.
One was that they are able to measure is what is termed ‘velocity load’ vs. ‘body load’. This is where the technology available is again astounding me. Not only are they using GPS to measure the distance that each athlete is covering during games and practices, but they are also measuring the nature of those distances. ‘Velocity load’ represents linear movement (sprinting downfield, for example), is extensor dominant, and is more common during a regular game situation. Body loads represent changes in direction. They tend to underload the posterior chain, and occur with greater frequency during small sided games. Once they have this data, they can analyze it to gain insight into the musculoskeletal stresses on individual athletes.
Another interesting metric was sleep data. They use monitors to track what time their athletes go to be each night, when they get up, and how much tossing and turning they do. Dave noted that the most consistently high performers in their club are the ones that sleep the best, not only in terms of number of hours and regularity, but in quality as well. The average times two of their best athletes went to bed? 9:44 and 10:15 pm. I'll now plug my article 'The best thing I did for my mornings' in the Clients and Patients section.