I believe people make assumptions because I'm a woman that potentially I don't have much to say or I don't, I wouldn't be able to make the right decision. I think the one that frustrates me, the most is when someone meets me, the first comment is, "Oh, what do you do? The dietician?" And that is, it's fine once, twice, but after about the 30th time and it starts to get to you, or the other one is the misuse. And look, that's nothing against dieticians or misuses, but it's never, "I need the head of performance." Welcome to the PASY Performance Podcast. The podcast that dives into the philosophies, ideas and practices of some of the best practitioners in high performance spa. Firstly, I do feel better than I sound. Justin Faction has taken me down these last few weeks, but I'm delighted to get Carmen on this episode of the PASY Performance Podcast. And if anyone wants to check out Carmen's LinkedIn profile, you'll see an incredible list of organisations over the last five or six years from the AIS in Australia. So Brumy's rugby, Brisbane Broncos, Fildelfie 76s and more recently with Perth Glory in Australian soccer, in Australian football. So what a journey over the last few years, it's exactly this journey that I want to speak to Carmen about, but as well as that, I want to have a little touch on some of the things that Carmen is passionate about, and that's recovery and earthly monitoring. And we dive into those two areas. So recovery periodization, recovery during congested periods of fixtures, which Carmen is very afraid with having worked in the MBA, and then earthly monitoring, so external load, internal load, how we actually combine these two areas of athlete monitoring to make sense and communicate to cultures as best way possible. So a really interesting episode coming up this week with Carmen. This episode of the PASY Performance Podcast is sponsored by Rewire Fitness. Mental fitness is quickly becoming a hot topic in our industry as we've found on recent episodes of the podcast, but what are you doing to develop the mental fitness of your athletes? Rewire Fitness is a mental fitness platform that helps athletes reach their full potential and avoid burnout by providing integrated tools to holistically improve readiness, recovery and resilience. Their patented technology features protocols from neuroscience, psychology, physiology, and beyond providing a holistic approach to human performance. So Rewire has been backed by some of the biggest names in sport like Undorama, who invested in their first investment round, and Kyle Kova, MBA Oldstar, who spent 17 seasons in the league. Make mental wellness and cognitive performance a priority amongst your athletes today, and to learn more to set up a demo, head to rewirefitness.app/paisy. That's P-A-C-E-Y. And also sponsoring this episode is Hydro. Have you ever tried Bloodflow Restriction for recovery? Hydro has developed the world's first BFR wearable unlocking the recovery benefits of BFR to sport athletes. BFR is no longer just for one-on-one Fizzur rehab. Hydro allows teams to use this safe and scalable sports BFR device post-exercise to dramatically enhance recovery. So whether in the changing room post game during a way game travel in the hotel or at home, Hydro has created a simple and effective tool to allow BFR to be delivered to athletes and squads simultaneously, safely, and more conveniently than ever before. Check them out at Hydro.com or email Warren on
[email protected] to find out how Hydro BFR can give your athletes a competitive edge. And this episode is also sponsored by Hawking Dynamics. Hawking Dynamics is the world's first wireless force plate testing system. The Hawking Dynamics system is built for coaches to test in the real world, not just in the lab. Capture reliable data on all your athletes in a matter of minutes and monitor their progress in the cloud from anywhere in the world. The Hawking Dynamics Force plates are wireless, portable and trusted by teams every level of sport. Integrating Force plates into your athlete monitoring program has never been easier or more affordable. If you want to see the Hawking Dynamics Force plate system in action, head over to their website hawkingdynamics.com to schedule a demo or for them on Twitter at Hawking Dynamics. So without further ado, over to the episode with Cameron. Cameron Colmer welcomed the Paystri Performance Podcast. It's a pleasure to have you. Thanks so much Rob. It's a pleasure to be here. No thank you for coming on. Add a little stock of your LinkedIn just before we just before we came on and press record. It's been quite a unbelievable last few years for you. Davin around the world, lots of different roles, lots of exciting organisations to work for. Yeah, I have definitely switched codes a few times and I had a lot of experiences which has been really great for my development and obviously been pretty exciting as well. What was the sport when you were coming through undergraduate, masters etc? What was the sport that you wanted to work in? Look, I always liked rugby unions. Growing up my family's French. So we're always following France and then the World Cup and the rugby World Cup and in my undergrad I, you know, when we had to design fake research studies, I always use rugby union as an example and then I was lucky enough in my masters to actually get a placement at the Melbourne Rebels in the Super rugby competition at the time. So pretty lucky with that. And PhD in rugby union as well, is that right? That's right. So it's a complex systems analysis in rugby union which is, it tells a bit more. Essentially it's looking at my, so the idea of systems thinking, so basically how patterns evolve on the field. So I'm looking at tactical patterns at how the players are moving, managed to do a big data trade with the other Australian teams and we swapped our data so that way we can look at the opposition as well because I think if you're thinking in systems you need to think about what the opposition is doing as well. So looking at potentially attacker and defender diets, so how the players are moving in relation to each other and then also in relation to the team itself. And so published my review and my first study in that I've just got two more studies to publish there which is a little bit more analytical using some machine learning as well and hopefully still I've gotten there yet with all the results but hopefully some interesting insights into how players adapt their behaviour in relation to the opposition, team strategy, and certain contextual factors such as phase of play, also the weather, how that can impact team tactics as well and so on. Does that make it a little bit harder now that you're not working in RubyUnion? I was at my no difference. To finish my PhD, you mean? Yeah. Not really, so I've already collected all my data so I finished data collection back in 2019. So I still have all that data and I still very much enjoy watching RubyUnion so I'm still invested in that sense and still using a lot of the footage and the KPIs and so on that from that period there when I was with them. So that was with with Brombee's rugby again in the Super rugby competition at the time. So I still closely linked with my time there. I've played Jump Past, I mentioned you linked in but I've played Jump Past, the intricate sense of what's in there. Would you mind just give us a bit of a brief background on you, Kamen, if that's alright? Yeah, sure. So I started normal staff under grads when I was there, lucky enough to get an internship at the Victoria Institute of Sport. So working in physiology, main sports there were cycling, swimming and track and field, mostly with a swimming team. Which was a lot of early mornings, a lot of Saturday mornings, five o'clock in the morning, chasing the coach up and down the pool but absolutely loved it, worked with some great people there and learned so much. And then after that started my Masters High Performance Sport at ACU and as I mentioned before I was lucky enough to get to do some of my Masters research at the Melbourne Rebels. So I did an internship there and finished that in 2016 and then straight up the back of that, I managed to get a position at the Australian Institute of Sport as a Presgraduate Scholars. So it's a year-long position working in physiology. I absolutely loved my time there. Kamen was a great place, a really good place for sport and I'm just a great place to live as well. And again worked with some absolutely amazing people at Australian Institute of Sport and then off the back of that luckily.
and often very conveniently managed to secure a PhD at Sprungbees Rugby, which was literally next door to the AIS. So I ended up staying in Canberra for another few years and that was under the guidance of Ben Cepel, who's now actually at Chalon Cats. So he's still my supervisor and probably I would say my mentor and has always been a really someone that I've looked up to and always go to for advice. So and then in 2020 I was contacted by someone at the Brisbane Bronco, so Paul Devlin, his head of performance at the time and he asked if I was interested in a role there. Ben Cepel was supportive enough and then actually encouraged me to take the position and go part time with my PhD and so moved to Brisbane and that was probably about six weeks before COVID happened. So it was off to a bit of a rocky start, didn't get to experience Brisbane as much as I'd like to, but again I love my time at the Broncos. We didn't have a great year that year performance wise, but I think it's an excellent organisation and just a really really good group of players there. And then after about a year I had been working with a physio, Simon Rice at the the Brumbies and he had managed to secure position at the 76s and a position came up there for a Dracler Sport Science and asked if I was interested and initially I wasn't too sure if I wanted to go because it's obviously quite a big move. A partner was in Australia and so on, but then in the end I said yes, so moved over to the US, that was still during COVID and did two seasons there, the 76s, loved my time there, did want to stay in a sense, but also wanted to come home to be close to my partner. I'm going to go home, not long after getting back applied for a position at Earth Glory as the head of performance thinking, oh there's no way I'll get that. I mean I've never held that position before and there aren't many women heads of performances in the world, let alone in soccer. So yeah, and then after a couple of interviews managed to get that so I started that in July of this year and you know, been here since. So I'm really interested to know, as always, I don't want to, I think it's a really important question, but I don't want to make the discussion for the next five days all about this, but I'm always interested for girls working in, for women working in male dominated industry like I was in high performance sport and the surveys that I have done in UK football in Ruby Union here in the UK and Oz and New Zealand and Ireland and Wales, it's pretty much a three or four percent of high performance staff are females. So what has it been like for you coming through that journey that you've just mentioned as a female, as a woman in this in such a male dominated environment, has it, has it been any stories good or bad that's affected you along the way? Maybe I've been really lucky, but I don't feel like I've had many negative experiences or significantly negative experiences. There are certainly times where it is frustrating because I believe people make assumptions because I'm a woman that potentially I don't have much to say or I wouldn't be able to make the right decision. I think the one that frustrates me the most is when someone meets me, the first comment is, "What do you do? Are you the dietician?" And that is, it's fine once, twice, but after about the 30th time and it starts to get to you or the other one is the misuse and look, that's nothing against dieticians or misuses, but it's never, are you the head of performance or are you the, you know, it's always just one of those two, I guess, stereotyically female dominated roles. I think the other challenges sometimes, I feel like it helps to have a little bit more of a voice than maybe you need to and that just helps to let people know that maybe you do have something to say, whereas I feel like men don't need to make a point of that so often. I guess in terms of trivial situations, you know, the big one is always, whenever you're a stadium or an arena, just trying to find a female bathroom is probably one of the most frustrating things. I think in the, the US it has gotten a lot better when they have a lot more female coaching or coaching staff, the whole change rooms and so on, whereas in Australia, I think we're still catching up and then the other trivial one is, you know, you're constantly just getting given male training kit and it's always about three or four sizes to be so, which, you know, if you're sure on the other foot, if there was a male working a female sport and you gave them an extra small women's prayer of shorts, that probably wouldn't fly so. And again, it's just, it's not something that really occurs to men in that situation, but I must say, and I'm just completely used to it now. And that said, there are some organisations that are a lot better than others and really, really do consider females and I've worked at some excellent places where I've had really positive experiences and that's at the forefront of their mind of making female comfortable in the workplace. And my last question on this before we dive into some of the technical, more technical stuff, what can organisations do, what can women do, what can men do, what can other performance practitioners do to increase that three or four percent, which is what I've found across the board. Certainly, male sport anyway, to get more women in these kind of positions that you've held or even just any high performance role and not dietician and muscles. That's a good question. I think we were speaking of line before and I mentioned that I didn't have too many role models growing up and that's not because they weren't any, but that's maybe because there wasn't as much exposure and that could be because they didn't expose themselves enough or perhaps five or six, seven years ago, social media wasn't as big as what it is now. So potentially it's the women that need to advocate for it a little bit more and maybe pave the way in a sense to women who want to be in sport. But then I think also organisations can, but then it gets a bit tricky because you don't want to have preferential treatment for women getting positions over a man. I think the position should be given to the ideal candidate with the experience and the attitude and the aptitude. But I think probably just inspiring women to pursue jobs would probably be the first area. I don't know where it came from and I've heard it quite a few times, but something like on a job description, men will need confidence in like 30% whereas women would need confidence that they can hit 80% or something like that which instantly kind of rules a lot of women out because they don't feel like they're up to the job unlike men who just took the name in the hat because they it sounds cool. So I suppose that feeds into exactly what you say in there. Exactly and I've read that too. This is a great book called Lean In and it explains a lot of that that women exactly as you say they feel like they need to meet 100% of the criteria just to apply for a job and I think if you meet 100% of criteria for any job, rugged out this review or a man or woman, then you're probably overqualified for it. I always think you should just apply for a job that's just a bit out of your reach. Look, I mean, I don't know if I should have technically been given this job because it was certainly just out of my skill set but I've learned a lot and I feel like I'm doing a pretty good job now but that's something I think maybe men would have been more inclined to apply for than women in that case. Nice. Right, let's dive into recovery. So I've published quite a few articles recently on recovery on sports myth and it's always about the gadgets. It's always about the compression gamut or new matter recovery stuff. It's always about the gadgets but when it comes to recovery, watch your general philosophy. So I think it's changed a lot. Initially, when I was talking about how I used to design you know, fake research studies, I was really big into cold water remission and I just thought, okay, you know, all we need to do is prevent the downstream effects of the inflammation and so on and all we need is cold water remission. And then when I was at the AIS, I was lucky enough to to piggyback off of someone else's PhD looking at recovery in different water remission strategies. Chronically and acutely and we found that cold water remission is probably not as as great as we think and actually hot water remotion might have superior
benefits, obviously dependent on the person and the context. From gaining experience over the last half of many years and seeing recovery done in many different contexts, what I've gone back to essentially is really the basics. So I think number one which comes before sleep and nutrition is actually what does your training program look like? Because if you're overloading the players whether it's too much game time in say basketball or someone where they're playing you know every second night or if it's in football where they're playing in the playing 80 minutes in this contacts and so on and then you've got them training two days later and so on. Then I think there's not much recovery that you could do that would negate those effects. So I'd say that's number one making sure you have a well formed training program. After that and definitely I think sleep and nutrition are the main ones. So the yes there are a lot of gadgets and so on and all these little one presenters but I believe you need to get the 90% as right first before you can start adding all that on and on saying that they're not useful, absolutely not. And I think it's easy enough, it's easier said than done with the sleep and nutrition but actually getting the athlete to do that, eat the right thing to stay in bed for a certain amount of time or to get to bed at a certain amount of time at a certain time. That's a whole different thing so however you grow about that whether it's information sessions but a lot of times it's a it's a behavior change aspect. So once you get that down then I believe you can start to put in those extra those additional modalities. Interesting thing that you said there was it's a it's a behavior change and I think that probably frames it slightly differently from me from the traditional like sports scientist, put something in place, get athletes to do it, get result. When you say behavior change that oh okay that's like a psychological aspect there's a social aspect there's this bigger kind of thing to think about than just okay what's the best gadget, what does the research say? It becomes bigger than that doesn't it? Absolutely I've actually you know initially I started reading so much about sports science and so on and it's all about systems thinking and then I actually started reading a lot more about behavioral economics and there's quite a few good books on that and there's one called Nudge which is quite good as well and I started to base a lot of things that I implemented around that so whether it's it's the the food buffet that we put on for the players I'm strategically placing items that are like in their line of view that are healthier and then I put the the less healthy stuff all the way at the end not that we're providing athletes with ridiculously unhealthy food but you know and then even and how is your whole training room set up whether that's the gym does it flow from the the locker rooms into the physio space so they do get seen by the physio no matter what and then into the gym and so on or then onto the pitch or the court so there's all these little changes you can make to actually make sure you get the desired outcome I always say does does the input match the output and by output I mean like so you could get an intern to make 20 protein checks for the players to have after a game and that's all well and good but did they actually drink them and I think that that's the key there so did the protein did the players have there you know whether it's 25 or 40 grams of protein post game that's the important thing and that's the outcome that we're looking for it's not just did we make the protein checks for the players so I think there's a huge element of this this environmental design that you can put into your practice which I put a lot into my practice to make sure that we actually get to that desired outcome so is there anything that you've done specifically for recovery on that behavior change side of things to get the outcomes that you wanted I think in a way yes so especially embassable simply just rather than asking players to to bring their compression tights to wear on the flight and you've got to think embassable that's probably where you do start to think about those 10% in in the sense that cold water immersion becomes valuable massage becomes very valuable wearing skins on plans becomes valuable and that's because you're essentially just play a recovery play recover and you know we might be playing in in LA and then we've got to get on a flight immediately post game which is probably you know one of the first things you can do for recovery especially when you're playing less than 48 hours later so we do look at those we did look at those immediate interventions and so for example um to answer your question putting the compression tights and on their bench right on top of their clothes or actually going up to them immediately post game and saying you know do you want tights and making sure as soon as they get out of the shower that they actually put them on rather than just asking them to bring them because chances are they're probably not going to bring them. It's a little bit trickier in terms of um unless you were part of building the facility it's a little bit trickier when it comes to organising the flow of everything and where the ice bars are located and so on but um then also you know like I was saying about the protein shakes and making sure they're actually drunk so again putting them directly in the players locker where they're going to sit down or maybe right next to their firing or so on. Interesting. Was there anything culturally in the US that was different from a recovery standpoint and getting athletes to do what you would feel is the most effective for them versus in Australia and the players that you work in be sport wise as well? Yeah so I can't speak for the whole US and I can't speak for a whole US and be here. I can only speak from my experience at that one team at that one time um but there were a couple of differences so in Australia I feel like we've um probably started well from from what I've seen started to favor heat a little bit more that's because of the the benefits we do get from heat and whether that's a physiological adaptation or the recovery benefits as well so whereas in the US or where I was that there definitely wasn't that emphasis there at all we had a sauna and I don't think anyone really ever used it and which is a real shame because I think you can get a lot of benefits from sauna and obviously that's always context specific and the other one was um you know in many sports in Australia especially in the football courts that I've worked in it's a lot more of you just tell the players to do something and you know the classic S&C coach stands there as all the the players are in the cold water um in the ice baths sorry and standing there with a stopwatch and saying you know four more minutes or whatnot whereas that would never ever happen in in basketball you you want to tell a 50 million dollar play to go stand in a freezing cold um bath for 15 minutes like no you have to you have to build that rapport on that trust first and they have to understand why does this benefit them and why should they do it before they're going to go and to go and jump in the ice bath would there be any times or hazard any times when you have directed things towards the gadgets for whatever reason would you ever do that as a technique to get that like you say that buy-in into certain recovery methods or not yeah I think I understand your question correctly um definitely like I think there's value in normatec breets for example and I remember maybe I was a little bit over zealous when I first got to the sixes and I thought oh you know there's this huge scope for like considering recovery is so important there because you are playing every 48 hours and you are on a plane and you're not moving for hours at a time and you're getting to bed late and not sleeping that much at all even if you're going to bed late because you still have the next morning you're training every day and um in a sense and um so I thought okay let's let's bring the normatec breets on the plane and get the players to where the plane like why aren't we doing this you know we have the resources we've got our own plane uh you know it's all first class seats it's plenty of room but then I think which is important in any in any any context whenever you go into a new environment you've got to speak to the people that have already been there and say hey what have you tried and what has worked in the past and what hasn't and so just speaking to people there you know there's a person I worked there he has been working there for I think 30 years and he said look the players like on the plane that's their time that's their time for themselves they just like to hang with the other players play cards maybe listen to music and just have some time to themselves they don't want to be bothered with normatec breets or setting something up cables everywhere or you know staff running up to them and you know whatever it might be and um and then so understanding the value of actually just letting the players have their time and that actually might have even a better effect than them wearing the normatec breets but that's not to say that there isn't a place for the for the gadgets for sure
I bet that that kind of decision of you to speak to that person that's been there a long time off or anyone to speak to someone that's been an organization long time that can make our break a practitioner's career at a particular organization. Because if you go in all guns blazing because you think you've got the right. Medellin, recovery modality, all right, recovery shake, all right, this, I'll write that when that's just not the dumb thing that can kill you can't it. Oh, absolutely. And I think I was brought in as part of change. We had a new coach who brought in a lot of new staff. And so as part of that change that my role was to change a lot of things. And I thought that's what I was going to do initially and then when I got there I realized actually that has to be a period of me just observing. I've just got to sit back and watch and see what do players naturally do, what do staff naturally do. Because of course there was still a lot of staff that had been there for a long time or a medium length of time. So what did I know about basketball? I wasn't going to come in there and tell them how things need to be done. And you know my experience was in rugby. It's not a rugby team. It's very different. So I learned that very quickly. I had had experienced that before where you do have to just observe or you do have to potentially fall in line with what was done before and then slowly, slowly once you built that trust or you have some buy-in from whether it's the staff or the players of both. That's when you can slowly start to implement and and you know maybe it's not hard and fast change but it's a it's a probing of the system and just seeing okay what happens if I do this because of course you have to be careful you can't make wholesale changes and potentially throw games so they do have to be they have to be slow burns essentially. One big question when it comes to recovery that I always have how do you monitor the effectiveness of a particular recovery modality within a group or within individual players is that something you can do is that something you try to do how do you go about that. Yeah look it's a really good question and I don't believe there's a right or wrong way to do it. I can only speak from what I've tried and then the information I know the moment and there are certainly some ways in terms of say quantitatively measuring that on a force plate for example which some people argue that it doesn't measure you know what I told you you're a muscular fatigue but that's okay if you found that in your practice with the population that you have that you do see effects of recovery intervention. Then I'd say then go for that but also I feel that there's a lot of value and just just wellness questionnaires so asking the player how they feel and if they have a good questionnaire that they they complete whether it's every training day or if it's every every day you can see that trend over time about when you do manage to implement recovery modalities or even when they they start to have a little bit more sleep or they've just started implementing a new protein shake or so on. You can potentially monitor that too. Well that's a little chat around the questionnaire, the particular questionnaire that you may run it in Perth. Is it something standard? Do you tweak anything? Do you go with like standard scientifically robust questions and how you go about it or do you make particular tweaks along the way? So it is one that I based off Aaron Kurtz's work so he's definitely being on in that space and I have adopted and adapted that a few different environments have been in and this one after reading some research and some parents on seem to fit here. So that's a seven point scale I believe we have five different areas so there's a mood area there's a sowness area sleep quality sleep quantity and for us that has worked well I have used a five point scale in the past and and this is descriptive as well it's not just numbered one to five or one to seven. I've always found the descriptions are a little bit more helpful because you know five could mean anything to someone whereas if a five is I've never been so sore on my life a play is not like as likely to hit that. Whereas if it just said five they might they might hit that when they're a bit sore and so I did change that to actually descriptive terms there. And so I found the seven point scale was just a little bit more sensitive to change. Interesting and last thing on this is there anything that you've taken directly your learnings from working in basketball to working in soccer working in football. Oh definitely in in the sense that so we're in the A league and we're the only team on the West Coast and Australia is quite large meaning that basically all our games are minimum for our flight away and in the sector for traveling to Adelaide that's only about a three hour flight away and Roy's caught crossing at least three time zones. So in basketball you're constantly traveling so you're constantly on planes you're constantly crossing time zones and so when I got the job here I made quite a few changes to the travel schedule so things excuse me that hadn't previously been done to say for example it's quite common in the football codes in Australia or at least once I've worked in where you always traveled the day before the game. You play the game stay the night and then travel afterwards but I suggested because I've seen it in basketball where players actually recover a lot better in their own beds in their own homes and for the most part they don't sleep after games not they're not going to bed you know 10 30 and probably see that like they've only finished playing the game at nine. So it actually worked a lot better when we were in travel straight off the game so I suggested that we're possible here let's try and travel straight off to the game so when we play in Adelaide for example we'll travel back after that game so long as it's not too late and we can go to flight out and we did that a few weeks ago and that worked out really well and that gives the players a whole day and home the next day because unfortunately when you fly commercial even just a three hour flight that's your whole day gone just to be able to do that. So I think it's a whole day gone just about with getting to the airport, getting on the plane then driving home from the airport and so on it's almost the whole day gone. So there were a lot of little things I picked up in terms of that that travel schedule the crossing the time zones and so on implemented a bit of light exposure so looking at okay when can we get the when should we get the guys up or when should we go out for a team walk or so on where we can actually expose ourselves to some evening long. So we can also look at the effects of crossing those time zones too so we know that it's easier to travel west than it is to travel east which obviously hurts us a lot because all we do is travel east and so and the reason it's more challenging is because you need to basically tell yourself and simplistically you need to tell yourself to go to sleep three hours earlier so you know if you've had times usually 10 o'clock now you're going to try and go to the airport. Now you're going to try and go to that at 7 o'clock. I'm sorry that's just not going to happen so you need to do what you can around that so I took a lot of my learnings from him again. I'm not saying that what we do now is perfect by any means but there was a lot that I learnt there which I've managed to implement here which has worked well so far. So I'm just going to do the staff and practitioner well being becoming such a big thing how do you manage it yourself that that travel and how do you help you staff as well manage that travel because that's tough like whether you're playing or not going across them time zones doing that every other week or every week that's that's hard on your body. Absolutely and there was something I started doing so I think in the MBA I believe players just need to bank sleep when they can and especially if we're on a late flight sometimes we wouldn't get back until 2.30 for in the morning and some players did want to sleep so I started bringing I'm asks and earplugs and big big packs of them that I could just hand out to all the players. Of course I realised that the staff were in the same boat you know we would travel with almost 40 staff and you know everyone's working just as long hours they're on the same planes they're travelling the same distances so then I started bringing enough for our staff department as well so I could hand out to them just to make sure they could bank some sleep as well. So I think that's one strategy so thinking about what you're implementing with your players and then how can you you know resource dependent of course but how can you extend that to the staff as well because if you want the best for me players you've got to make sure your staff able to bring their best to then get the best out of the players as well. And then I think the other thing is especially when you do travel so much and this is something that's done really well and embassable but it's also again very resource heavy is that all staff get their own rooms which is not very common in Australia in or again the football.
or codes I've worked and need to quickly share a room with someone else. And I think when you do travel so much, it's really important that you have your own time, whether that's just your own space. And then I think there are schedule modifications, you know, you don't need to have meetings at six in the morning with all the staff and the players aren't up till 10. So again, in basketball, they were really good at that, where we didn't really have to be at a meeting until about 9.30 in the morning. So everyone had time in the morning, whether they just wanted to go to the gym or just go for a walk, get a coffee, whatever they wanted to do. They always had time to themselves. So I think that was something that really, really helped and is a sort of sense, in a way, is self-care for staff. So it's good to go very quick break in the chat with Kam and Hope in Join Part 1. So over in Part 2, we dive into athlete monitoring. So external load monitoring, internal load monitoring. How we get buying from coaches and athletes to make sure this information that everyone's putting so much time into collecting from players to coaches and sports scientists, how we can actually make sure that is of best quality and how we can use it as best we can. So really interesting part to coming up with Kam. This episode of the Pacey Performance podcast is sponsored by Play. Play is the leader in high performance, athletic, flooring and strength equipment globally. So with offices in the US, Australia and the UK, Play provides an end-to-end experience by collaborating with organisations through their own proprietary formula to create world-class environments for coaches and athletes. Play's achieved 18mm rubber and attack turf have been the cornerstone of elite training facilities for now over a decade, with the addition of the new Icon X rack range. Play once again set to elevate the industry. On 23 April 2022, Play will be hosting their first UK lab of the year in collaboration with Loughborough University. Play will be joined by some exceptional speakers from elite sport, industry and academia with a huge breadth of knowledge experience. Listeners and supporters of Pacey Performance podcast are able to obtain an exclusive 20% discount using the code sports with 20 when registering at playercademy.com/play-labs-loughborough. And this episode is also sponsored by Kitman Labs. Kitman Labs is sports first technology company to offer a complete solution that includes innovative analytics and advanced athlete management platform that is supported by a team of sports, technology and data science experts with over 200 years experience. Kitman Labs is leading the evolution of sports performance, partnering with over 150 elite teams across the NFL, NHL, MLB, AFL, EPL and Championship rugby. Through advanced statistical analysis, rigorous scientific research and unparalleled industry experience, they've architected the world's only analytics platform that helps sports teams to truly harness their data and uncover the influences behind performance, optimization and injury risk. To find out more about Kitman Labs, visit KitmanLab.com or follow them on social media at Kitman Labs. And then we'll head back to the episode with Cameron. That's another thing to think about. Room sharing as a woman and a male dominated staff, isn't it? If you don't have single rooms and you've all guys and one girl, right, another thing to do the thing to sort. Well, I've been lucky enough that every everywhere I've worked has always been the only woman so I've never had to share a room. Happy days. Yes, so. Happy days. Yes, so that's never been too much of an issue for me. Good. Right, load monitoring. Next 20 minutes or so, the topic that you're passionate about. So it's probably got in waves, has external load monitoring of the last probably six or seven years since I've been doing the podcast. It's been like something that everyone's really, really interested in. So something that it's just like there, like we kind of with it and we don't want any more information, right? Then it comes in again and people want more information. So where do you think this particular area is going in terms of like interest in terms of kind of what's what's coming next with this kind of technology and what you're interested in? It's a really good question because yeah, I've obviously gone as similar to the trends that you mentioned, like I've gone in waves as well in terms of like, oh, this is the thing, this is what everyone needs to look at. It's all about how much distance we cover above a percentage of VMAX or something. And then I've realized that GPS or monitoring load is probably a better tool for just prescribing than it is for describing what happened. I think typically if you've been at a program long enough or if you've run drills enough times, you should know or maybe you've built a predictor that you can actually know what you're going to get from that session. So I don't think it's definitely still used for that, of course. It's definitely still a monitoring tool. There is a lot of value from load monitoring, of course. And I still use it a lot, especially when you look at different positional groups and what they typically get and what they would get in a game and are you trying to match that in a training session, whether you are looking at some sort of aspect of game speed, however you want to interpret that. And you want to match those demands or essentially want less or super maximal in that training session. So I think it's really valuable in that sense where I think it could be improved is again, the accuracy which I think or companies consistently trying to do this. But I also think that there is a really good company called SportLight, which is quite a new company. And they are similar to second spectrum and track out what's off there, but they're actually using wider rather than just cameras. So it's self-driving car technology and is facial recognition as well to track the players on the pitch, which overcomes the main hurdle of players not actually having to wear a GPS sensor, which has a lot of constraints in itself because if you think of a contact sport, whether it's got to be wearing this quite chunky unit, although they are getting smaller, of course, they still do have a unit in between their shoulder blades. And when you've got players going into tackles and so on, that could prove problematic. Of course, there's the technical errors around that where you could forget to charge it or potentially the unit doesn't turn on or so there isn't error in that or perhaps a player forgets to pick it up and put it on or someone forgets to hand it to them. So I think with companies coming in such a sport like that are overcoming some of those limitations. And from what they say and the white papers they publish are improving that accuracy. I think that will help a lot in terms of, overcome the limitations of players actually having to wear units. And so say for an imbarsable, for example, they use LPS and they can only use the LPS in the training facilities. So a huge limitation there is that you have one system that you travel with that collects data one way. You have one system that you use in your training facility and then during games they use second spectrum because of course the players actually aren't allowed to wear units at all. They're not allowed to wear any wearables during games. So when companies do come in and create a system that overcomes a lot of these limitations and can be used across all those in all those context then it improves that validity as well. And I think that that's probably an area that still could be improved. So if you use spotlight anywhere, I've just spoke to the guys there. So I vetted them when I was at the 76s because we were looking for a better solution just because of those limitations that I mentioned because of course it's really hard to replicate game demands and we actually don't know what the game demands are. Of course they give us the metrics but we know that the metrics are collected in games that are likely completely different. We don't even know what the coefficient variation is there. So I've heard about them and they started developing a prototype for us which as far as I know they still are developing for them and will be rolling out at some point in the next six months I believe. And yeah so I did have a little bit to do with them and I did a short article for them as well but I have no vested interest in them whatsoever. Unfortunately you don't have any vested interests because it looks like it looks like I'm doing alright. Yeah yeah. You're making some cash. Cameron so is it?
Is it cameras? Is LIDAR for my ignorance? Is it cameras? Is it beacons? So it's one system so you can have two I believe set up and it's one system. It sort of looks like a tripod with a camera looking thing on it. I believe LIDAR stands for something to do with a radar or something. I don't know the technical details around it but yeah it is just one system and you can roll it around with you and bring it with you. As far as I know they're using it in the the EPL and they have just put it into all the stadiums they're now to. I believe so I've heard the same thing. So when it comes to internal monitoring internal load monitoring and we've touched on a little bit about the subjectives and that's where this kind of plays into into it as well. But what kind of internal measures of you gravitated towards we had Sean McLear and Dr Sean McLear and I should say on the on the podcast a few weeks ago talking very much in depth about our PEs. And I calculated some of the certain things that he was saying with anecdotes from guests that have been on the podcast previously who'd been our PEs for various different reasons. So what's your thoughts on internal load monitoring and subjectives when it comes to that as well? I think there's obviously quite a few different ones whether it's RP, you could look at heart rate variability. I did mention looking at some kind of movement jump testing and then of course the wellness questionnaire and I'm sure there's plenty of others. I think number one like what suits your context at the at that time the best would be the first thing because heart rate variability is all well and good but I think it's actually going to do that. You know in the morning first five minutes or you know whether they're sitting on the toilet or whichever the the the valid way to the reliable way to do it is. So first making sure there is something that the athletes can do consistently so you get inconsistent reliable data there. What I do like is of course the wellness questionnaire we always use jump monitoring so on a game day plus three. I know a lot of people use game day plus two but I always find that game day plus two the boys are really stiff and and so we don't do much on those days anyway. What's important to me is how recovered are they come our next session actual training session or proper training session so that's why use the game day plus three and I don't just look at modified our style a couple of other metrics as well whether it's take off velocity or so on. But I do think there is a lot of value in our p e are used our p as an example with the with the coaches just to express to them you know okay yeah many really did three K on the field but we're out there for two and a half hours and if that's the day before a game that's a lot of time on feet and that's a lot of potential fatigue or cognitive fatigue at least. So what I did was that okay you can be out here for maximum two hours but you can't get more than this many arbitrary units of load and so basically which means that the session couldn't go for more than 60 minutes and they couldn't rate it more than a three essentially. So and that that really helped to to show the coaches that you know this is actually what it looks like to the athlete rather than just what the numbers say from what they actually did and so I found that really useful in terms of what I know it's not necessarily how well it is in a sense how the athlete responded to the load but it's not it doesn't show the intensity of it but it does show I guess that over. I guess that overall low which is the purpose of it. Have you ever looked at what the coach may perceive has been the api for that day versus what the athletes have actually said? It's kind of what he said anyway but like rate it the coach is rating. Yeah I think I have not in my pre not in my current role but I have them in previous roles where they had predicted our piece for the day and what they would actually look that like that to look like and it actually helps if you can add that into your your period as moral as well and say okay well that's what you plan for that session so then how long do you want to be out for well out the pitch ball because that would equate to this many units and if we look at that over the week does it have a nice variation within the week is it not too many out to our units but then I mean also to go on a bit of attention here like say if you're looking at this over a preseason that should change so you should actually say the same as load goes up as the players get fitter so you know there is a difference there as well because a training session rated at a nine at the start of preseason would be very different to a training session rated nine at the end of preseason or you to hope anyway because you to be fitted by them. Interesting interesting so in terms of this this load load monitoring whether be external or internal what of your tactics and techniques being to get buy in from athletes maybe it's an MBA thing because the things that you spoke about maybe it's a new current role what the tactics and techniques you've used to get buy in an intrat real deep interest from athletes and coaches. So I think yeah it's definitely more of an MBA thing where there's less of the hey you've got where this just because and you do need to convince the athlete and let's say convince the athlete that they need to wear a device and in the MBA is particularly challenging because a lot of players tend to think that any data collector on them is going to be used to get them traded so what you need to do is of course develop that trust first but then also show them I found a really helpful in in showing the players what we actually do with the data and so because we saw that you did this we actually pulled you back here or you did this in a game and because you did this in a game you didn't do nearly as much as you usually would so X Y Z or you did this in a game and therefore that's why you need to do this recovery strategy and then another one was getting players to jump on the force plates that we had three different types of force plates the 76s and when I got there none of them were being used so and so my challenge to myself was okay how do we get at least you know ten of these players jumping on the force plates regularly and by the end we had just about jumping on the force plates and showing them like this is why we do it and this was every second day that they'd be jumping on the force plates and look that that might be overkill for some people but if you do it specifically on a game day and it's consistent across that you can you can see some good trends over time but then I guess to ask you a question the key was to then actually show what you then did with that data and whether that was showing that he is this is the the result of the intervention that we put in a few weeks ago whether that was a training intervention or so on but once we we showed them it was easy after that one question for you is loan monitoring and general monitoring data used for trading decisions in the NBA I was that just a perception from the player that concerned about what what do you mean specifically so that jump the jump data for example would that go any further than your laptop and you know coach or physios does that go up higher like is there a general concern from the player that the data that they use that data that they generate on the force plate is that concern real that it's going to be used in a trading decision yeah I mean in a not not that I am not that I am okay and our data was I mean of course front office could access any of the data if they wanted it but not that I saw it was pretty yeah that that wasn't necessarily something they were interested in there a lot more interested in KPIs and there's that whole money ball around basketball so that's essentially how all the data that it wouldn't wouldn't really be related to what they did on their their job two days ago okay now that's fine that's fine well Carmen thank you very much for coming on the podcast and that's a good place to to round it up do you have social media carbon is anywhere people can keep up state what you've got going on yeah look I'm I'm very poor at Twitter I'm on it all the time but I'll seldom post anything in the shadows in the shadows I look I find there's a lot of value in Twitter a really good for sports scientists to keep their finger on the pulse anyone is you know researching anything and publishes a paper they'll typically post it there so I love seeing what people post there but maybe I just don't publish enough or do anything exciting enough to post that often but yes I am on Twitter it's come and call them one is my Twitter handle so I'm going to check me out there perfect and looking at your link 10 based on last few years is is definitely some interesting stuff that you've been doing.
and get it on Twitter, get it on. - All right, Rob will do the food. - No, no, I'm really chill, you know. Now, Cameron, thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it. Good luck in the new-ish role that you've got back home and look forward to keeping in touch. - Yeah, I really appreciate you having me on too. And yeah, thanks so much for your time too, Rob. - Thanks, Cameron, speak soon. - Thanks, bye. (upbeat music) - Thanks to you, Ninh, to episode 428 of the Paisy Performance Podcast. Big thanks to Cameron for giving up her time and scheduling this on very short notice and then putting up with me, something like this for the whole hour that we spoke. And big thanks to Hawking Dynamics, Play, Kitman Labs, Rewire Fitness and Hydro for sponsoring this episode today. The podcast could not run its crump for without these guys, so I really do appreciate all their support. Hope you have a fantastic Christmas and new year and look forward to speaking to you in early 2023. (upbeat music)
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