Why Great Data Doesn't Change Behaviour | Dr Emma Neupert

Why Great Data Doesn't Change Behavior Welcome back to the Behaviour Cap podcast. My name is Carmen Colimer. In elite sport we have better technology than ever, better testing, better monitoring, more data. Yet many performance teams still struggle to change behaviour. My guest today is Emma Newport. Emma has worked as an applied physiologist in the Canadian Olympic system and the English Institute of Sport. She later completed a PhD on a question every practitioner has faced. Why don't athletes buy into monitoring? Her research started with an with athlete compliance, and it ended somewhere very different. This conversation is about trust and relationships, culture and leadership, and about why data alone rarely changes behaviour and why the best monitoring systems depend on people more than technology. We also discuss why athletes sometimes hide the truth, how coaching behaviour shapes honest reporting, where the line sits between monitoring and surveillance, and what sport science looks like when the goal shifts from collecting data to creating insight. If you work in high performance sport or you lead people in any environment, I think you'll find plenty to take away from this conversation. Here's my discussion with Doctor Emma Neubert. Real-World Challenges in Athlete Monitoring Emma He spent years as an applied physiologist in the Canadian Olympic sports system and then also in the English Institute of Sport. So you're on the frontline of sport, but what did you keep hitting in practice that what you'd learned at university and all the textbooks just hadn't prepared you for? Speaker 2 Yeah, that's a really good question. I think I came out of university with a really strong foundation in how to do lab testing, how to do monitoring, what the data should look like, how to interpret it. And I think what I perhaps in my naivety was less prepared for was when you actually get on the ground, that is not always the coaches priority, your lab testing and your monitoring. And and that was a real wake up call. So yeah, I think I remember, I remember reading one of Anna Saw's papers back in 2015 and it had this beautiful flow chart about how to do monitoring. So you set up this, you check the reliability and validity of your metrics, you do it this way and then that way. And I'm like, that's all perfect, amazing. But how do you get the buy in? And that for me was the big missing point. I was like, that's all great. But yeah, the buy in's really, really tricky. And I remember conversations with a particular athlete and they were just like, oh, why should I bother doing this monitoring? How's it going to help me? How's it gonna help me go faster? And I was like, that's a really good question, you know, and, and you start to realise that, yes, I've got this amazing scientific foundation which my university degrees have given me, but I felt really ill prepared for actually trying to change the behaviours on the ground and do things like get buy in and, and, and that was all my interpersonal skills and nothing that we'd actually been taught in the classroom. So that was my gap, my behaviour gap was trying to make it work on the ground. Uncovering Why Athletes Don't Report Data So when that athlete did ask you, and I'm sure plenty of athletes asked you, do you remember what you said? And then I assumed this was actually before we'd done your PhD. Speaker 2 Yeah. So I think I'm probably a bit of a deer in the headlights at that point. I think I, I remember sort of muttering something about, Oh yes, well, over time we can do this, you know, XY and Z and we'll work with the coaches, etcetera, etcetera. And I'm running back to the books to see what the literature said about getting buy in and there wasn't much there. And, you know, as a physiologist, I felt really out of my comfort zone. And which is partly what spawned my PhD was these awkward conversations about, well, you know, actually how are you going to use this data? Is it going to help me? Is it going to make me go faster? And yeah, I mean, fundamentally my PhD going back a few years now, but my PhD was meant to be about digging into monitoring data and mining that to try and enhance performance. But what it actually turned into was they're not filling the data in that well in the 1st place. And why is that happening? So that was really what shaped my PhD through inadvertently things not going to plan. So, yeah, so. Speaker 1 Had you already looked into the topic to see that anyone else had done a similar work, looking at why athletes aren't actually filling in the data? Or was it purely just, let's look at monitoring first and then you discovered that they weren't actually filling the data? Speaker 2 Yes, I mean, the start of my PhD, we were doing some regular monitoring with an Olympic team and the data just wasn't being as complete as I was expecting it to be. And so, you know, I'd have a chat with the team around me. We were, you know, trying to dig into why it might be. I looked in the literature and there was some stuff in psychology, but not necessarily within athlete monitoring sort of in adjacent fields. And I felt there was a bit of a gap there about, well, why isn't this happening? And it, and it's not until more recent years. So obviously I've written a few papers in the area and you've got people like Al McCall as well, who've written about, you know, are athletes honest? Why aren't they reporting? You know, why might that happen? Why aren't they reporting? Honestly, that it really sort of made me stop and reflect on actually, I don't think this is an athlete problem, which is what I initially thought. I think it might be an US problem, the team problem, and I think maybe it was a big reflection point for me. We need to stop and think about why they they don't want to do it. Speaker 1 So what? OK, so that we've obviously scratched the surface on it now, so people are dying to know, of course, what was your PhD actually on? And can you just discuss a little bit about your papers? Because that was, this is how I discovered you. And I just thought that this was fascinating. Speaker 2 Yeah. Punitive Environments & Social Desirability So, so my PhD was on that gap essentially of why, why we struggle to get athlete monitoring buy in and effectively how can we make athlete monitoring more effective. So I looked at the current practices in athlete monitoring in particularly the UK sporting system. I looked at why athletes directly from the athletes didn't want to fill these things in. Oh, some great stories along the way. Like, you know, some of these, some of these teams, you know, I had athletes telling me stories where they're actually creating their own code to fill in, automate the subjective monitoring on the dashboards because they don't want to fill it in. So, you know, why don't they want to fill it in was a big question for my PhD and then the PhD ended with a case. We had some ideas about why they didn't want to fill the monitoring in and for various reasons. But can we change it? So I looked at some of Susan Mishy's work who has got a behaviour change framework called the Behaviour Change Wheel, and we looked at implementing some interventions to try and increase adherence. And the spoiler there was. It wasn't as effective as I'd hoped it would be, but there were some very good reasons as to why. Speaker 1 So can we just go back a step before we get into the behaviour change? So what were some of the reasons that Pete, that athletes weren't filling it in? And then can you also discuss if there were any difference between sports, for example, so say like were some sports more compliant than others or was there just a general trend across all the athletes? Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So I think a lot of athletes, athletes will fill this in. They will fill monitoring in if they think it's going to benefit them is the bottom line. I was what I really believe if they feel that filling it in will help them be better faster and be the best athlete that they can be, I think you'll get them to fill it in. But, and this is this is where the problem comes. Real life comes into that, right? And so the athletes are filling it in. The coach may not have time necessarily or you may not have time to look at the data. So, you know, on the ground, the information doesn't always get used. I know people try to use it, but it doesn't always happen. And, and if the athlete is investing time, this is what they told me. If I'm investing time and filling this stuff in, I want to see some results from that. And I think that's perfectly fair. And you know, why? Why would they invest that time if if if it's not going to be helpful for them? And I think the other big thing that came through was the potential punitive side that sometimes occurred. So sometimes athletes would fill this in. And I had a great example where, you know, the athletes would say, well, you know, I've got a zero to 10 score here about how you know, how ready I'm feeling today to train. And if I'm not putting an 8 or 9 score down, the coach is going to pull me aside and shout at me and ask me why I'm not ready. So why would I ever put anything down that isn't an 8 or a nine? And so that's the environment around the athlete. Do they feel that they can respond honestly and then not be consequences, negative consequences for that? And I think sometimes environment, not necessarily intentionally, but environments can be created on the ground where responses that perhaps the coach or practitioners don't want to see are hidden by, by the athletes. They, they sort of, you know, they have this social desirability around how they think they should respond because they've learned that if they respond otherwise, there are negative consequences for them because they don't want to be pulled from training. They don't want, you know, to have to do something different to everyone else. And, and I think those are some of the key reasons why. And I think, well, sort of woven into that, as well as compassion from the staff on the ground. So if they don't feel that the practitioners and the coaches care about them, they're probably not going to respond honestly. So coming back to my PhD and you know, I'm trained as a quantitative physiologist. All of a sudden, Oh my gosh, I had to have feelings and start start having good interpersonal skills, which was, which was, you know, I just, but you know, that's a really important part of being a practitioner and not something that I felt I'd been prepared for until I sort of rolled up practice on day one. Closing the Athlete Feedback Loop It's, it's such a good point about the coach because I've seen someone's PhD before who was looking at readiness on game day and if that related to performance metrics in a game. And I thought, and this was data that was available to the for the coach to VC. And I thought if I was a player and I'm being told that I have to report my readiness on game day and the coach is going to see it, I am not putting anything but a 10. And, and I think I get it. I understand. I mean, I don't, I've never been an athlete, but I can understand it from a practitioner perspective. So was when you heard comments like that, was that more of the exception if you heard athletes that were saying that? And then also, do you think it actually matters with the, the practitioner and their relationship that they have with the athletes? So say, if there's, I mean, I'm not sure every, every environment I've been in has been different. There might be an intern walking around with an iPad saying he, he filled this out. There might be athletes might be doing it on their own on their phones. There might be iPad setup, whatever it looks like, but let's just say that there is a practitioner facing role in that monitoring collection. Do you think it matters if there's a relationship with that practitioner? Speaker 2 I I think it can be a really positive point. So, so yeah, as you said, every environment is different and it's not just the practitioner and the relationship with the practitioner. Because I've spoken, you know, through some of my research, I've spoken to practitioners that have had amazing relationships with the athletes they were with. And the athletes will to a degree fill in for the practitioners because they know it's really valuable for the practitioners. But I think that only gets you so far because if that data is then not used by the coach, which would be, you know, hopefully it is. But if it isn't and if that isn't used to inform training programming, the athlete won't see the value of it. And you know, you risk over time there being a decay in adherence. So definitely the relationship with the practitioner is important and I think practitioners go above and beyond to try and foster that. You know, I've seen so many examples of practitioners being, you know, they're super early in the morning, running around, as you said, with iPads, smiling, joking, trying to get all of the information. But the linchpin is then is that information used? And, and I think the difficulty is as well, sometimes, sometimes the coach, even if the, let's say they're flagging that there's high levels of fatigue, sometimes the coach won't make a change. And that's appropriate in the training program. But there needs to be that communication between the athlete, the coach and the practitioner that that circle's closed. So if the athlete flags that they're more fatigued, their muscles are sorer. If that circle isn't closed with the coach to say, well, you know, hey, I'm my fatigue levels are high, why isn't anything changing? And there may be a valid reason why the coach, you know, doesn't change it. But yeah, if that isn't that circle isn't completed, I think you'd lose the athlete over time and they're less likely to fill it in. Adapting Systems for Better Adherence Can you? It's such a good point. It's a really good point. And again, I've seen a number of environments and I've seen it done differently because the reality is you can collect so many metrics and and then what are you going to do? Are you going to put it up on the wall and show everyone whatever on score was for that day? I mean, that's not realistic and I don't think you should do that. But I agree you need to to close that circle. So can you talk about just a little bit what you saw say in Canada versus in England, how that was done, whether you changed it? And then adding on to that, could you also talk about what, what was the exact protocol that you did in your pH? So how many questions whether you think that matters? You know, 5 questions versus 50 questions is obviously going to be a deterrent more questions for an athlete to to be compliant with filling it out. So can you just talk a little bit about what you've seen and different methods of doing it and then potentially what you think might be the most effective method of collecting monitoring data? Speaker 2 Yeah. So I mean, as you said, different environments do very different things. So I've worked in winter sport in Canada and, you know, summer sport in the UK and I've seen some really positive environments where that loop is closed. So the coaches will, you know, come into the practitioner's office or read the dashboard, whatever it might be, and have a conversation about, OK, how's everyone looking this morning? Are we good to go? And then there's usually a sort of a brief before the athletes go out and do their training or perhaps at the end of the session as well. And I've seen, I've seen. So that's, you know, count as a really positive environment where there are visible appropriate consequences to the monitoring information that's collected. It's tangible, the athletes can see it and the conversations happen around the data. And and then I've seen the other side where the data's collected and the coach, the coach, the coaching line, which is sort of perhaps a little bit old school, but not to say it hasn't been successful of, well, this is what it takes to win an Olympic medal, right? If they're fatigued today, they still got to train. They we've got to get out there and they've got to go. And that's it. That's what it takes to win. And so I've seen, you know, both can be successful, both create somewhat different environments on the ground. So that's, you know, some of the differences I I've seen in the environments I've worked in, in terms of protocols that I've worked across. So I think like Aaron Kootz and Franco and Palazzeri have done a huge amount of work in this area, which has been really helpful. But I think when I started as a practitioner, we were making up as we went with with subjective monitoring. We had lots of single item questionnaires that I'm not saying, you know, they weren't useful, but we had invented or had evolved over time in the sport. And I remember a specific conversation with a more senior colleague who said, well, yeah, we used to, we used to rate this scale from zero to 10. But everyone just put a nine or a 10. So all we did was times it by 100. So we had more variability in the data, more data points. And I look back on that and I, you know, and all the work that Franco and everyone has done since on trying to improve that. And you think, you know, yeah, we we're in a better place now. You know, I think the, I think practitioners are much more conscious about the reliability and validity of what they're collecting for, particularly for subjective metrics, which have got more, more scope to customize, shall we say. Um, so I'd like to think people are more aware of that. Uh, I think in terms of what works, it's so environment specific and context specific. It's really difficult to answer that question because I think what works for a basketball won't necessarily work for, you know, like AI don't know cross country skier, but I think there are some fundamentals that run true throughout it. So for example, it needs to but you obviously need to have the scientific foundations of reliability, validity and also the clinometrics, you know, appropriateness. But in terms of the user side, it needs to be easy to fill in Swift to do and not to interfere with training, practice and the and coming back to the athlete needs to see the value in it. If you're asking questions that perhaps don't necessarily relate that well to the sport or they don't understand why they're there or perhaps they don't understand the question itself, you know, that can be problematic. So I don't know if I've answered your question there. Speaker 1 Well, I'll just, I'll tack on another one. Did anything evolve in the monitoring system you're using for the data collection in your PhD? Did you, for example, in study one, have one monitoring questionnaire that you realized halfway through? And look, the answer could be no, but that you realized potentially, oh, actually if we switched up the order, we might get better compliance. Or if we left this question out, was there anything that happened like that along the journey? Speaker 2 Yeah. So with my PHDI think the we initially started collecting the objective and subjective data that had been set by the sport, you know, however many years ago and that had been collected for a long time. And we we didn't set out to change the questions. That wasn't a wasn't a specific point in my PhD, but yeah, I think it became clear that we have too many questions, I think as on reflection because they weren't filling it out. But yeah, it wasn't a specific part of my PhD to dig into what to ask them and why. But what we did do at a later point was actually look to modify their behaviours through that Susan Michie behaviour change wheel and try and put things to promote adherence in. And that was what we were trying to impact. Because from my perspective, I knew that I wasn't trying to get the questions themselves changed was going to be a little bit tricky because they were sort of set by the sport and that wasn't going to be something that I was going to change with within my relatively short time frame of a PhD. Speaker 1 I think, I know you keep talking about the behaviour change and we will get there, I promise. Building Resilient Monitoring Systems Yeah, yeah. But I know I was reading one of your studies and you did mention that there was some compliance issues when it came to staff and relationship building effectively is what I got out of it because staff were leaving. Can you talk a little bit about that please? Speaker 2 Yeah. So I think coming back to coming back to my first sort of my first points is a lot of athlete monitoring is a relational behaviour, right. And I say this as a physiologist, you got to you got to have the buy in and you and that's with the coach, the athlete and the wider team. And this relates to another piece of work that I'm I'm just finishing up. But when the coach leaves, as happened in one of these research projects I did, that whole ecosystem gets disturbed and changed. And it might mean that some of the practitioner staff leave as well. And you know, particularly in professional sport, the whole backroom can change. So when your monitoring systems and I think one of the one of the things that we don't really talk about, but we need to think about is they need to be resilient to the organizational change that often happens in elite sport. So can your monitoring system survive a change in coach, a change in backroom staff? Will it outlive you? Is it strong enough to do that? And from what I've seen that that's really difficult, especially every coach has got, you know, different priorities, different things that they want to do. But you, for the athletes do need, I'd argue, some form of continuity in terms of, you know, the data that's being collected, the information that you're returning to them, the feedback you're giving them. So yeah, I think coach change is a really has a really tricky impact on the practices on the ground in elite sport. And it happens often as well as, you know, we know there's a high turnover in elite sport. It's a precarious environment. And so being resilient to that is another thing for practitioners to think about on top of everything else. Speaker 1 It's, that's such a powerful statement, everything you just said, because it's so true. I mean, I know practitioners who spend years building the ecosystem, like you say, their performance department. And that can all just come crumbling down with them within a moment because there's a coach change. And it's, it's hard for, for systems and technologies to survive that. So I guess we'll probably get into the behavior change now because I feel like this will be the answer. But did you find that there were any monitoring systems or was there any type of monitoring that could survive a coach change or did that rely on behaviour change? Speaker 2 Yeah. So the monitoring system that we had in place, so we had, we have three coaches in the system I was working in and two out of the three left fairly well. This is the project I did fairly soon after each other and the monitoring that was being done was really driven by one to two out of those three coaches. And so there was a very technical coach who had much less to do with the monitoring system. So that coach left first and and the monitoring continued. But when the key coach, who was the one giving the feedback was the one there with the iPad saying, well, hey, how come the score's lower? You know, talk to me about it. How did you sleep last night? You know, did your girlfriend, are you still having problems? All of those other social things that go on around the sport. When he left, that was when things really went South. So we with the behaviour change interventions we put in place. I think when you look through the literature, when people want to do things like increase adherence, they seem to default to let's do an education session for the athletes and or coach. And that's come through in quite a lot of papers now. And you're smiling. I think it has, I'm not saying it doesn't have value, but I think it has perhaps limited value. And you know what, for what for us I think could have made the difference in terms of trying to ensure the resilience of the monitoring system was really weaving the monitoring into the like the weekly case reports with the athletes, for instance. So you've got that, you know, that feedback, you've got the regular touch point with the coach. And I think that would have really helped, but we didn't get it off the ground in the way that I had hoped for. So it's really tough. It's really tough to try. And you know, we, we took this really strong theoretical framework about how to change behaviours and elite sport came along and did what elite sport does and threw the table up over and, and made us rethink it. So I think there was some, there was some learnings there around, you know, you need to do something that perhaps is going to weave into the wider team that's going to stick around beyond the coaches. But that was tricky, hey? Behaviour Change Wheel's Agility Challenge So I guess like, it sounded like you could have almost felt like a failed study given that you had the three coaches and two left whilst you're doing this behaviour change. But like, the way I see it was maybe you learnt something by them leaving that you wouldn't have learnt had they all stayed, you know, and it had been this perfect environment, which of course we know sport is not. So do you think there was a silver lining there in that sense? Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I remember, I remember when, you know, the first coach left and I went back and had a chat with my supervisory team, and I just had my head in my hand. So I was like, Oh my gosh, this project's falling apart. And one of my, one of my supervisors just said that this is elite sport, like this stuff is important. And, and he was completely right. And what I thought, you know, on a slightly on a bit of a tangent, trying to get this published was difficult because people want a nice study where you can tie a bow on it in the end, right? And that was not what happened in this study. It was messy. And I think that reflects, that reflects elite sport. You know, it can be slightly chaotic at times. It's a wonderful environment to work in, but things change fast. And So what did I learn from that? I learned that the interventions that we had in place were, I think they were all really good ideas, but I learned that they weren't resilient to the speed of change that happens in elite sport and that I couldn't respond fast enough to try and mitigate what was going on. And I don't know if I have a good answer for what you could do to try and do that, you know, But yeah, I think some learning around this behaviour change will fantastic. Really made me think broad more broadly than just that. OK, we've got poor adherence, let's educate the athletes. It really made me think about what other things we could do. But it was not agile enough to deal with the environment. Speaker 1 Can you just, just to give everyone some context, even myself, can you just explore, explain broadly what the behaviour change wheel looks like in practice and then well, what the theoretical framework is and then what you think it maybe should look like in practice when it comes to monitoring? Speaker 2 Yeah, you're pushing me back now. It's been a while since I since I read, since I read it, but yeah, it's a, it's basically a, the reason I liked it, it's a very, it pulls together different theories of behaviour change and it gives you a very clear framework for isolating what the behaviour is you want to change. So you go through a series of tasks where you try and isolate what it is that you're trying to change and then you think about everything around that behaviour that may influence that behaviour. So like I said, we were just very stuck on education before, but it made us think about, right. So is there stuff that we can do with role modelling? Is there stuff that we can do with the environment? Is there changes that we can make, you know, around the athlete to both facilitate and, you know, if necessary, some more coercive changes to try and to try and do that. And you know, I've seen examples with practitioners and sports I've worked with before where part of the actual contract for the athlete will be, you are required as part of your contract to fill in monitoring information on a daily basis. And and that would be, you know, it doesn't, I haven't seen it in that many sports, but it does exist in some. And, and and that's a very sort of coercive, you know, strong road to take. So it forces you to think more broadly beyond, you know, just the things that you're comfortable changing and and then you essentially go through and rate each of the different potential changes you could make to modify that behaviour in terms of feasibility, practicality, cost, etcetera. And so for a physiologist trying to trying to meddle in this area, it was a really nice sort of colour by numbers approach for how to do it. I really liked it, but it was, I found it personally, and, and maybe this is just me, I found it quite cumbersome to do. Like it's really quite a long process to go through to do it, you know, as correctly and comprehensively as I think the authors set out for it to be. And, and I think as a consequence to that, it wasn't, it wasn't like I could just pick it up and go, all right, a coach has changed. How do we modify this? I'd have to go right back to square 1 again. I think as well, you know, the, the environments, a complex that we work in. And I was, you know, some of the research they, they talked about changing behaviour and they gave the example of sort of an adjacent example of trying to change addictive behaviours and how just a small change can send someone back to being, you know, into addictive patterns again. And I think perhaps the the theory of doing this doesn't necessarily take into account on the ground some of the smaller things or bigger things that can set you off on being successful or unsuccessful path. So I don't know sort of sort of gone through that and made sense in my answer to you, but. Sports Science 3.0: Beyond Data Collection No, that's really valuable and I can understand how cumbersome it could potentially be, especially when you're, you know, you're considering all the social environmental factors within that. And, and I think in one of your papers, you obviously pointed that out and you said that whether an athlete monitoring system actually works is determined by those factors. And it's not the quality of the data. But I would say like from my experience and what I've seen, there's most performance departments would spend most of their, their time and their money or, and resources on that data data layer. So do you think they're under investing and and where would you say performance departments should allocate or reallocate some of their resources? Speaker 2 Yeah, so it's a really interesting point because the data is the foundation, right, That needs to be right. If you're dealing with data that's biased or missing or incorrect, you know, you're going to have it doesn't matter if you've got the best socio environmental setup around it, you know, you risk coming to the wrong conclusion. And and I just sort of I was thinking back to some of Martin Buckites work where he talks about, you know, how sports science has evolved. And you know, I think he from sports science 1.0, which was like, we understand training. We're sort of going through principles that drive performance. Sports science too, where we're measuring everything and it's about data and tech. And we're now in sports science V3, which is we've got data everywhere, data coming out of our ears. And if if we're not careful, we've got insight nowhere. And I think we really need to actually properly think about how we're using that make data to influence behaviours and make decisions. And I think traditionally for a practitioner, that's something that I know I've been weaker on. And I mean, that's why some of my research is in this area, to try and think about how to improve that. Speaker 1 It's yeah, it's such a good point. Transparency, Trust, and Psychological Safety And obviously I love Martin Vishad's work and and his latest paper was was great and spot on. Do you think so? Just going back to to the social, the social environmental context, do you think there is an optimal environment? Like what, what would that practically look like, say on a Tuesday morning? Who's leading it? What does the environment look like? Is there a leader? Is there, you know, are the athletes leading it? Are the practitioners leading it? Is, is something being presented to them at the end before they go to training? What? What does that look like in your opinion? Speaker 2 Yeah, I think this is context dependent to a degree. But you know, if I think about if you were to set up the the perfect environment, I think the athlete would rock up in the morning. I think you'd have then drop in and speak to the team in the morning, chat about the data, an open honest chat about, you know, what that morning monitoring data says. I think then you'd have, you know, prior to going out to the training session, the coach referenced the monitoring information in that, you know, pre training session and talk about it individually and perhaps where appropriate as a group with the athletes. So you've already got that initial feedback and acknowledgement that, hey, you invested time filling this stuff in and I'm telling you what I see as a coach and now I'm going to tell you how that is going to impact the training session today or not as the case may be. So there's just the acknowledgement that that data has been seen and the athletes have been heard. I think that transparency then is it like really feeds into this. I think you've then got the practitioner and coach confidence to make alterations if appropriate on the fly based upon the data that they're seeing. You've got the buy in from the wider team as well. So if I as a practitioner have concerns about heart rate variability data on a specific athlete, you know, I, I'd like to have the confidence then to go to maybe the doc or the coach and have a conversation and have the psychological safety to do that without having the coach say, well, I don't care. Or, you know, tell me like, what does that? You know, So I, I think you'd have that back and forth conversation and, and the confidence to do that and that you feel empowered to have that conversation as well. And I think, you know, then at the end of the session, maybe they're doing RPE, you're doing some GPS metrics, whatever it might be. Hopefully you've, you know, everything gets pulled into your dashboards and you know, maybe there's some sort of feedback session at the end where you're able to debrief the athletes as well. I think that's the kind of environment where the data has value there. And then I think the immediacy is important as well as seeing the value in the data and the data being used to inform programming. And so I think the visible consequences, visible appropriate consequences for the athlete and the conversations happening with and around the data are really key in my mind to to make the monitoring stick and to be really positive for for everyone. Speaker 1 That's it's a really good example and thank you for creating this fake scenario. The Ethical Line in Athlete Data Like you said, it's obviously different every context that you're in, but one thing I have heard many times in the interviews that I've done is about this perceived importance. And athletes do need to see everyone in the department perceiving the thing, whatever The thing is, the testing, the monitoring, the whatnot, the nutrition as important and and the message. The more people that have the same message, the better. You know, if you've just got the one poor interns telling everyone they've got to have their protein shake and not one other person in the performance department says, Oh yeah, you need to have your protein shake. The athletes probably won't think it's important. And I feel like that's the same, which is in very in line with what you're saying regarding the monitoring. They, if it's perceived as important by the coach as well as all the performance staff and then it's brought back to them, you know, with a number of people presenting that information to them, then absolutely I feel like you would get that from my opinion anyway. Anecdotally, you would get that buy in. Speaker 2 Yeah. Speaker 1 One thing I wanted to mention was I know you presented at Oxford a while back, maybe a year ago or so, and you did present on the difference between meaningful monitoring support and then surveillance. So where exactly is that line, and what does crossing it do to an athlete's willingness to engage honestly with with that type of? Speaker 2 System yeah, this is I think this is something that I had a chat with him about this as well ECSS I'm sure he wouldn't mind me saying I think this is this is something that we need to be very aware of as practitioners. We now monitor our athletes 24/7. We know when they wake up, when they go to sleep, when they go out, you know when they're walking their dog. We, we have insight into their personal life more than we ever have before. And the project I'm working on at the moment is thinking about that just from a perspective of is it OK? And how as practitioners do we deal with that? Because you might see things that you don't want to know or, you know, don't have really the right to know about an individual. You can, you know, it's, I think we've opened a bit of a Pandora's box here about the, the ethical side of monitoring. Ongoing Consent for 24/7 Athlete Monitoring And I think there are some from, from what I've, you know, I'm sort of more outside of sport now working in academia. And I think there are some sports that deal with this great. They've got fantastic privacy, consent, confidentiality, etcetera around this. But I think there's a risk of the athletes just wearing a watch or a ring, whatever it might be, it being uploaded to the cloud. Maybe they tick yes to share it once and they don't really understand what they're sharing the detail of their life that is going this being broadcast to the coaching team. And that's, you know, I'd imagine most of the time that's fine if you've got a trusting team around you and you've got a positive environment. And but I think there's a risk as well to that and which is why in research, you know, we would require all sorts of consents and ethical approvals for that level of monitoring to happen. And it doesn't necessarily in our world, in the elite sport world. So it yeah, it's a kind of worms, so. Speaker 1 I know you probably can't answer this as such, but where is that line and and also, who decides where that line is? Is it the institution on sport? Is it the practitioner or is it the athlete? Speaker 2 Yeah. So I think, I think there has to be an ongoing consent process for the athlete to share that level of data with the coaching team or whoever it might be the the wider practitioner team. Because you know, when I go to work, my boss doesn't know about my menstrual cycle. He doesn't know what kind of night's sleep I got. And I don't want him to know about that, right. Like that's not normal in a normal working world, but it is, it is in the athlete world. And I think where do you draw the line? So first of all, the, the athlete has to have full awareness of what data they're sharing. And I think, well, I know from the research that we've done, they're not always aware of how much information goes up to the cloud. It should be, in my opinion, ongoing consent and re consent. So it's not just a one off, hey, I filled in this form, you know, a year ago. It just carries on as we continue on and perhaps the algorithms get, you know, changed and more information is being collected and you don't even know because you don't see that. So see where is the line? That's a really tricky 1. Ultimately, you need trust, consent and respect and privacy and, and confidentiality with the data being collected and, and you know that it. So I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's massively useful for sports science, but you have to recognize that you're potentially going to see, I'll give you an example. And, you know, you might find out before an athlete knows that they're pregnant. And yeah, and and I guess like, have you as a practitioner thought about that? Do you know, do you know what you would do in that situation? And I mean, it's sort of an extreme example, but this is the insight that we're getting now with the level of technology that we have. And, and there was a really nice white paper from it was like an Academy of Sciences in Australia that talked about this level of data and ethics in sport. And I think it's something we need to be well, hence my research project is something we need to be thinking more about. Just so far as as a practitioner, you make sure you protect yourself and your athletes. Emotional Skills for Practitioner Development Yeah, it's such an interesting topic and I think makes me think of, you know, maybe five years ago or maybe closer to closer to 10, everything was about maybe this is Sports Science 2.0, but everything was about invisible monitoring. But I feel like there's ethical implications now aligned with invisible monitoring. So I think you have to probably be a little bit more careful when you're using that term now. Can you talk a little bit more about the project you're just finishing up, just because you've touched on it a couple of times? Speaker 2 The the ethics one or I've got a couple on the go at the moment I've got, I've got a project on athlete monitoring ethics and I've got a project on how practitioners develop insight into their athlete monitoring practice. So. Speaker 1 Either both would be really. Speaker 2 Valuable. Yeah. So the ethics one, I'm working with a colleague in Sterling and someone in Portsmouth. We're, we're just finishing up on getting practitioner, athlete and coach perceptions and opinions on how they, how they manage the ethics of the athlete monitoring that they do and their experiences. So we're, we're winding that project up at the moment. We're, you know, hopefully, hopefully get something out next year about it. We'll see. And, and that was, as you said, the, when I presented at the Podium conference in Oxford about that. And so people can find that on the The Podium website, the athlete monitoring insights is a is a different project. So I presented at ECSS this year about that. So I interviewed 40 practitioners from the Australian, UK and Canadian systems and asked them how they, how they developed insight and basically implemented their athlete monitoring practice. And to tell me a story, like one story about their, a time where their, where their knowledge of athlete monitoring was really flipped on its head. And so the data analysis from that's done. I'm reporting back currently. So I've spoken to for instance, about some of the results and few others. So, you know, we're in the final stages of that now and hope to get that out. And and that's really about again, coming back to sports science version three. We've got a lot of data and how do we make sure we get insight out of that data and use it to actually coming back to your behaviour gap, influence behaviours and not just collect lots of data that is wasted. And so yeah, that I've got to abstract Ecss, which I'm sure in time people will be able to access and you know, hopefully, hopefully get something out there in due course. Can you? Speaker 1 Share any any insights from that one at all? Speaker 2 Yeah. I think some of the key things are the, I think, I guess coming back to some of the themes of what we've talked about, we traditionally think about monitoring as being a very sort of data-driven cognitive problem solving process. Like why has this number gone up? Why has this number gone down? What does that mean? And, and, and that's correct, but actually doing something about it and implementing it on the ground involves all of the other messy stuff. So the wider environment, the influencing of the coaches, the, the emotions that go with that. So I think the overriding finding is that using data to to have insight in athlete monitoring is not just a cognitive problem solving process, it's also emotional and it revolves around interpersonal skills as well. And from a practitioner development perspective, all of the foundations that you're learning at university are really important, but you need to have excellent interpersonal skills to support them to actually be able to make a change on the ground. And so if I was a practitioner coming through now, I'd probably be focusing on, you know, the softer stuff. Again, I say this is a physiologist around it to try and implement, implement. You know, if you want to make change, you've got to influence behaviours. It's not just the data alone that's going to get you there. Speaker 1 Can you share and you can obviously completely de identified, but can you share any of the stories? Speaker 2 Yeah, so there was 40 stories, so that in all shades of everything went really well and swimmingly. And you know, look at this amazing change that happened through to disastrous. So I think practitioners should take heart that, you know, from, from my research, it doesn't always go well. And, and there'll be plenty of practitioners that have walked though in those boots before that monitoring is is tough and trying to make changes is tough. I think I'm trying to think of some of the stories that stick with me. But I think 1 practitioner told me a story about a health issue that came up with their athletes. I won't say what the health issue was because it will like probably identify the sport. But this one health issue kept coming up with her particular athletes and within the sport, the culture in the sport. And so they were monitoring for this health issue. The culture in the sport was, but that's just the sport. You know, that's what we that's what we expect here. You're going to see this particular problem and we just try and manage it as best as we can. And you, you just crack on. And this practitioner was new into the sport and was just outraged, absolutely outraged. Like, this is not okay. Like, no, this is not normal. And it was a clear example to me of something that had become very culturally embedded in the sport, that had become normalized. And for someone coming in externally who hadn't worked in that sport before, it was just, you know, this, this practitioner was stamping her feet going this is not OK. We need to do something to change it. And they did. They set out to to monitor it better so they could understand the problem better, make changes to try and mitigate the health issue and make it not OK. And I think, yeah, so many fantastic stories that are difficult to talk about on the fly without identifying people in sports. But I'm really looking forward to getting this particular project out there. And and I really hope to use it for to support practitioners in their development to help them understand. And so some of the other themes that came out were things like performative monitoring, sort of a term I use where a lot of practitioners monitor because they feel they should monitor and that's part of their job. But the data just gets wasted, can get wasted. So, you know, problems with that kind of approach and how to deal with it. I know I'm rambling, but I'm really looking forward to getting that project out there. Speaker 1 As soon as it's out there, I will be reading it. I think this is honestly, this is what the feedback I've been getting about this podcast is that this is what people want to hear about. This is what people want to know. Everyone's got their own stories, their own anecdotes, but actually hearing from the the broader practitioners what their experiences have been and how they've potentially solved some problems is, is definitely what people want to know. So I would say thank you so much for doing this type of research. And I'm really looking forward for this, those two projects to come out. Culture, Environment, and Sustainable Change I'm just going to, we're just about at the hour and I'm conscious of time, but I just want to close with one quick question. So you've obviously studied athlete behaviour coach behaviour practitioner behaviour system design, like socio environmental factors. What do you think's been? The hardest to move or the hardest behaviour to change out of all of those? Speaker 2 Oh, that's a tricky question, I think. I think practitioners, practitioners in let's say your sports that are very successful and that have a history of being very successful. There's a certain way of doing things in those sport. That's been my experience, right? Like this is the culture, this is the way we do things around here. And I'd say in those sports, it's more set and you probably know the you can think about in your own country, in your own setting, what those sports might be. And in those sports where you've had historical success over an extended period of time, it can be, yeah. And they know what they're doing. They know how to be successful. They know how to win. So therefore, trying to change anything in those environments, I think from the research I've done, is more challenging. So whether that, you know, whether that is, I don't know, trying to bring in a new way of approaching a certain, you know, altitude training or whatever it might be, there's it can be trickier when you've got a lot of history behind you to do that. So I think from a practitioner perspective, walking into those sports, you're going to learn a hell of a lot. It's going to be a fantastic environment to work in. But moving the needle on whatever it is that you need to do can be, and I'm not saying always is, but can be trickier just because they know how to win and who are you to, you know, in their minds? Who are you to tell them how to do something differently? So I think that most recent project that I did, those kind of really big hitting sports were the ones where people not saying they didn't get over changes over the line. They did, but it was a process and quite often an emotional one. Speaker 1 I can imagine and I can, yeah, definitely see what you're alluding to there. There's definitely some cultural shifts that are harder, cultures that are harder to shift, I should say. Speaker 2 And I think if you just contrast that for a second as well with, you know, if you walk into environment where you've got, let's say a new, not sorry, a new sport, but like a new discipline within a sport with new coaches coming in, fresh practitioners, you've got kind of more scope for change. And, you know, not saying that you can't change in the other environment. I'm, you know, not here to sort of cast too many aspersions, but I think some environments are set up to be more flexible like that from the outset. So yeah, I think understand and know your environment for practitioners is, you know, be a student of that environment and the sport to know what is and may not be feasible. Speaker 1 It's a really good place to end there, Emma, that has this has been such a valuable conversation and I know so many people would get so much out of this. So I want to thank you so much for your time. I can link everyone to your socials, your LinkedIn, and potentially a couple of your papers in the comments. And yeah, thank you so much, Emma. I really appreciate it. Speaker 2 Well, thank you for having me.