September 2022 - Athletic Performance Academy

Pacey Performance Podcast Review – Episode 413 Marco Altini

This blog is a review of the Pacey Performance Podcast Episode 413 – Marco Altini

Marco Altini

Marco is a Scientist and Owner of HRV4Training. In addition to this, Marco is also an advisor to Oura Ring.

Background

Marco has a mixed background between computer science and sport science. He has degree in computer science & engineering, a PhD in Data science and another Masters in sport science. He has a role as a guest lecturer in a University in Amsterdam.

🔉 Listen to the full episode with Marco Altini here

Discussion topics:

”Is coding, is learning aspects of computer science the next thing and how far are we along the road of the computer science and sport science getting closer together?”

”We are getting there. Not for everyone, but for some people I think it can be a new path to explore and something where you can start to play with all the data that are taken from the different devices now fairly present in professional environments and even at lower levels to use that information and help the team in different ways.

We teach a course here at the University which is exactly that, data science for sport scientists so the basics of how to process the data and machine learning and building models and evaluating the accuracy. I think that can be something interesting for sport scientists but again it doesn’t necessarily have to be what everyone should be doing but I think if some people start doing that I also think it helps the whole industry to have a better approach and more critical thinking around these solutions that are otherwise given to you and they are difficult to interpret if you don’t really understand how they work.”

”What is HRV and why should we be bothered about it?”

”HRV stands for Heart Rate Variability and it refers to the fact that the heart does not beat at a constant frequency there is always some variation between consecutive beats; and this variation is not random, it is actually caused by how the autonomic nervous system (ANS) modulates heart rhythm.

And since the ANS is changing its activity in response to stressors, measuring HRV becomes a way to capture our response to stress, so in short it is just a proxy for stress that is non invasive and easy to measure (such as hormonal changes which are harder to measure, and more expensive). We cannot measure the ANS directly either, we can only measures what the ANS influences that is Heart rhythm and that is why eventually we look at HRV because it becomes a proxy of these stressors.”

”What are the different ways we can measure HRV?”

Chest strap

”We can measure it traditionally using an electrocardiogram (ECG) which measures the electrical activity of the heart and that is the same technology you have today in a chest strap, so if you use an app that allows you to link to a strap with a sensor like Polar or Garmen then you are are measuring the electrical activity of your heart, and from the beat to beat differences you can compute your HRV.

Optical Methods

An alternative is with optical methods where there has been a lot of work for example an Oura ring or a Whoop device that you wear on your finger or on your wrist and they are measuring changes in blood volume. Of course the blood is flowing when the heart is beating so there is a very strong link between activity that you measure at the heart and the activity that you measure somewhere else.

At HRV4Training we use just the phone camera so you don’t need any sensor- the technology is the same because instead of having a dedicated sensor, we use a flash. The sensor would normally flash a green light or an infrared light so you can’t see it (but it’s there) then you have another receptor, an LED, that is capturing the reflection of the light so you can see these changes in blood volume. If you use a phone, it’s a similar story but the light source is the flash and you capture changes taking a video with the phone camera.

There is a caveat that not every device is equipped for this task as most devices are not. They need to be designed for this purpose, where as most are designed to measure heart rate and that makes the data sometimes not usable for HRV.”

”What would make optimal measuring conditions and maybe give some team sport context for that coach who is working with multiple athletes?”

”So first of all we need to contextualise what we are interested in measuring. We talk about HRV as a measure of stress and it is not really specific to a particular form of stress but it is very sensitive to all forms of stress. So that is why it can be useful because it can give us an idea of the response of the athlete to not only training but other forms of stress that they might be experiencing such as:

International travel
Illness
Intake of alcohol
Any sort of thing that impacts your ability to train and perform

Now if you want to look at this overall marker we cannot measure at any random time of the day or the night because the ANS is always continuously adjusting depending on the things we do. A lot of these adjustments are transitory and irrelevant for our application of interest, which is to quantify this overall stress.

So to quantify this ”baseline” stress level that results from the most impactful stressors and not just from any useless transition like having coffee or eating something, or walking up the stairs. We don’t care about those changes, we care about your state at rest as a result of the past few days of cumulative stressors and the strong ones that have really affected you.

Now to get a snapshot of that we have really two moments when we can take a measurement that are not impacted by all these other transitory stressors. These two moments would be either we measure:

During the entire night or
First thing in the morning when you wake up

If you use a device that looks at the night it is important it is the entire night or at least 4-5 hours because if you look for just a few minutes (like the Apple watch- which provides a few data points during the night) they are all over the place because the ANS activity is tightly coupled with the sleep stages, for example, and sleep stages happen on any given night at different times. So using a few data points it may be that the device is sampling when you are in deep sleep and another night you are in REM sleep, and there is going to be a very large difference and it has nothing to do with your baseline stress level, just the fact that you were in a different sleep stage.

Both Oura and Whoop provide the average of the night and provide the same data because they are using the same technique.

It is also important to be consistent and use only one time of day – you can’t use night during some days and morning other days. Also some athletes may forget if you tell them to take a measurement in the morning. Another consideration when working with teams is if you measure in the morning then you are measuring after the restorative effect of sleep and after the stressors have happened.

Night vs day measurements

If you are a team and you played a match in the evening then the overnight data will be more impacted by the game simply because it is earlier so it is likely that it will show a suppression, it does not mean that you have not recovered (in the morning) just that you are measuring very close to the source of stress. So the interpretation of the data needs to account for when you are measuring. So you can wait another day and see if things go back to normal and then you have nothing to worry about.

One thing is to talk about the raw data and HRV and make sure it is accurate and another thing is to look at readiness and recovery scores that are built on top of that, how that information is used and there indeed the discrepancies are obvious.

A good way to look at the wearables in general is to look at the metrics and see which ones they agree on and in which ones they don’t. The ones in which they agree are typically the ones you can rely on. So if you look at heart rate, HRV and temperature you will see they are very similar across devices but if you look at sleep stages, or readiness or recovery then they are all over the place!

Intensity of Training

The response to high intensity training will be a much higher suppression of HRV. The intensity will drive much of the change sometimes more than the volume. The menstral cycle is an important factor as you have variations that are linked to the changes in hormones. So if you have a reduction in HRV during the second phase of the cycle (accompanied by a slight increase in heart rate) that is quite typical and so that suppression is linked to something you are expecting, and so you don’t associate it with something else. Therefore you don’t attribute the change to something like a poor response to training. But the variability between women but also within the same person (across cycles) is so high that the HRV is not very easy to track the menstrual cycle that way but we must keep the cycle in mind.

Interpretation of the Data

You should collect data for a while in order to build the ”normal range” which is the range of values in which your data will be if there are no abnormal stressors and things are going well. The normal range is somewhere between one to two months. The baseline change is the weekly moving average so it is the weekly value with respect to the normal range.

At point then it is easy to flag deviations from this normal range so that you can identify potential issues so that is where we have had a data platform built where we can read data from. The night devices should also have the same as we feel we should be looking at the physiology and the response rather than building scores that confound that information.

If you have a suppression in HRV but on the day the athlete subjectively reports that they feel great then we don’t have such a reactive approach and do not change anything, and then we wait for the second day. If on the second day everything bounces back to normal, great. We haven’t done anything. If we have two or three days of suppression then at that point the baseline and the 7 day moving average will start to go down, and perhaps the 7 day moving average will go down below the normal range – and then we have a more chronic form of stress. It’s a repeated poor response so that is a good time to start looking at the reason for that change and possibly implement some changes in the programme. This could be manipulating load or prioritising other forms of recovery such as sleep which may have been neglected.

What you want to see, especially in a professional environment, is not these combinations of parameters and variables (readiness and recovery scores) – it is the actual response of the body (HRV) so that is what you should be looking at (the raw data and the physiology) but still be able to contextualise it with respect to an athlete’s normal, otherwise if there is a reduction you never know if it is meaningfully lower or it is just a bit lower, and you shouldn’t care because it is just normal day to day variability.

For example, you are doing a training camp so now you are training more and your readiness and recovery scores will penalise them for doing more because the model expects that when you do more you are less recovered. It is just as simple as that. But then that is not the information you care about – you want to see the actual response of the body – so if the HRV let’s say, is still within the normal range, then it means you had a good response to that increased load and that is exactly what you wanted to see.

The physiological data gives you the answer if they are responding well to the load or not

So when you put all this extra information in like sleep and activity level into some of these apps you end up knowing less because if it says your recovery/readiness is less, is it less because your body did not respond well, or was it because your sleep was a bit different or your activity was a bit different. This is not to say that sleep and activity are not important, they are, but they are context to see when there is a change, if it is coming from there or not. But it is not what you should be looking at when you are looking for the response, you should just be looking at the physiology- the HRV and how it responds in response to the stressors and not in combination with other parameters.

Top 5 Take Away Points:

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) – refers to the fact that the heart does not beat at a constant frequency there is always some variation between consecutive beats; and this variation is not random, it is actually caused by how the autonomic nervous system (ANS) modulates heart rhythm.
Chest straps vs Optical methods – chest strap measures the electrical activity of the heart whereas optimal methods measure blood volume to estimate HRV.
Time to measure – all night or first thing in the morning when you wake up are the two best times
Interpretation – it is important to establish a normal range before you start to interpret if the change in HRV was a meaningful change.
Interpretation – don’t be too reactive to just one day of suppressed HRV. It is better to pay attention to a few days of suppression before making a decision to act.

Want more info on the stuff we have spoken about?

Pacey Performance Podcast REVIEW – Episode 410 Shawn Myszka

This blog is a review of the Pacey Performance Podcast Episode 410 – Shawn Myszka

Shawn Myszka

Shawn is a Movement Skill Acquisition Coach at Emergence and currently serves as a personal performance advisor and movement coach for more than a dozen NFL players and has partnered with 108 NFL players and counting over 15 seasons.

In this episode, Shawn details his approach which dives into the world of ecological dynamics and a constraints led approach. He explains how his approach differs to a “traditional” approach of pre-planned movements and drilling them time after time. Shawn presents an example of a closed drill which aims to improve cutting and develops it into a much more open drill so the athlete has to react to a changing environment, much like they would have to do on game day.

🔊 Listen to the full episode here

Discussion topics:

”For those of us who don’t know much about your coaching philosophy can you share a brief background on yourself?”

Coaching agility is much more than setting up cones and letting the athletes run routes around them. Agility is much more than just change of direction ability. But with so much complexity to improve the physical quality of “agility”, how can we coach it effectively to ensure transfer to the field?

I view movement and movement skill as my main objective. I believe that sport is a problem solving activity where movements are just used to produce the necessary solutions

We can impact and influence how athletes are interacting with their environments in a much different way if we view movement and movement skill in this fashion. Things like ”abundance of strategies,” things like ”adaptability” and ”dexterity” these are things that have shaped my form of life, the way that I view movement and sport behaviour and performance.

I am very American Football orientated but I have co-founded and operate as the co Director of education of an movement skill & education company called Emergence.

”Are you employed directly by players or do you also do consultancy with teams as well?”

”I do some consultations with teams, usually it’s on a very short term situation where I will present to staff, I will come in an for one, two or three days and maybe analyse their practice activities and get into how it is I feel that they can make them more ALIVE, so that’s a term you’re probably going to hear me drop a few times – this idea of alive problems being solved within environments. Mostly I work directly with the players and become a personal performance advisor/movement skill acquisition coach for players that they and I lock arms with one another to attempt to polish and sharpen their craft – specifically how they behave on a field. It was the NFL players that referred to me as the ”Movement Miyagi.”

Obviously I still attack things like general physical qualities and general physical preparedness so I’m still doing weight room stuff. I actually used to be a strength & conditioning coach but I morphed into this role because I felt there was a major gap between what we were doing in the weight room and what they were doing on the field. I elected to exist within that gap and attack the gaps within their skill set, particularly from movement standpoint.”

”Why did you decide to go down that route to be known as a movement skill acquisition coach and really niche down in that area?”

Learning Environments that weren’t really learning environments

”I was finding that that gap was getting bigger and bigger – and the position coaches within the NFL are very intelligent when it comes to the X’s and O’s, tactics and strategy, principles of play, but really I have been on my soap box during this pre-season about some of the horse shit that is being done on individual drills, where position coaches are taking 10-20 minutes to work with individual players each and every day and they are decontextualised isolated drills- where there is rote repetition which is being prioritised. It starts to show us the limitations in how they view movement behaviour. But what I was finding was that gap was getting bigger and bigger because strength & conditioning professionals were really prioritising the same thing within their learning environments, that they weren’t really learning environments.

When they were addressing speed or change of direction qualities it was in highly irrelevant fashions to the way that it would be expressed on the football field. So I felt that that gap was getting bigger and the player was getting lost in the middle of this saying how do I put those physical qualities to use in highly practically relevant ways to functionally solve problems in my world?

That’s what the players care about – they are there to become better FOOTBALL PLAYERS. So everything that we do at either end should support and supplement their craft in that way – how they were having to solve problems, the abundance of movement strategies, the diversity withing strategy, their decision making, their perceptions, their actions all being coupled and intertwined in a way, that allows them to really connect to their environment and become more functional problem solvers and more dexterous movers.

People hear Movement Miyagi or movement skill acquisition coach and they think that what I’m doing is chasing perfect execution of motor patterns- motor system degrees of freedom. That’s what they view coordination of movement to be. I do not. I view it as movement skill in relation to one’s environment which is constantly changing, that has emerging and decaying opportunities and I want to assist the player in perceiving and selecting and acting upon those opportunities in their own unique and authentic fashion.

The position coaches really weren’t doing that, and the strength & conditioning coaches weren’t doing that because they don’t view movement skill in this fashion and so things like speed and acceleration and power and explosiveness wasn’t really being expressed on the field. That’s why I have been knocking on the door of the NFL to change and adjust its talent identification procedures particularly with the NFL combine, since 2013-14 I’ve been saying the stuff you are looking at isn’t actually overly relevant when it comes to how they are going to behave on a football field on NFL Sunday.

Listen, I understand there will be times when you will need to assist people in GAINING MORE – strength, speed, addressing things from an injury reduction standpoint and so on and so forth. But if it’s not actually finding its way out onto the football field in a competitive environment at some point when we move up those levels of mastery, we have to address some other things.”

”Bear with me because I have a theory. The ‘S’ side of the S&C coach is 90% of education when it comes to an under- or post-graduate education. So we are heavily educated in that area and that translates into a working environment? We like things in a box, to be measured. We are comfortable in that area. We are not comfortable when things get complex, or a little bit messy. There are a few coaches who like the messy and live in the messy and thrive in that area, but the majority [me included] like the package, like things to be in a row, like the drill where everyone looks the same. Would you agree with this theory?”

”I think you are 100% on point Rob. I think what you’ll find is that we have done what we have always done, we address it in ways that we have always addressed it so we don’t know what we don’t know, or we’re not willing to look at it through a slightly different lens.

We intuitively know that sport is much more about adaptability, that this world will be messy, that no two problems are ever going to be the same in sport. There will be sports that seem to be more repeatable that have less complexity and less interacting component parts. Yet when we really look at it, we see that there is a lot more messiness than we are willing to acknowledge, that one’s adaptability is still likely to be the calling card, the higher the levels of skill and mastery we go.

So something like running a 100m sprint on a track may at first seem like a very repeatable skill but we can still analyse the performer-environment relationship and attempt to facilitate a more functional athlete-environment relationship through and because of these changing constraints – the weather, the track, the shoes and rather than chasing this perfect technical model, perhaps what we want to chase is dexterity (Bernstein, 1960s).

The ability to find or organise a movement solution for any emerging movement problem under any situation and in any condition.

”How do you reconcile the struggle to fill the gap between the orderly approach of rote repetition and the chaos of the sporting action, and the need to reign it back in so I have more control. Would you say that people do struggle with this middle bit like I imagine they do?”

”As I found my way towards an ecological approach I realised that for the first 5-6 years of me working with NFL football players I was the traditionally minded individual that you were speaking to. I was chasing a rote repetition perfect technical model of almost any movement action or technique that the athlete could organise or coordinate.

At the end of the 2012-2013 season I remember asking myself the question really poignantly, ”Are the players performing on field because of the work we do, or in spite of the work we do? And I didn’t like the answer to that question. I very rarely saw them behaving with this perfect technical model that we had beaten the path towards with that traditional approach. If the athlete couldn’t behave in that way, I just felt they needed more repetition, or more feedback, or more instruction or more consistency. I realised I was neglecting decision making, I was neglecting perceptual information and I was really separating and segregating those processes of the human movement system.

Dexterity doesn’t live in the movements or actions themselves, but it lives in its interaction with the environment

So if it’s about interaction with the environment then that environment has to present some ALIVENESS.

When you chase that perfection you’re actually doing the athlete more harm than good when you do that. I was treating them with kid gloves, and somewhere along the way they became less prepared to adapt to the environment when the environment was going to ask that of them 50, 60 or 70 times a game in an NFL game on Sunday.

I can still manipulate constraints and scale the information so it’s a little less. So it isn’t this complete free for all. Self-organisation that goes a long with an ecological dynamics rational is not like a free for all, we don’t just let it go. It’s not like I don’t ever explicitly suggest or attempt to facilitate changes to behaviour for the athlete – but I let them try to figure some shit out on their own at times too!

Shift our hat from being a dictator to a little bit more of a facilitator by setting an environment where we don’t have all the answers and by attempting to manipulate the constraints so it does MEET THE ATHLETE AT THEIR CHALLENGE POINT, which is an art in and of itself.

”How would we as coaches make our way more towards the end of the coaching spectrum that you are talking about?”

We want alive learning activities not drills

”How can we immediately interject more ALIVENESS into the problem? If we are viewing sport movement behaviour as a problem solving activity, then how can we actually turn this into a problem that has has dimensional levels to it?

How can require more from the behavioural organisation of the movement system with PERCEPTION, COGNITION, INTENTIONS OR DECISIONS?

Cones are just boundaries! The only thing worse than a cone is an agility ladder!

We would remove those cones and put bodies there to promote aliveness. Rather than being inundated with information from coaches, let them reconnect with their own information about how their environment might be changing (which the environment in and of itself won’t be and with a cone the environment won’t be changing).

It doesn’t have to be an overly chaotic or complex environment, it could be just one where at least there are some moving bodies in it, that the athlete has to become sensitive to and attuned to because those moving bodies and the space they occupy, angles, speed and posture will all dictate the behaviour of the athlete who is going through the ”drill.”

We don’t need a tonne of messiness but we likely need either an opponent or a team mate in the space. How do we make it look and feel more like sport? (Notice I didn’t say identical to sport). An 11 vs 11 is the most representative but we don’t often exist there because they can’t always handle the amount of information from that complexity, so we might have to scale it down to 1 vs 1 or 1 vs 2, 2 vs 2, 3 vs 3 or more small sided game activities that we can all do if we use some more aliveness.

”Is there any place for closed drills, for example, you’ll hear coaches saying, we are just getting them warmed up before we drill down and then chuck them in. Is there any place for closed drills?”

”If you adopt an ecological dynamics framework where our relevant scope and scale of analysis is on the performer-environment relationship, and that athlete, particularly in a team based sport such as American football, isn’t going to have to coordinate, control and organise their movement behaviour NOT related to an OPPONENT or an alive environment, then I do not believe there is very much need at all.

Now it doesn’t mean that you couldn’t do it if you were trying to get them to open up their ACTION CAPABILITIES.

In order to act upon what we perceive we must have the action capabilities in order to act! All that is saying, is that I have to have access to that strategy within my movement toolbox. For example, if this situation requires me to execute a cross-over cut but I have tremendous knee tendinitis and I can’t cross-over on that leg I might have to scale down the information down to such a level that the athlete can explore and instead have a live opponent who is stationary. This will reduce the complexity and aliveness- the opponent isn’t moving. But at least if it’s a human and not a cone, they can still reach out and touch you, they are much bigger and even just putting a human there changes the behavioural organisation and what an athlete has to perceive. There are likely not looking down at the ground any more for that cone and instead looking at the posture and position of the opponent.

There might be a place for more closed drills (on a spectrum of fully closed to full open) but not in the traditional sense where we are telling them exactly how to move, exactly where to move, when to move etc.

That I think is the danger. Or, the situation where we are chasing the same model for everyone; talk about thinking as though we have all the answers! Movement behaviour in sport is a lot more complex than that! If you took the top 10 running backs in the NFL and presented them with similar behaving movement problems to solve, guess what? No two movement solutions are going to be the same. They could both functionally solve the movement problem- they would all make the defensive player miss (the tackle) but in their own authentic and unique way.

”The other end of the spectrum to what you are talking about is linear progression, it involves doing X drill, okay that’s successful, now we move onto this, making it more complex or whatever progression it might be. On the side you’re talking about the linear progression is not so obvious. How would you advise people to try and make sense of that to allow them to feel more confident in that world?”

Respect the non linearity and coach to the athlete’s model

”First we have to acknowledge, at least from an ecological dynamics rational, and we when look at complex dynamical systems, is behaviour and the interactions that lead to that behaviour is NON LINEAR. So small changes to the way that something that unfolds from a context standpoint, could lead to huge changes in the way in which the behaviour emerges.

We never stand in the same river twice.

Second point is we are constantly presenting the athlete different situations or contexts to test the stability or flexibility of the movement solution. If we start to see movement behaviour that is ‘stickier’ that maybe is emerging on a more frequent basis, well I want to test that ability to match or emerge in different problems. So I’m going to change positions and speeds of opponents and use different size spaces to work in. And all while I do that we are basically perturbing the system to see what else may emerge.

How do we chase it to begin with? Usually what I do if athletes are new to me I get them to be much more comfortable being uncomfortable, and I know that people say that all the time! So I try to inject more non-linearity and more complexity of the problems right off of the the bat.

So what we will do is give them some safety by putting them in the middle circle of a football pitch, with 5-8 athletes positioned around that circle and I’ll say you are going to go in (all at the same time) and you’re going to execute any number of movement strategies. You’re going to explore and search and see what’s in your tool box. You’re going to change direction and make evasive action and at times you can accelerate and decelerate and they’re all cutting in relation to each other. So it starts off in a pretty unrepresentative way (in the the game) but there is a lot of aliveness and a lot of non linearity but that’s where I begin!

Once we get them to come out of their shell and get them comfortable in the autonomy and re-organisation of those degrees of freedom in what they are perceiving, how they are intended to act all of a sudden they can put it to use in more representative problems and it’s there where we can have more linearity and more progression! We can take it in a step by step linear fashion, where first the opponent isn’t moving at all in a 5 x 10 yards space and the athlete’s only intention is to execute a cut in that space in relation to the stationary opponent. Notice I don’t say ”you have to cut in this fashion”, I’m just getting them to become more sensitive to the information which channels and guides their movement. Next the opponent has to be moving, maybe first it is straight towards the athlete but not very fast and in a more predictable fashion. Over time you simply progress the difficulty and uncertainty and the complexity and aliveness of the problem. After that I can have them do any number of things- the defender can change the angle they come in etc and it’s still a 1 vs 1 problem at this stage. I didn’t tell the athlete exactly how to move but I have enough control of the environment as the coach. And I am keeping their perceptions and actions coupled so their movement behaviour is in relation to a changing problem, not a tonne of aliveness but enough that they can become sensitive to key movement information variables.

Top 5 Take Away Points:

Decontextualised isolated drills- where there is rote repetition – is being prioritised but it’s time to adopt an ecological dynamics model
One’s adaptability is still likely to be the calling card, the higher the levels of skill and mastery we go.
ALIVENESS – We want alive learning activities not drills
We never stand in the same river twice – so respect the non-linearity of movement.
We can still create progression within an ecological dynamics approach

Want more info on the stuff we have spoken about?

Tennis Conditioning Blueprint – Groundstrokes Ebook

September 17, 2022/in Ebooks /by dazdrake

Tennis Conditioning Blueprint – Groundstrokes

Tennis Match KPIs – FREE Ebook

September 17, 2022/in Ebooks /by dazdrake

Tennis Match KPIs

Best Speed & Plyo Drills for Acceleration – Part 1

September 11, 2022/in APA Blog /by dazdrake

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted a blog, which has been down to several different reasons.

Firstly, in July APA were officially offered the contract to run the strength & conditioning programme at Bromley Tennis Centre.

This is an incredible opportunity for APA to continue our work in supporting elite junior tennis players in the UK and so I was hard at work behind the scenes in late July and early August interviewing for the Head of S&C role and two assistant coach roles. This was on top of my interviews for the next intake of APA interns, of which I had selected four coaches who will be based at Gosling Tennis Academy.

Secondly, I have made a conscious decision to spend a little less time on social media so my posts have been less frequent across all means including this blog; and thirdly, to be perfectly blunt, I want to share things when I think I have something noteworthy to share!

As it relates to noteworthy topics I was given a recent nudge by one of my athlete’s father, who is also my business partner on the Junior Player Fitness App who recently asked me how my unofficial PhD was going, referring to my research to underpin the APA Method, that I hope will help transport APA to being regarded as the ”Best Tennis S&C Team in the World.”

You might recall I broke the research into four areas:

Movement
The Serve
Ground strokes
Tennis Match KPIs

I recently created a mind map to help me brain storm methods to research further that I think will take the APA Method to the next level, and help us to stand out as the Best in Class for what we do.

So I thought it was time to give you an update and home in on a topic that has recently peaked my interest – ”bounding.” I see this as being one of the key elements as it relates to Movement. In this Part 1 I want to introduce the background (the ”Why”). In Part 2 I’ll focus on the jumping drills – bounding (the ”How.”). Finally, in part 3 I’ll discuss the speed drills – acceleration (the ”How.”)

Best Speed & Plyo Drills for Acceleration

Background to the Blog

After I did the research on Tennis movement there were a few things that were left unresolved in my mind in terms of the best approach to develop movement, and specifically acceleration. However, it seems like a lot of pieces of the jigsaw puzzle have started to fall into place (the world seems to have a canny way of creating opportunities like that if you are ready to receive them). It started with some useful insights in an old instagram post from Alex Natera on his preferred stationary drills to teach Acceleration. This was quickly followed by specific guidance on bounding from US High school Coach of the Year John Garrish in a Pacey Performance podcast. Then most recently I caught another podcast with Mike Boyle (Strength coach Podcast Episode 342) and I read an article on sportsmith on ”shin roll” and its importance in Acceleration.

My interest in this topic as owner of APA, is focused on selecting exercises for the APA Method that make the biggest impact on the Movements that Matter.

I have been reluctant to utilise methods whole heartedly until I have understood the biomechanical and physiological underpinning qualities associated with them. So that’s why I first did a review of all the Power research (see some of the articles on Triphasic Method, the Force-Velocity Curve for Tennis, and Weighted jumps.)

This enabled me to review the APA Method for Strength/Power and the exercises suitable to develop: Maximum Strength, Explosive strength, Ballistic strength and reactive strength.

Acceleration Development

This blog will focus on the most recent research I did on jump exercises that aid in acceleration development, so those jumps that aid in deceleration will be addressed in another blog.

Most people assume that when I am talking about jump training, I’m talking about ‘plyometrics.’ However, I think it is important to highlight at this point in the blog, that not all jump exercises are plyometric (even though I mention plyos in the title of this blog)! When you look at the movement demands of tennis you find there are jumps occurring where emphasis is on the concentric part of force production.

I also want to be clear on what type of tennis movement I am specifically referring to by breaking down the tennis movement into different phases that characterise tennis sprints. For example, to quote Matt Kuzdub, ”an elite 100m sprinter might reach maximum sprinting velocity between the 50-80m mark while a tennis player needs to reach their highest attainable court speed within a 5-15m distance. And all these sprints still require that the player gets off to a good start.” I like that Matt refers to it as top (court) speed instead of max speed or top speed.

In a 15m sprint to get to a drop shot, there are different phases that characterise the sprint:

–> the start (0-1m)

–> the acceleration (1-5m)

–> the top court speed (5-10m)

–> the deceleration (10-15m)

For the purpose of this blog, I am mostly talking about the physical qualities associated with ”acceleration.” For ease of explanation I’ll include both 1-5m and 5-10m as acceleration in my definition.

Maximum Strength- (First step speed, 0-1m)

Force production

Force production demands are highest during the initiation of movement (after the serve and after the change of direction from a wide ball), as well as when the player is wrong footed (see below).

The so-called ”starting movements‟ executed without ”counter-movement‟ (for example: the body’s static inertia) are best trained against heavy resistance in my opinion, and the major role is played by Maximal Strength and the Explosive Strength, expressed in an isometric regime.

For the most part, this form of force production will be addressed best with heavy strength training, but we can use jump exercises that start from a stationary position (without counter movement) and emphasise concentric only actions – such as:

–> Single leg hops to box

Explosive Strength – (Acceleration, 1-10m)

In the sport of tennis there are various actions that place high requirements on explosive strength. Leg drive on serves, and the take off phase of big ground strokes, as well as the initial acceleration to the ball, to propel the body in the direction of the ball over the first 10 metres (see below).

Matt Kuzdub refers to this acceleration ability as their top ‘court speed.’ We want players to hit their top court speed as soon as possible when tracking down tough balls (drop shots, angled shots, wide balls, serve and volley, lobs etc).

When the explosive movement is executed with ”counter-movement‟, i.e., in the reversal yielding-overcoming (“eccentric-concentric”) regime, the major role is played by the Explosive Strength expressed in the overcoming (“concentric”) regime.

Acceleration to the ball – when first moving to the ball following the split step we’re actually not moving fast at all, but we are generating high forces. The initial acceleration to the ball requires explosive strength. Those first several strides are characterised by longer ground contact times. The more force we can develop in these first few steps, the faster we can displace ourselves. Explosive Strength expressed in the overcoming (“concentric”) regime will be a key physical quality.

Think Olympic Lifts (80-90% 1RM) and Back squats 60-80% 1RM with 2-5 reps occurring within a given set and complete rest being achieved after each set.

I personally view high force – high speed methods like Olympic lifts and explosive back squats (aka 55-80 power phase after Triphasic method in Cal Dietz training model) as ”best fits” to develop the explosive strength required for the initial acceleration (1-5m) to the ball. This is based on the assumption that the player is performing a full sprint such as when chasing down a drop shot!

I’m thinking that Heavy Sleds might be a good fit here but I haven’t incorporated them yet so watch this space

I may also do some concentric enphasis plyos – I’ll leave you to argue if they fit better for First step or Acceleration (or Alex as he is far smarter than me):

Weighted Squat Jump
1 leg Smith Squats to box
Bungee Broad Jump
1 leg Broad jump to low box
Box hop onto high box from box sit
Loaded stair bounds (weighted vest)
Resisted block start – bungee
Resisted acceleration – sled

Thanks to Alex Natera for the inspiration for the exercises above.

Ballistic Strength

In the sport of tennis there are various actions that place high requirements on ballistic strength. Acceleration phase on serves, and ground strokes, as well as most tennis movements within a few metres. Think:

–> Loaded jump squats (30-60% 1RM), med balls and slow SSC plyos

The majority of tennis movements are performed using ”footwork” patterns such as side shuffles and cross-over steps as well as steps towards the ball where there is more hip and knee flexion and more time in contact with the ground (such as a wide running forehand). Therefore slow SSC plyometrics fit well here- with emphasis on hip based jumping exercises.

How To Hit the Running Forehand

I’m not going to talk in this blog about reactive strength. In the sport of tennis there are various actions that place high requirements on reactive strength. Racket head speed on serves, and ground strokes, as well as tennis split steps and most lower intensity movements that don’t require you to move much at all. Think fast SSC plyos which are also useful for top speed sprinting (although top speed is not specific to tennis).

As it relates to Ballistic Strength and slow SSC plyos, I wanted to get a bit more clarity on the type of plyometric activities we could use for the APA Method. I want to focus in particular on the wide running forehand. I have to give Jez Green and also Dave Bailey credit for putting me on to the idea many years ago, that the running forehand is more like a triple jump (from track & field) than it is like a sprint.

There is a clear conversion of horizontal force into a vertical force effort (at ball contact) and I just think it’s one of the shots (which has a specific footwork technique) that sign posts the S&C coach to a type of plyometric activity that would fit best with such an important movement in Tennis. It’s not a full out sprint (so the technical model for acceleration doesn’t quite fit) and it only requires movement over a few metres; so what could we use to overload the skill of hitting a running forehand beyond just practising doing the shot itself?

And that’s when I get to the 3 Hop for distance……

John Garrish – Bounds for Distance

If I’m totally honest I stayed in my comfort zone for most of my career when it came to bounding – meaning, I didn’t do any with Tennis players. It was on my ‘To Do List’ to spend some time with local track & field coaches. But no matter how hard I tried to hide from them, bounding kept showing up in my socials and coaches I respect kept mentioning them.

I stick to my mostly bilateral jump progressions but then I catch two podcasts in the space of a few weeks – John Garrish talking about bounding and Mike Boyle talking about the 3 Hop for Distance, so I decide to get to grips with this! Before I get specifically into the 3 Hops for Distance I’ll talk more generally about bounding first.

The podcast with John put me onto his instagram where he has done a terrific job of explaining the differences between bounding and max velocity, and also the biomechanical differences between speed bounding versus bounding for distance.

Speed bounds and bounds for distance are quite different, both intentionally and technically. Speed bounds more closely mirror sprint postures and the mechanics of acceleration. John recommends Bounds for distance first, to clearly differentiate bounding from sprinting.

Bounds for distance – hind-foot

A couple of takeaways from the Instagram posts:

–> The #1 cause of shin discomfort is ball/toe first bounding, rather than hind-foot contacts

–> We see hind-foot contacts in many sporting movements

–> Power skips, approach jumps, dunks, headers, high jump, long jump

–> But bounding progressions are harder to master (gallops and skips) because the penultimate step in these actions (the initial ground contact after flight) is more stiff on the front of the foot

–> This is especially true when using ‘for distance’ (vs. ‘for height.’). The second ground contact (the leg that will perform the jump) will be heel first, rolling ground contact.

This also helped me develop a framework for introducing bounding into the APA Method:

Gallops –> Power skips –> Bounding

In terms of the progressions within bounding itself:

Lateral bounds –> In place Vertical bound –> Forward (heel) hops –> Forward into Vertical hop –> Hop Bound Combo

I’ll give examples of all of these in Part 2 of the blog.

Mike Boyle – 3 Hop for Distance

Finally, I just wanted to touch on what I heard Mike have to say on the topic of 3 Hop for Distance.

Mike posted on twitter, ”Would you ever actually do a unilateral hop for distance if you weren’t testing? I’m curious. We only hop for reactivity and height, never distance.”

I love that Mike says that sometimes like a lot of people, he is looking for a little bit of validation, ‘Is this odd, or am I odd?”, when he looks at that idea. So I hear all these people say you have got to do this lateral hop, and 3 hop for distance and multiple hop whatever…and all these return to play tests. And does anyone ever programme these tests in when it is NOT a return to play situation? So that was the question.

Mike doesn’t. Mike’s plyometric programme is generally not based around max effort jumps or hops.

”So we don’t say I want you to do 3 hops on your left leg and try to cover as much ground as you can. We will generally lay out three hurdles that are layed out at a set distance and then get that athlete to negotiate their way through the three hurdles. And so, the ACL world is weird as there is a lot of emperor wearing new clothes (meaning a situation in which people are afraid to criticize something because everyone else seems to think it is good or important).”

Why would you do it for rehab if you don’t do it with your healthy athletes?

People don’t want to speak up and they don’t want to ask the questions that I’m asking right now in terms of why did open chain stuff come back, why are we testing and listing a return to play test as important, as you never did it before, never did it in training and you will never do again, and yet that is going to determine whether or not you are ready to play? I think that is very odd. So a 3 Hop for distance or a single leg vertical hop left and right are not really trained, and the reality is that they are not being done in a lot of return to play training programme that I’m looking at and yet suddenly they pop up as tests. I just think that is a bit strange.”

Mike feels we don’t do repeated (3 Hops) in sport.

”Okay you might get at some point a 2 Hop situation in sport where you land on one leg and then you stutter and hop again and you land on the same leg, but in general that’s not done. Running is opposition, running is right to left, is basically a bounding action versus a hopping action. So when people use the 3 Hop for distance to help athletes run fast I don’t think that is a good argument because multiple take offs and landing on the same leg is NOT normal. In triple jump you do, but in general it doesn’t happen, you don’t see multiple hops.

I get that you need to do multi hops but do I need to do that for maximum distance, because now there is exposure to gravity and flight time etc and I think it gets a bit dicey when you add the distance component.”

Mike also doesn’t like Broad Jump for maximum distance for the same reason because of the risk of straining your ACL (or similar) when you get competitive guys to do competitive things – such as trying to hit a PB in a SBJ preparing for the NFL combine. It can end badly when you are trying to extend your SBJ out and perhaps land in a heap on the ground in a ball with ass to grass.

I feel like this has already become the longest blog ever on justification for bounding, so I’ll pretty much leave it there. But before I do, I’ll just give you this journal article for your consideration – Vertical and Horizontal Hop Performance_contributions of the hip, knee and ankle

Percentage Work Contributions from the Hip, Knee and Ankle

I think that if the goal is to develop hip based jumping exercises then probably the 3 Hop will be good in that regard (horizontal hop has 44.3% contribution from hip). But given that there is little contribution of the knee in a horizontal hop I’d be inclined to use a horizontal into vertical hop, in order to better recreate the expression of force in a wide running Forehand. I think the vertical component of the leg drive up into the ball (34.1% contribution of knee in a vertical hop) will be important.

And if I’m looking for a plyometric activity that best prepares for a more extreme ”running Forehand” I’d be going to bounds for distance…….

Hope you have found this article useful.

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