Understanding Sport Science: Research, Evidence & Coaching | Dr David Nolan

Question now, you being, because I want to frame this around like, partly what is sports science, but largely using critical thinking or the scientific method of thinking, I suppose, as coaches and as S&Cs.

But I don't expect like a definitive answer to this, but even just to get you thinking, what's the difference between an S&C and a sports scientist?

That's a good question.

I suppose sports science is the umbrella term, you could say, kind of sports science, performance studies, and then a strength and conditioning coach is a prong from that.

It's one area.

And again, we're trying to talk to coaches, and I think too many of us academics and scientists make the mistake of, either through our own ego, try to use language that's inaccessible to coaches.

We want to keep it accessible as we can.

But when we think of athletes... and how we get performance.

We work with what we call complex systems.

There's so many different factors that goes into whether an athlete or whether a team plays well on the day.

And, you know, nutrition, psychology, sleep, the preparations gone in, the weather, there's so many different things that we can control and not control.

And to kind of quote a very good coach, Stu McMillan, He would have a great way of phrasing.

We're trying to get our athletes to like a 7 out of 10 on average across all those things.

You know, we can't be perfectionists and everything.

But we're trying to get people to a 7 out of 10.

But that's a long-winded way of saying we work in a complex system.

So...

The strength and conditioning works with one area or a handful of those areas in that overall complex system.

And that is at its core, you are there to physically develop the athletes.

You are there to, now I think strength and conditioning, one of the worst things it ever did was call itself strength and conditioning because it pinches and holds itself into gym work and running.

And then You're maybe underappreciated by coaches and by technical coaches of how the S&C can influence because I always say good S&C happens in the shadows that players don't even know it's the S&C coach having an influence.

But our job fundamentally is strength and conditioning has two primary goals.

it is to improve the performance of the athletes.

So that is to improve their physical qualities, their strengths, power, all of these physical qualities that they can express themselves in their sport to a higher degree.

So that is they can run faster, last longer, jump higher, whatever it may be.