What Actually Makes an Athlete Faster? | Dr Eddie McGuinness

Yeah, no, that's really good.

And then that brings us on to the main bit.

You were looking at testing and profiling.

Now, I would have thought of speed profiling as categorizing sprinters or runners in general into the pushers and pullers stuff.

But you're looking at something different there in terms of your speed profiling.

Give us an overview of what it is you mean by profiling and then why that might be important for coaches.

Yeah, so I think the pushers and pullers concept can often come from the work that was popularised by JB Marin and Pierre Samosino, which is around force velocity profiling.

So I wasn't interested in that as much.

The profiling for me, And sprint profiling, speed profiling for me, of course anti-profiling is a comprehensive assessment of an athlete's physical qualities.

But in the case of sprint profiling, it's a comprehensive assessment of their linear sprint performance, their acceleration and max velocity.

So, you know, timing in a lab setting, timing those qualities in terms of time, but also in terms of speeds, particularly as it relates to maximum velocity.

And it has many uses, to be honest.

So I think we'll probably touch on this as well, but let's make the assumption that the testing is conducted reliably because that's a big thing.

So once the testing is conducted reliably, And we want to assess acceleration and maximum velocity.

It has a number of benefits.

So number one, like any testing, we can see someone's progress over time and see if they're improving, disimproving, which obviously tells us about our training.

Is it working? The next thing then is if, let's say John, his max velocity is good but his acceleration maybe isn't, so we can compare his data to other players in his position or other teammates of his, we can obviously inform our training practices to focus on, let's say a cluster of players can focus on improving their acceleration performance or their max velocity.

So it helps inform their training priorities for the S&C coach.

The next thing I'd say then is it can be a very useful tool for talent identification.

So if you're working with an underage development squad, you could be testing 80, 100 players, identifying players who have very high levels of speed can be very useful.

Maybe they haven't developed the technical skills yet, but as we know, and particularly in the modern games of hurling and football, Speed is really, really important to create separation, evasion, pursuit.

So it can be useful in Talent ID.

And then one thing that I think it may be useful for, the other reasons are probably stronger, is potentially informing positions.

So we've often come across a male or female player who... maybe they're good at a lot of things and we're not quite sure on their position, but if they have really well-developed, let's say, acceleration, maybe they're more suited to being maybe more full back line, full forward type of player where that acceleration, your ability to win primary possession, or win, sorry, possession is essential.

So I think, yeah, so that's probably an overview answer of the speed profiling and its uses.