Avoiding Stagnation: Minimizing the Effect of Biological Accommodation.
The Role of the Performance Therapist
If you have ever worked in high performance at any point, it requires that everyone has a defined role, often determined by education and or licensure, but at the same time everyone must work together to manage the athlete and do what is best for the athlete and their career.
For this reason, the role of the therapist in performance can be a tricky one to navigate, Oftentimes, the therapist is unsure as to how to fit into the performance team and how their skills are most effectively used, as the traditional concept of augmenting an athletes’ performance has been about strength and conditioning and skill/technique based work. This usually results in the therapist only being consulted when an athlete is injured, feels sore, or is in need of some “tissue work” for some regenerative purpose.
It is the role of the athlete management team to monitor for the signs of performance stagnation. Recall, that plateaus in performance are the result of neurological boredom on the part of the athlete, meaning there are less ways to accomplish performance outcomes required by the athlete so they become stagnant or “trapped” in certain behaviours. It is the view of Absolute that underlying this stagnation is internal biological accommodation whereby the internal ecological niches are undergoing the process of degradation. We discussed the the Biological Law of Accommodation and our perspective of what it means to us.
Having had numerous experiences being part of athlete management, the role of the therapist is paramount to understanding the effects of stagnation and biological accommodation.
The two major skills of a high quality performance therapist are their eyes and their hands. This leads to the third major skill of the performance therapist, which is related to their cognition. The ability of the therapist to gather information from their eyes and hands and use what is needed to make important decisions regarding management of the athlete. Thus, the ability to repeatedly observe movement behaviours and haptically understand the movement qualities of the biological tissues required to perform the movement places the therapist in a prime position on any high-performance team to provide valuable insight as to how or why the movement dynamics of the athlete are in their current state and make decisions regarding how to change them.
Here is a recent example, working with a professional hockey player who was having difficulty with certain skating techniques that involved edgework (pushing on the inside edge), the initial acceleration (also involving the inside edge, although different part of the blade), as well as getting to the end of the full stride. These were causing a sudden detriment to the athlete’s speed and agility, two important skills that made him evasive and effective at his position. As a result, his play suffered, his confidence in certain game situations decreased which led to a change of decision making on the ice that minimized his effectiveness but also had effects on team play (puck possession time, puck retrievals, defensive zone coverage)
In watching the athlete on the ice, these deficiencies were clearly observed on the right side. It was evident that the foot, and therefore the skate and subsequently the edge of the blade were not getting into the appropriate positions that would allow for the improvement in mechanics and allow the athlete to produce the amount of force necessary to generate speed. These were all skills that the athlete possessed earlier and have subsequently become “lost”. Quite simply stagnation had occurred and was wreaking havoc not only on the athlete but on their interpretation of the game.
Keeping in mind that stagnation is a mechanism of the nervous system, when it occurs it is imperative that an understanding of the biological elements is sought. This is the value of being a therapist on a high-performance team and when managing an athlete for performance. Using the hands, the therapist is able to feel and engage with all biological elements relevant to the neurological stagnation of skill to determine if there is a relationship between them, and if there is, understand how to link them together to allow for a change in system behaviour that drives future improvement.
In my own experience, having a process is extremely important. I heard Stu McMillan speak about this and it really resonated. This allows the therapist to gain knowledge and insight into the athlete and their current state of abilities, whether those abilities have the potential to improve and at what rate, and making the necessary but not always easy decisions regarding the” how, when, where and why” behind the need for any therapeutic interaction and intervention.
The process:
Observe the athlete performing isolated movement skills relevant to their sport. These could represent the foundational or fundamental movements that the athlete must be able to perform. In addition, watch the athlete during their performance to associate what is observed during isolation to what is observed in game play situations. Using the eyes and an understanding of sport performance the therapist can then create the necessary cognitive loop that helps define where more information within the biological system needs to be gathered. These qualifications of system behaviour during performance allow for the identification of important areas that need further analysis, thus this can be called the identification stage.
Analyze the athlete based on the qualitative observations from step 1 and use the lens of the relative norms of the athlete. Understanding the concept of relative norms is critical in the process. Relative relates to the athlete not to the group. High performance is individually specific (and is also relative) so when the therapist analyzes the athlete currently, the knowledge of current behaviour must be relative to previous states of the athlete as this is an important calibration tool to know where and how to move to the athlete out of stagnation.
This begets a small discussion of the purpose of an analysis and trying to differentiate that from an assessment. Many people don’t differentiate “assessment” from “analysis,” but there is an important difference and, while it might sound minor the words do have specific and very different meanings.
An assessment is defined as the act of making a judgement about something. To assess something, you are estimating the value or character of that thing. In doing so, you are superficially associating an opinion to something that does not account for the depth of information you possess about that thing. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, an “analysis” is defined as the careful study of something to learn about its parts, what they do and how they are related to each other. To analyze something is to separate a whole into its component parts, which allows a person to break something complex down into simpler and more basic elements.
The act of breaking the system down into more manageable components allows the therapist to analyze explicit reference points about the biological elements and how they may correlate to the stagnation of performance. The more reference points the therapist can create that provide meaning, the better decisions can be made down the line.
The analysis and the gathering of reference points relate to how the therapist uses the information, compares it to previous states of the athlete where performance outputs were higher and can then explicate how to re-calibrate the system to these more desirable outputs. Step 2 implies information gathering that must be rationalized within the context of the athlete and how they have stagnated and accommodated is therefore referred to as the interpretation stage.
This is the intervention stage. Using the information from step 1 and 2, the performance therapist must apply the most appropriate form of intervention to improve the system qualities of the biological elements both in time and over time. Confidence and high quality clinical skills are necessary to apply the most appropriate intervention at the most logical system level.
The last stage of the process is termed integration. Managing an athlete for performance (and minimizing stagnation) requires a team approach. It is important that as changes are made to the biological elements over time, they are continually integrated into training inputs, and the athlete’s skill work to allow for the neurological representation of the different outputs required as well as the different representations of the skills necessary at the level of competition. This requires that the performance therapist works closely with the strength coach and skill coach.
The performance therapist plays a significant role in minimizing the effects of biological accommodation and should be an important part of any high performance team involved in athlete management.