Sports Science

Bryce Murphy

Sports Science at Scale: What the Military Can Learn from IMG Academy

Bryce works with roughly 1,600 athletes across 12 sports at IMG Academy. We brought him on to talk about what actually goes into managing that many athletes, how much of the data makes it into training decisions, and whether elite sport has this whole sports science thing figured out.

Spoiler: they're still working on it, too.

What we get into:

— Everybody's collecting. Who's actually using it? Bryce watched Catapult take off in American football in 2015. Suddenly everybody was wearing the bra, but the training often looked suspiciously similar. Collecting more information is easy enough. Explaining what you changed because of it gets a little harder.

— People and processes. Alex likes graphs. Drew likes tables. A seemingly small detail, until you realize the person receiving your report has no interest in reading it. Before getting too excited about the technology, you probably need to understand how your coaches make decisions.

— Same run, very different workouts. Put the whole unit on the same run at the same pace and your fittest soldier gets a warm-up while your least fit soldier fights for his life. We know this. We keep doing it anyway. Bryce sees versions of the same thing in sport, where having the information to individualize training doesn't necessarily mean it happens.

— What earns its place at IMG. Bar velocity informs programming. Athlete availability shapes sessions. Mental performance assessments guide group work. But none of that earned a permanent seat at the table just because somebody thought it was interesting. Coaches had to explain why they were collecting something and how they used it. 

— About that readiness dashboard… We'd all love a little green light telling us to send it. Unfortunately, the human being attached to the dashboard remains a bit more complicated. We get into force plates, Omega Wave, and how much confidence we should put in the numbers. As Bryce put it, placebo is a hell of a drug.

Mentioned in this episode:

IMG Academy — imga.com
Catapult Sports — catapult.com
Martin Buchheit — 30-15 Intermittent Fitness Test
Kinexon — local positioning system
The Sports Gene — David Epstein
Adrian Peterson — the ACL rehab highlight reel that got Alex through his own recovery

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Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.