If you want to help your athletes maximize their potential, you need to have a system to assess athletic qualities.
This is important to individualize programming and monitor progress.
We follow a few steps in our system:
1. Identify the athletic qualities needed in a sport
2. Identify an assessment to measure this quality
3. Determine the technology needed
Here are the athletic qualities we value at Champion, and how we assess them.
To view more episodes, subscribe, and ask your questions, go to mikereinold.com/askmikereinold.
#AskMikeReinold Episode 352: What Athletic Qualities Do We Test (and How)?
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Transcript
Student:
All right, we got Steve from Arizona. He asked, “We are building out a new testing protocol for our athletes training at my facility. I know Champion incorporates a lot of sports science and data testing to help program their athletes. Can you share what athletic qualities you test and how you test them at your gym?”
Mike Reinold:
All right, I like this. This is a good question. Let’s divide this up a little bit. Let’s start with Diwesh. Maybe Diwesh can say what are the athletic qualities that we care about. And then maybe Jonah, from his sports science lens, can say, “Great, for each of those qualities, how do we test them?”
Because that is how we come up with our testing. That’s why we test what we test, is going through that same thing.
So Diwesh, you’re an athlete coming to Champion. What are the qualities that you care about for most of our athletes? What do you think?
Diwesh Poudyal:
Yeah, I’m going to take a little bit of a step back before we jump into just getting obsessed with the data-driven type stuff because I think athletic qualities are a lot more overall encompassing than just running and jumping and stuff.
So, we definitely want to make sure that we assess how well people are moving. So their coordination, ability to move their joints, ability to control their body in space, general mobility, stability. So, we’re taking care of all that stuff.
And then just seeing just how they do basic athletic movements like skipping and things like that when we have them warm up to get ready for their testing, even that’s part of our test. You know what I mean? That’s a subjective test for me, with my eyes, to see how well they coordinate their body. So, just general movement quality is a big one.
And then from there, the other ones that you’re probably looking to hear are: we want to assess speed in some way, in a linear fashion. We want to assess change of direction or the ability to cut and change directions. We want to assess some semblance of lower body power in a couple of different ways. I’ll let Jonah get into that a little bit more. And then we want to test some semblance of raw strength, just force production.
And then we’ll throw in some other stuff in there, depending on what specific populations we’ll get. We do a little bit of rotational power testing with our baseball people. With our more advanced people, we might do some more force velocity profiling type stuff. But for the most part, it’s taking care of movement quality, speed, cutting, power, strength.
Mike Reinold:
Love it. And I think that’s a great baseline, right? That’s a great starting point.
And remember too, I will say this, is why do we do this? One is to assess where they’re at, but it’s because we’re going to use this to program for them. That’s the whole point of any testing sequences, that you use this to actually build a program. Otherwise, you’re just testing to test. So sure, we’ll show progress and that’s helpful for them, but it’s to help us get these people better.
So, Jonah, based on those athletic qualities, what do we do for tests?
Jonah Mondloch:
Yeah, so I think a big piece is trying to acknowledge what equipment you have or what technology you have and matching the types of tests you’re using to that.
So right now, for the lower body power aspect that Diwy was talking about, we have our force plates. We do a counter movement jump, a squat jump, and a hop test. The thought process behind that is in the counter movement jump, you’re assessing more of that slower stretch shortening cycle and bigger or deeper positions. So you’re going into a full squat. For the hop test or the ten five hop test, we’re assessing our fast stretch shortening cycle. So minimal knee bend, and that’s going to be more of a tendon-driven test with the really short ground contact times. And then squat jump, we’re trying to take out the stretch shortening cycle. So you’re holding that bottom position for three seconds and then going straight up.
I would only use that combination of tests because we have force plates. If you don’t have force plates, a squat jump is going to be really, really hard to do because visually seeing whether or not somebody adds in a counter movement can be tough. And as soon as you have any sort of dip, that’s going to skew your numbers. So we’re only able to use that combo of tests because we have force plates.
For people that are using a Vertec or people that are using a jump mat, you’re going to want to use different tests. Maybe it’s just a counter movement jump.
Or even people with different kinds of athlete populations. If you have a lot of basketball players, maybe you care… Okay, what’s their general lower body power with hands on hips? How well can they coordinate by adding an arm swing and then an approach jump? Because that’s going to matter a lot for basketball.
So within the lower body power sphere, there’s a lot of different good tests you can use. And I think you have to identify who are the athletes we’re testing, and then what kind of equipment do we have, and what specific test matches that equipment well.
For speed, based on our space limitation, we only have the space to do a 10-yard dash with a three-yard buildup. If we had more space, maybe we would do a 30-yard sprint with splits at 10, 20, and 30 to try to profile who’s really good at acceleration versus who’s better when it comes to top-end speed.
So again, that’s another example where we have to, based on our space, decide what tests we’re going to do. If we didn’t have laser timing gates, we honestly probably wouldn’t measure speed because if you’re trying to do it with a stopwatch at this point in time, that’s just not going to be accurate enough, and there’s really not much point in doing that.
And then once we’ve done all these tests, the goal of it is to help us identify what are the strengths of our athletes, what are the weaknesses. And during certain times of the year, we want to spend time building up those weaknesses. As we’re approaching the season, we want to make them good at what they’re already really good at. So we’re using all these different numbers to skew the programming in the direction that’s going to help that athlete out long-term.
For younger athletes, we probably spend even more time building up weaknesses. For older college athletes, maybe there’s not enough time left in their career to get really good at what they’re not good at, so we’ll just spend even more time focusing on what they are good at and trying to turn those into true superpowers.
Mike Reinold:
Love it. What about change of direction?
Jonah Mondloch:
What we use is a Pro-Agility or 5-10-5. Again, it’s partially limited based on space. We don’t really have the room to do, say, a T-test. I do think the Pro-Agility is a pretty solid test, as long as you’re thinking of it as a change of direction test and not an agility test. If you really want to get into agility, you do need some level of reactive component. But we’re using it just to measure change of direction ability. And if someone plays a sport where they need to be good at that, and they’re not, then we can spend more time working on the deceleration aspect because that’s likely what they’re missing if they’re not good on their 5-10-5.
Mike Reinold:
Nice. And I don’t think you hit strength either. What do we do for strength?
Jonah Mondloch:
Yeah, so partially we’re testing strength every time somebody’s in the gym. So for athletes, as we’re seeing their weights go up, we can look over and say… We spend enough time around kids. “Oh, this is a high school sophomore dumbbell benching 70-pound dumbbells.” That’s a pretty strong kid. So we are getting that regular assessment just by watching them work out.
But then we do for younger athletes on a monthly basis… We do an open-ended set where they’re doing as many reps as they can on the main exercises, and we’re using that as our measure of strength. That way it just works in the flow of what they already do.
For older athletes or people who have started to hit certain strength levels, we’ll use an isometric mid-thigh pull. An isometric belt squat would be another good option. They’re great tests because you can do them with fairly minimal fatigue. So it’s a test we can keep using throughout the season to make sure that we’re not losing strength as the season goes on without having to do a one or a five-rep max and crush the person when they have a game two days later.
Mike Reinold:
Awesome. So you can see there’s a bunch of athletic qualities that I think we consider are kind of like the bread and butter, the things we do. Here’s a good example, though.
Mike Scaduto, you work with a lot of golfers, right? What athletic qualities do you look at when you go through somebody’s TPI and golf performance assessment at Champion? What athletic qualities do you look at?
Mike Scaduto:
Yeah, I think it’s picking and choosing really from the ones that were just mentioned. I think being able, in terms of power production… A vertical jump has a high correlation to club head speed. So if we’re looking to see how they generate club head speed in their swing, vertical jump, a rotational med ball toss, and a seated med ball chest pass are really the three big power production tests that we’re looking at.
I think a general baseline of strength is really important. We may not necessarily directly test their strength in a TPI assessment, at least for the first assessment, but that will be certainly a component of their programming going forward.
Mike Reinold:
So my point there was that, Mike, under the lens of a golf performance assessment with somebody has a slightly different perspective. So keep that in mind, Steve. Athletic qualities are who’s in front of you, so there’s going to be some difference with athletes in different sports, but also maybe differences with the niche of your center. So keep that in mind, too.
So we have our standardized Champion athletic qualities that we try to keep up with, but for people that are coming in that are specific to different sports, we’ll have additional or supplemental things too. So that’s something to be creative with based on what’s in front of you. And I think for that, I think that’s just something you need some experience and background with.
So, awesome stuff. Thanks, Diwesh. Thanks, Jonah. Great answers there for our athletic qualities.
We do a lot of work with that stuff here at Champion. And I got to say, I’m one of the physical therapists here at Champion looking out in the gym and seeing how much our athletes are getting after and seeing how much progress they’re making. There’s no doubt it’s because we’re putting effort into this concept of assessing these qualities and documenting progress and programming to individualize based on that. So if you’re not doing that, I think you’re leaving some gains on the table for some of your athletes.
Diwesh and I just talked about a specific athlete yesterday and it’s like, “How do we get more out of this kid?” And it’s like, “Well, let’s bring him through the testing. Let’s see where his low hanging fruit are.”
So Steve, hopefully that helped. To me, I think it’s a big conversation, but I think that’s a good starting point. So, great stuff.
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