We talk with Dr. Michael Kennedy about his work trying to bridge the knowledge-practice gap between researchers and practitioners.
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:05
Hello and welcome to fast talk. Your source for the science of endurance performance, I’m your host. Trevor Connor, here with Coach Rob pickles, there was a time when communication between exercise science researchers and the people practicing sport coaches and athletes was almost non existent. Research was focused on controlling variables and studying what could be done in a lab setting. It was often well conducted research, but too often, had one major issue. It had no real world application or drew conclusions that didn’t really work out on the road. Likewise, coaches and athletes were the ones seeing the direct result of their training, but too often their solution was based on gut and not any scientific foundation. Great coaches had a good gut, but in many cases, the coach or athlete’s gut led to bad places. What we had was a very significant knowledge practice gap with little interest in bridging that gap. Fortunately, thanks to forward thinking researchers and coaches like our guest today, Dr Michael Kennedy, at the University of Alberta, that mindset is changing in 2017 at the ITU science of triathlon conference, Dr Kennedy pulled together coaches and scientists to discuss how to future proof triathlon. Central to the discussion was how coaches can help guide research and how researchers can better disseminate knowledge to practitioners. In today’s episode, Dr Kennedy discusses with us what he learned in these conversations and the challenges we face in bridging the knowledge practice gap. This included putting more value on applied research and not just lab research, how research like ice baths can be taken too far in the modern social media landscape, and how we have to remember that research is about the law of averages, but individuals don’t always fit neatly in the average. Finally, we’ll look ahead and discuss some of the efforts that are being made to connect researchers with coaches and to provide more practical advice and research results. Joining Dr Kennedy, we’ll also hear from Dr Paul Larson, a respected researcher himself, and owner of athletica.ai, and Dr Steven Seiler, who shares his story of when he presented his practice based research to a group of scientists 20 years ago. As we say later in this episode, applied research is so important, because at the end of the day, all the coaches and athletes care about is that N of one what has an impact on them, and that is what our sponsors, training peaks really care about. I remember about a year ago, going out for a ride with their CEO, Lee gracos. We rode for about four hours, and I think three hours of the ride, we were just talking about research. He was asking me, you know, what is the current research? He had read a bunch of studies himself, and wanted to get my opinions on it. And all the while he was trying to figure out, how do we apply this to training peaks? And that really impressed me, because one of the things I like about training peaks is it’s a simple interface that really focuses on the coach athlete communication and the coach athlete interaction. But at its core, built into training peaks, they are trying to go through that science and make sure that the science is being applied, that it is helping the coaches work with their athletes. It is giving them the ability to produce better training plans do more precise analysis of the athletes training to be able to give better training zones to the athletes to make sure their workouts are more successful. The science is all there. It’s built in. They are looking every day at what that science is. They’re talking to people like me. They’re talking to people like in you go saw Milan to find out what is current? What science should they be applying? But all the while, they’re keeping it in a simple interface that allow coaches to really interact with their athletes. As a coach myself, I’ve been using training peaks for years to work with my athletes, I like the interface. I like that it allows me to apply what I’ve learned and what I know. If you want to do the same and you’re ready to level up. Visit trainingpeaks.com/fast talk to start your coach free trial, and with that, put on your knowledge cap, but keep it practical, and let’s make you fast. Well. Dr Kennedy, welcome to the show. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation with you,
Dr. Michael Kennedy 03:56
my millennial grad student who knows everything. When I told her that I was going to be on your podcast. Was so excited. So I feel more important that you have asked me to talk about applied research and sports science.
Rob Pickels 04:09
You want to give a shout out to her, you know, let her know, you know, I will,
Dr. Michael Kennedy 04:12
yeah, Sarah Sabo, who’s an exceptionally good trail runner and also studies female athlete health and menstruation.
Trevor Connor 04:18
So a little bit of history behind this, we were actually preparing for a different episode about triathlon training, and discovered your study. This is a study you did back in 2020 and absolutely loved the study. It was unique. It was different. It was you were doing focus group sessions with coaches, and there was a ton in it that I found really interesting. But there in particular, I got to page nine, where you talked a lot about this. A lot of research is done in the lab, and sometimes the issue is the researchers don’t really communicate with the coaches, and what they’re studying isn’t really applicable to the real. World. So there’s this importance of applied research, but sometimes applied research is looked down on because it’s not as controlled as the lab. And you had some really interesting thoughts on how we should address this gap, and that’s basically what this episode is about, which I think is really important. But could you tell us a little bit about the study and the motivation behind that study?
Dr. Michael Kennedy 05:24
The motivation was partly the legacy of the science and triathlon conference we hosted here in Edmonton in 2017 and the final day of the conference, I was the chair of the science committee, so I felt it was important that we try and get these round tables as part of the conference where we had athletes, it representatives, coaches, sports science, practitioners, researchers, all sitting and talking about the challenges, issues and feature of the sport of triathlon. And so those transcripts, then were really powerful in terms of how we publish them for the science of triathlon conference. And then I was talking to a fellow colleague, Camilla Knight, and I said, you know, we should take this further and see whether we can do some more focus groups and one on one interviews using qualitative research to really give voice to what was talked about in the round tables, and try and then produce the study that you see as a legacy of what we talked about and some practical recommendations as to how research and innovation can drive health and performance in triathlon.
Trevor Connor 06:37
What I really enjoyed in the study was you pulled all the different opinions together into these five main themes that you saw in these conversations, but throughout you had quotes from athletes, from coaches, really, I thought, really perceptive and interesting quotes that showed their perspective on how you know where triathlon is going, How the research plays a role. Just gave it a different flavor perspective that you don’t often see in other research studies.
Dr. Michael Kennedy 07:07
Yeah, and I think that is exactly one of the key benefits of qualitative research. For example, both of you, you know it resonated with you. You heard those quotes that prompted you to reach out to me. We’re having this conversation, and I think that is truly one of the most powerful aspects of how qualitative research can affect the perceptions, behaviors and ideas of individuals who are then reading
Trevor Connor 07:33
- So something I want to dive a little bit into, and sorry, this is where we’re going to get a little bit spicy. You mentioned in your notes leading up to this that right now you’re seeing a lot of punditry in the research. I read a very recent paper by Dr Larson, and forgive me, I’m going to, unfortunately, probably butcher the name here, but Dr Martin Bucha, who talked about the fact that a lot of the research now they’re really trying to pass it off as more innovative than it really is. And pointed out the fact that, when there was an assessment done of the 100 most influential science papers, they were all older papers. You weren’t really, weren’t seeing a lot of recent papers. So I’m interested in you kind of touched on this. They touched on this. What’s going on with the research right now, and why it doesn’t seem to be as innovative and influential as it used to be.
Dr. Michael Kennedy 08:27
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, I’ve had that conversation with many colleagues. To be a applied physiologist, cardiovascular physiologist back in the 40s and 50s would have been fantastic, because you could have, you know, you could put art lines in anyone and not really care, and you can really, sort of, you know, understand the fundamentals of, then how, you know, exercise performance was regulated. And those are the papers that I go back to when I need some resolution or to reaffirm what I was thinking or annoying about. Maybe current research, I think the idea that the research cycle has been compressed, and so I think a lot of applied physiologists have moved away from maybe doing the more important research that maybe would have sort of bigger resonating effect, and either chased research dollars to fund other things in their lab, or have done studies that just aren’t as impactful and aren’t the sort of things that are going to really move the needle in sport in sport science, because they do take a lot of resources. They take a lot of planning. Oftentimes, there have to be very collaborative. You have to get buy in from a national federation. A good example for me is we want to look at the seasonal effects of competitive biathlon in on lung health and respiratory symptoms, especially female biathletes. And we’ve been working for two years now. How to convince the Norwegian biathlon Federation to be the partner, because we want access to their athletes, and you have to then get a lot of consent and belief that this is going to be valuable to the athletes before you can actually do the project.
Trevor Connor 10:15
You also wrote up briefly another example of ice baths and cold plunges, and I was very interested in hearing a little more about that. I love your description of Kate Courtney looking like she was in agony.
Dr. Michael Kennedy 10:27
Yeah, the first time I saw that image and the grimace on her face, and I thought, oh, Lord, partly because just down the hall from me, one of my colleagues, who’s an exceptionally gifted mechanistic cardiovascular science researcher uses cold pressors and only sticks a hand in a ice bath or ice bucket to magnify this really large response that you can get in the cardiovascular system. So the fact that if you’re immersing your entire body in that amount of cold pressor is clearly shocking, but punditry and social media and whoever has seized hold of that idea that more is better and that the science of the cold pressor has been ignored is really frustrating, but the research is starting to catch up. I’m happy to in my own world, at least know that there are people who are doing more research, especially on ice baths and cold plunges, to get more of that sort of applied research out there to say this isn’t that healthy, and we really should be careful about the value that it has to the recovery cycle in athletes, as well as the cardiovascular risks that it can trigger.
Trevor Connor 11:50
So this is where you’re seeing really a misapplication of the science.
Dr. Michael Kennedy 11:54
Absolutely, yeah, and I think it’s probably the most present example of that. And if you ever had Mike Tipton on your show, he would be able to talk for hours about the risks of cold water immersion, on morbidity, mortality and other risks associated with cold water immersion. I’ve
Trevor Connor 12:16
got to share this with my nephew. So he is very proudly Canadian. So in the winter, like every day, he cuts a hole in the ice in the pond or lake, and jumps in. Cringing friends, I’m look how Canadian I am
Rob Pickels 12:32
wearing nothing but a maple leaf.
Dr. Michael Kennedy 12:36
Yeah, yeah. But like putting it back on you. I mean, logically, right? It doesn’t. How does it make sense? Who willingly and like, how did Kate Courtney ever come to the decision that is like something of value? We are hardwired. Our systems are hardwired when someone puts themself in a situation where you have to grimace or grin and bear it through something, all of your sensory afferents are telling you that the alarm bells are going off and that you need to get out of that environment, but we continue to persist, and coal plunges is really taken root as this sort of arcane
Trevor Connor 13:12
my answer to that question would be, and I remember this when I was, you know, competing myself as an elite athlete. Of you’re looking for all those little things, that little extra advantage, and even if it’s painful, you’re going to do it if you believe there’s some science behind it, if there’s something behind it. And I wonder if that’s part of what you’re getting at is maybe sometimes the science is getting away from the fundamentals to trying to find those little things that are gonna catch on.
Rob Pickels 13:44
I think Trevor you mentioned painful, and I almost think that that is an essential component of this, right? Because if we think about as an extension of training for athletes, oftentimes athletes will train in this slightly uncomfortably hard sort of area, right? We are big believers, sort of, in the polarized model, and oftentimes people aren’t doing enough easy work, and they’re not doing enough truly hard, hard work. And I think the cold plunge fits exactly in there, because it is somewhat uncomfortable, but you can manage it if you’re tough, and you film it on video and you talk it up with your friends, then you can dunk yourself in that and make a big deal of it, and it feels like you’re doing something that’s really hard, but you’re actually doing something that’s somewhat manageable, in my opinion. And I think that athletes tend to gravitate toward those experiences because they feel like you’re doing something, they feel like you’re accomplishing something without really putting yourself out there.
Dr. Michael Kennedy 14:39
Oh, that’s a really good point, actually. So I could see that, yeah, you’re right. There are some the reasoning behind that is reasonable. I think back to the sort of applied research that’s where then the value of applied research can help then allow athletes to make more informed decisions as to whether that then is a benefit to them. It is. A little bit muddy, because we do know that, like 15 degrees Celsius water, half body immersion does actually improve leg feel. So it’s also not that all the cold immersion research is or all the cold immersion practices are bad, because especially in team based sports, it could have some benefit on leg feel the next day or in a subsequent game or race.
Rob Pickels 15:23
And so to tie sort of this back into the concept of your research, right? The traditional research model would be that reductionist model, where they would stick an athlete in they would look at just a couple variables, they would say, oh, there was an increase in catecholavien response by 1.5% and this is our p value and up, we know that this is a beneficial thing for you. I don’t think that a lot of athletes necessarily know that right. Athletes probably hear the message, oh, cold water immersion is a good thing for you. They don’t know why. They don’t know the depth of it. Your research, when we’re talking about these larger qualitative studies, would look at the question of, why actually are you doing this? And the person’s going to say, Oh, it feels good. Oh, my friends are doing it. Oh, I seem like, I perform better. The next day. Not many of them are going to be like, well, I read 13 studies on it and, you know? And so that’s where we then begin to understand, like, Okay, what’s the qualitative reason that somebody is doing this, and is it or isn’t it beneficial for them? We can then develop strategies thereafter to help that athlete, because we truly understand why they’re doing it and they’re not doing it because of that research paper, in my opinion.
Dr. Michael Kennedy 16:35
No, actually, that’s a really good point. I think ties back to why the qualitative research, in my mind, even as an empirical trained scientist, does resonate, and some of the research I’ve done now in lung health using qualitative research has generated significant knowledge mobilization, some significant collaborations with other researchers around the world, and has given voice to why athletes, in this case, put themselves into these extreme, cold environments and make decisions to race in environments that they know are going to potentially acutely and long term damage to their lung health.
Trevor Connor 17:16
Kind of loving this conversation, because Rob actually hasn’t been on the show as much lately, because he’s been off running a couple research studies right now, which he is up to his shoulders in and heavy into the research. And you can just see the fashion and Rob, why talking about research? Oh yeah. So I almost feel like I should just let the two of you talk about this, and I should leave the room. But
Rob Pickels 17:39
if you want to leave the room. I can make one more point, and that’s just that the human factor in all of this is very interesting, and that when we are discussing training and really anything in life, right, it’s all about choices that that person is making. And there’s a big conversation about this in a backcountry ski in the backcountry, Ski World and snow safety, right? Where we can have all of the empirical evidence. We can test the snow, we can say, oh, there was a collapse in here, and this is the snow levels, and this is a high avalanche risk, and yet people will still make decisions to do or not do something that is not necessarily aligned with what the data is telling them, right? And so that human factor is gigantic, and really ultimately needs to be considered when we’re understanding a situation. I
Dr. Michael Kennedy 18:31
mean, it buys into one of the more important things I’ve ever read is Mike stone wrote a PowerPoint presentation that was called what is sports science, and in it, he lays out the definition of sports science, and I took that as a mission to then improve how I do research, and then also how I interact with different sports as an applied Sports Science practitioner. And to your point about the human element. One of the things he says in this document is that many researchers or grad students at a university go and want to get their thesis done. They go do some research, they convince a sport or coach or a team to be their participants. Then they get it written up, and then they just leave and sports and coaches and athletes feel burned by that, and so where I’m going with that is I’ve really tried to invest, then in forging relationships and consider the human athlete element as a way to inform the hypotheses or The research that I want to do and make the athletes and the coaches part of that purpose, and some of the research I’ve done in swimming has come exactly out of the time I spent on the pool deck working with our varsity swim teams over a number of different years here at U of A
Trevor Connor 19:57
so this, to me, is a. Good transition point into what I think is going to be a fascinating conversation, and was part of the focus of your study, something that you called this knowledge practice gap. And before I ask you about it, what I found very interesting, as I was preparing for this episode, I read a commentary by a doctor, Joey Eisenman, that was in the written for the American College of Sports Medicine from 2017 But you called it this knowledge practice gap. He, in his opinion piece, was talking about translational science and the places where you can have a disconnect between the research and the actual application. And he brought up three things that also really came up in your study. One was the relevance of the research. Is it really applicable issues in translating the research into something that the practitioners can use? And then there’s just a dissemination issue, where sometimes the people in practice go, Yeah, you know what? I don’t care. I don’t want to hear the research, or are selective about it. So it seems like there’s a lot of issues from the creating research that’s usable to getting it to the practitioners and actually having them use it. And I think what we were just talking about with the cold immersion is a great example of that. But I want to throw it to you and really hear what is this knowledge practice gap, and what’s your feeling about this? Yeah,
Dr. Michael Kennedy 21:28
the knowledge practice gap, in my mind, is really this disconnect between, as you said, the research findings and the research that’s being produced that is either tied to a specific sport performance outcome, a sport issue, an athlete health issue, and then what happens in daily coaching, practice and daily sort of training, race, trip scenarios. And I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault really that this knowledge practice gap exists. If I was to talk to Dr Seiler. I think you would agree that with researchers that are working in tenure track university career jobs, their ability to do research that has relevance in sport is important, but is also challenging to do. And so sometimes individuals like myself get dissuaded from getting into the sport world and investing in that relationship to really understand, like what the question should be and how it then could actually have an immediate impact, or some larger impact, on how an athlete or a coach looks at their sport and sport performance. The other thing is, though, that researchers like myself and most of us have labs, and so labs are important to not just sport performance research, but Applied Physiology research, because you can control the environment and do that very precisely, and that’s very important to our ability to then have robust research findings, but it doesn’t necessarily then translate well into how you can use those research findings to inform or apply them to a real world sport environment.
Trevor Connor 23:13
Dr Seiler has a great story he shared with us in Episode 363 showing the gap that used to exist between practitioners and researchers like Dr Kennedy, he shows how this can lead to research that doesn’t translate well,
Dr. Stephen Seiler 23:29
one of the first formal lectures I gave was in France, in the European College of Sports Science meeting in 2004 so Exactly, yeah, 20 years ago, and I’m sitting there, and I’m giving a lecture about this idea of training intensity distribution, which was kind of a new thing, even as a topic, and then trying to describe what we were seeing with high performance athletes and how they were distributing their training. And the coaches in the audience, the national team coaches who were at this conference, they’re nicking their head positively. They’re saying, Yep, that’s what we do. And then the scientists in the audience were looking at me like, that’s not right. That can’t because their background was the body of literature that was basically taking untrained people and training them for eight to 10 weeks and then measuring them again. And a good way to go with those is just have them work at the same threshold intensity every day, three days a week, for eight weeks, and yep, they get a nice response. So it didn’t make sense to them that I was basically saying, well, athletes don’t do that too much. Yeah, they do threshold stuff, but they don’t want that to be where everything ends up intensity wise, it’s a great way to just stagnate. So that was that message from 20 years ago, and it was seen as very provocative. And now it’s almost like everybody says, Well, yeah, we’ve always known that. So then along the way. People started to compare this stuff, like you say they were using kilojoules or amount of work as the calibration, then you would end up with these really poor, low intensity sessions that lasted maybe 40 minutes. And then they would be compared with a 30 minute interval session. And the interval session would come out on top as being much better. And so then I said, Well, yeah, but that’s not how athletes train. If they train at a low intensity, they’re not training for 40 minutes, they’re training for 90 minutes or two hours. Or if they’re cyclists, they may be going for hours. So that’s apples and oranges. You’re not comparing reasonable workouts. And so that’s when we started saying, when we’re looking at these workouts, let’s base things on effort. What’s the effort of the workout or and we called it maximum session effort.
Suzy Sanchez 25:50
Hey listeners, I’m Susie Sanchez from USA, cycling. If you like what you hear on fast talk podcast, you’re the kind of coach we want as part of our certified coach program, fast talk Labs is producing 50 courses on physiology, training, athlete management and the business of coaching, all for USA Cycling coaches. Visit USA cycling.org backslash coaches to learn more.
Trevor Connor 26:12
So I have used this study multiple times on this episode as an example. But you know, talking about the relevancy side of it, I think one of the best examples I ever saw. And I wish I could remember the exact title of this study, but it was a study that basically the title said long, slow training isn’t as effective as interval work in adapting athletes, and was really pushing for you should just be doing interval work. But when you read the study, as you’d expect being in the lab, they controlled for the amount of work that was done. So the athletes, for the interval intervention did a 22 minute workout with intervals, but then for the quote, long slow distance, they did 42 minutes at a lower intensity to get the same amount of work. And any practitioner would tell you, that’s just a recovery ride. You went long, slow distance you need to be and this was with cyclists, you need to be out there four or five hours. So you really saw that disconnect of the researchers not understanding how athletes actually train.
Dr. Michael Kennedy 27:15
It’s actually a great example. And I think you bring up another really important point, and I’ll, I’ll try not to sound like I’m on my high horse here, but there are less of me around where I’ve invested in love sport performance, love the days and years and trips that I have been on working with athletes in a large variety of environments, and that I unders get that right, like I would never have designed that study. I would have been, well, yeah, the LSD ride has to be four hours, because if we’re actually going to compare apples to apples with interval work, that is the method and the protocol you’re going to have to use. My colleague down the hall. He could be a great sports scientist, a great applied physiologist, and have great value, but he doesn’t really care. He just wants to do mechanistic research, and doesn’t necessarily get what the difference would be. And maybe looking at this sort of polarized training Comparison, where you have zone one work versus zone four or five work as your two adaptation interventions,
Rob Pickels 28:19
another place that this plays out, I think, is highlighted by a quote from one of your papers, and that is, scientists tend to deal with groups, but it’s the difference between athletes, not just the averages, that determine success. And I’ve always found this really interesting with interventional studies, where, if you look at participant by participant data, there are some athletes that are going to improve a lot, there are some athletes that will not improve much at all, and there might even be some athletes that go down, and when you look at the group average to determine your statistical significance, all of that nuance is lost. And there are, say, some techniques that might work really well in some situations, but research doesn’t support that, right? And so you had, I think, previously mentioned before, that training and life is messy, and that science tries to be as clean and as neat as possible. I shouldn’t say science, but a lot of these research studies, I know, in my experience, I’m probably working with one athlete right now that I will say I am doing things pretty textbook with just one of my athletes. I’m able to do that with everyone else has really messy lives. That person is getting really, really good gains. They’re doing awesome, right? But that’s not the typical situation that coaches tend to work with.
Dr. Michael Kennedy 29:33
Yeah, it’s so interesting. You say that because I’ve really invested in in my lab now having undergraduates as part of the research experience, and trying to get them more exposure to the research sports science research that we do. And I’ve also made a goal to recruit as many female undergraduates as possible, because I really value that we need to have more female sports scientists. And. And researchers working in this area, but the Canadian Society of exercise physiology abstract deadline for our annual conference is coming up, mid May, and three of my undergraduate students want to submit an abstract. And one of the things that we’ve done, and I’ve now asked all of my students to do, is exactly what you said, is, do the spaghetti plots of the group change so that you can actually see whether everyone’s going up, whether there’s some outliers and couple are going down, and so that you then can have a more precise conclusion and discussion about what the actual intervention meant on a person by person basis. And I have always valued that, and that has been reinforced with with the process in terms of working with the data sets we have with these undergrads. And for one of them, it just happened last week. It was like, this, light bulb went off for her. She just was like, oh, because I said, I want you to plot over time. It was a pre post intervention, like, what happened on a group by group or on a person by person basis? And then she totally got it. And I was like, okay, there you go. And then we had a really interesting discussion, because in this case, everyone did go up and we’re like, Okay, well, that’s really interesting. It’s altitude exposure. It was an altitude exposure study, but it really did help clearly define, then what each person did and responding to this altitude. And so
Rob Pickels 31:22
just for a little bit of clarity there for everybody listening, you know, oftentimes you’ll be looking through a paper and there’ll be a chart where there’s a pre column and a post column, and it’s, oftentimes it’s a bar chart, right? And so you just have the mean like, oh, the post is higher or it’s lower than the pre, therefore intervention was better or worse. But what Dr Kennedy is talking about is, instead of those being bars, we have individual dots in two columns for each of the subjects, right? All of the data from the subjects, from the pre and then each individual subject in the post, and the dots are connected, so you know which subject is which subject. And you can see the lines are like, Oh, these five are going up. That one’s pretty flat. That’s how we’re looking at the individual data and whether or not the intervention was effective for that particular person,
Dr. Michael Kennedy 32:13
exactly. And one of the best ways to sort of illustrate how important that is is with what we would call the maladapters, or the slow adapters. So just in Applied Physiology and Exercise Science, we know that different people respond or need different amounts of overload to see adaptation occur. But oftentimes in those exercise science studies, we would write off then the people that didn’t respond to whatever the amount of overload or exercise intervention we gave them. But then I forget it’s a group of Swiss researchers started to then say, well, you know what? And those that didn’t actually respond to the initial exercise intervention, if we increase the frequency and extend the actual exercise intervention, do they eventually respond? And lo and behold, they do. And if you look at those studies, the powerful illustration of how, then the data points in those non or slow adapters actually do change when you actually added three or six more weeks of increased overload is really a powerful example of, then, how you can’t just write off some people, or say, You know what, on a group by group level, this exercise intervention didn’t necessarily work.
Trevor Connor 33:31
Well. This is something that I say to athletes all the time when you’re talking about an individual athlete and what’s best for them, which is the science is fantastic. I love to use the science, but even when you have a really well conducted study that’s highly applicable, there’s always an outlier in the study. And what happens if you’re that outlier? What happens if you’re the one reading that research and saying, well, the study, the research, tells me to do this, but if you had been in that study, it actually didn’t work for you. You were that one person it didn’t work for. And I always tell the athletes that I coach, you’re probably an outlier in at least one thing.
Rob Pickels 34:11
We all are. I’m even more special than that. Trevor
Trevor Connor 34:14
Rob’s an outlier. And many things, many things, okay,
Rob Pickels 34:18
my life right there.
Dr. Michael Kennedy 34:21
I mean, it’s comforting though. I think because talking to you, it’s comforting to me, but just the idea that, if you can look and that outliers, you know, from a statistical standpoint, are not great, because they do drag, you know, a group, mean, one way or the other. But on the other hand, it is, we’re dealing with humans, right? These are not rats, and they don’t all respond the same, and that outlier is as important a finding as all the others who may, on average, responded about the same. And I remember going to a talk that David Martin did. COVID at American College of sport medicine. Gosh, years ago now, but his talk was entitled minutes to marathons, I think. And he was the first person that I ever heard actually say that and that you, if you’re going to invest in applied sport science research and you’re going to be a Sports Science practitioner, you better pay attention to the individualized response, and that should not dissuade you, but empower you to do then a better job of individualized exercise prescription and understand that every athlete is different and will have different responses to training interventions.
Trevor Connor 35:39
I can’t remember who I heard this from, but one of my favorite expressions is, in science, an n of one equates to a poor study. So for our listeners, n is the number of participants you’d have in a study, and so you have no power in the study if you just have an n of one. But you, as an athlete, all you care about is an n of one
Dr. Michael Kennedy 36:03
Exactly. Yeah. And I just when I was preparing for this interview, it did trigger me to think about some of those single subject designs and papers that have been published on a single athlete, and one of them that I have used so many times, and a number of my graduate students have used because a couple of the psycho biological measures they used in the study are really important. And so the title of the article is an elite endurance athlete’s recovery from underperformance, aided by a multidisciplinary Sports Science support team. And that article, although it’s an n of one has had so many implications, not just in my own life, but I know in others, because it got published and it showed the journey of this athlete from underperformance back to recovery. And I am grateful that actually got published.
Trevor Connor 36:55
No, and I was glad to see you say that there is a place for those case studies where you’re just looking at a single athlete
Dr. Michael Kennedy 37:01
exactly, and so for all the over trained athletes that I have had in my office and helped get them on a journey back to recovery and health, I’ve used that study and used a number of the measures that they published as a way to help me guide decision making as an applied Sports Science practitioner. Okay,
Trevor Connor 37:19
so we’ve been talking about this knowledge practice gap and some of the issues here. And we started by talking about some of the translation issues, and I loved your example, the cold immersion, where there’s great science behind that, but then it gets to social media, and all of a sudden it’s turned into go sit for an hour in an ice bath and kill yourself. So there can be issues with the translations of the science, we probably just beat up a little bit on researchers talking about the relevance that sometimes researchers are studying things that are very well conducted studies, but aren’t always that applicable. But I think we need to look at the other side of this. It’s not just the researchers, it’s the practitioners. So in this case, we’re talking about coaches. Certainly you mentioned this. I saw this in that other study that I just mentioned. You see issues with the coaches being able to take the science and apply it. Brought up a couple examples of either they don’t have the training in the science to be able to interpret the research, but more importantly, sometimes you see coaches say, I don’t really respect the science I’m going with experience. And you mentioned something called survivor bias, which is why you have to be careful about experience. So can you tell us a little bit about why you think coaches shouldn’t just rely on experience?
Dr. Michael Kennedy 38:37
First of all, one of the people that’s had a big influence in my life was a person called Jim Dennison, and he is a social, cultural researcher in our faculty. Sadly, he’s passed away from cancer, but he was one of the first people because he was obsessed with sport. So if I was to walk around my faculty and talk to different people about just sport and sport performance, or what happened at the diamond league track meet or the NFL on Sunday. He was always one of those people that wanted to talk about he was obsessed with sport. He was obsessed with quantitative although he was a socio cultural researcher, but he said to me, once, Michael, performance is always messy. And I really sort of like took hold of that idea and thought, okay, that’s one of the ways that I’m going to then continue to approach the idea that if we’re going to do research in this, you’re going to have different multifactorial challenges with research through that, though coaches on the other side get that like they understand right? If you’ve been in the coaching game a long time, performance is messy. There’s so many things going on, and so they kind of go with their gut. They go with what works for them, and they use that as sort of their vehicle to inform decisions. But then with that comes bias, because they will think about. The best athlete, the one that did make the state team or the provincial team or the national team, and then they use that as their sort of singular example to inform how they’re going to train then subsequent generations of athletes. And that is this survivorship bias that I think really can influence the net outcome of a single athlete, an academy, a team, a development system, and I’ve witnessed it so many times, especially in cross country skiing, which is the sport that I’m most closely aligned with.
Trevor Connor 40:33
So we recently did an episode on what’s really popular right now, which is this Norwegian method, and when you read about the descriptions of the Norwegian method, it’s really just two athletes that are brought up, particularly Jacob ingebrigtsen. And that, to me, is a great example of this survivorship bias. You have two athletes that have done amazing with it, but the question is, how many athletes have tried it and burnt out or didn’t go anywhere, that’s what you need to look at. You need to see what has been the success over many athletes, versus just focusing on one athlete who’s done really well with it.
Dr. Michael Kennedy 41:12
Yeah, and the Norwegian method in my lab, and the athletes that I talk to and coaches I talk to in the local communities, I often bring that up as this really powerful example, again, of using maybe the concept or the training principles associated with the Norwegian method, but not taking lock, stock and barrel what’s actually being done. Because, let’s be honest, 85% of anyone’s potential performance in their lifespan is determined already by their genetics. We can’t recreate another ingridson By just training them and giving them that sort of fantastical idea that you know they can do what these exceptionally gifted athletes do, and then can tolerate with this very different genetic profile or locomotor profile. And that is a really good example. One example that I use in my first year biology of fitness course with our first year undergrads is another example of that. It’s the study that published Merritt Jorgens training logs, and so it’s entitled The training logs of the world’s most successful cross country skier. I show it to illustrate some of the training principles that are within the paper when I’m talking about training principles, but I also give the students this sort of word of warning where it’s like, what can you learn from this? From an overload perspective, what did merit and her sports science team do that sort of then changed how she continued to accumulate gold medals and podiums over her career. But if you give that to the average bread and butter masters athlete who’s an engineer, a physician or a lawyer, they somehow then just translate suddenly, if I’m doing 400 hours a year, well, you know, Merit did 800 hours a year, so that’s what I’m going to do the next year. And that inevitably then leads to tragedy to be
Trevor Connor 43:15
traumatic. One of the worst examples I ever saw this was a friend of mine who was trying to become a competitive marathon runner, and she was very talented, but she got her hands on the training plan of an Olympic medalist marathon runner and started doing that plan. And she came to me, she was completely cooked and had a marathon coming up, and asked me for help. And I was like, Yeah, rest,
Rob Pickels 43:42
doing nothing is the best thing you can do right
Trevor Connor 43:45
now, basically, and it killed her, but I had her rest for most of the time leading up to this marathon. She rested enough that she was able to go and have a good marathon, but then she went right back to following that plan, and ultimately she destroyed her thyroid. She now has the condition that she’s going to have to live with the rest of her life because she was trying to do a plan that her she just wasn’t ready for
Dr. Michael Kennedy 44:08
it pains me. You could probably see the pain in my face. I mean, the number of cross country skiers I know that have thyroid dysfunction, all female because of overload and long term dysfunction in their endocrine health is just is staggering. It’s an epidemic. Now to your point, though, like back to the training principles. One thing that I don’t think coaches or we maybe need to do a better job of, and I say the royal we, is using training principles as a vehicle to help coaches make better informed decisions, and that the research we do incorporates some of those training principles as a core application or outcome of the research that you
Trevor Connor 44:53
- A researcher who’s been very focused on principles is Dr Paul Larson, before we dive into our solutions for. Bridging the knowledge practice gap. Let’s hear Dr Larson talk about a program he was part of that was focused on bridging that gap.
Dr. Paul Laursen 45:09
This issue has been core to my being for the last 1520 years, really, and it actually started when my work at high performance sport New Zealand, where they hired me actually, as both a professor at AUT University and also a lead of the Olympic program, because there was a real disconnect between the research findings, which are vital and really important in the laboratory, and the application of those scientific research findings at the coalface. So they wanted a professor that was sort of swinging back and forth between the two. And as a result, my whole job throughout both the London and the Rio cycles was to have this integrated model and to bring in PhD students, ultimately that do research projects, not just in the laboratory, but also in the field, working directly with the Olympic programs, one of those Dan Plews, you might have heard of. So Dan Plews was working within the rowing program, and he pioneered, ultimately, the application of heart rate variability and its usefulness, its utility within athletes, in discovering models that are actually used for that, and there’s many other different examples, but this item is just so vital. We have to have a little bit of both. Both are important. Both field research and also the laboratory research are vital to us understanding because at the end of the day, context rules over the content, but we can still take the learnings the fundamental principles that we learn in the laboratory and apply those ones in the field. I
Trevor Connor 46:45
remember a respected exercise physiology researcher criticizing publicly, Dr Seiler, saying all of Dr Seiler research was based on looking at what top pros do, and if it wasn’t done in a lab, then it isn’t real. That was literally his criticism. So I was wondering what your response to that is.
Dr. Paul Laursen 47:05
I disagree, and I think that the sensors are getting better and better. Take the power meter, for example. Like the accuracy of the SRM power meter and others are well established, both in laboratory and then also in the field. I definitely see in this era of what I like to call Sports Science 3.0 we’re seeing the laboratory move slowly into the field research. We’re only going to see this improve and get better and better as we go with sensor technology getting better and AI getting better. So yeah, I think that there was a time for that comment. But I think the goal posts have shifted.
Trevor Connor 47:42
Coaches are you ready to bridge the gap between cutting edge sports science and your athletes? Daily training. Training peaks helps you personalize plans, track progress with precision, ensure every workout is optimized for performance. Move beyond guesswork and elevate your coaching on a platform designed for expert guidance. Ready to level up, visit trainingpeaks.com/fast, talk to start your coach free trial. So I could continue with this conversation for hours, because I love the research. This is a fascinating conversation, but I think we need to shift over so we’ve described this knowledge practice gap. What are your solutions to this? How do we make sure that practitioners and researchers are communicating well, and that we’re producing research that is highly usable, highly applicable, and that the practitioners, the coaches, are using it correctly? What are some of the solutions that you’ve identified? I think
Dr. Michael Kennedy 48:40
one of them is just resources and funding more sports science research is paramount to giving researchers that are invested in sports science research and sport research the latitude and time to build the relationships with the sports that they want to work with by having the adequate resources doing it, so that the researcher feels like they can do something that actually is impactful, or more impactful than maybe kind of rushing things, so they can get that on their annual evaluation thinking about sort of like their career and their sort of university job. On the flip side, I think coaches need to be braver. And I think you’re a very good example of this, though, that you clearly invest in having researchers and academics on your show. And there will be some coaches that are going to listen to this and kind of go, You know what? I reach out to someone, maybe at my local university, and maybe see whether I can just go and have a coffee with them and talk to them about, sort of some of the things I’m struggling with, and be brave in that way of put yourself out there. And. That that’s really effective professional development. One of the other things and the coaches that’ll be listening to this, I might get some hate mail, but some of the coaches I know really say maybe they’re professionals, but they don’t really act professional the way that other professions do, and that can be for a host of reasons, but those are kind of excuses as well. If you’re going to be a full time coach, you got to invest in your PD, you got to get out there. You got to keep that as a sort of present mission for how you are going to improve your ability, to improve your athletes performance, keep them healthy and improve the overall performance, maybe of your team or academy or whatever it might be.
Rob Pickels 50:42
Yeah, I think that this sharing of information is a big part of what you’re talking about, right? Is really important. And I’ll encourage everyone to share the information in two ways, right? And information is a two way street. I love that Trevor and I have the opportunity to get on the airwaves and to send information in one direction. And I love that people are taking that information in, but I want those people that are listening now take that information and go to somebody else and share it with them and take their ideas in, and give them your ideas, and get this two way street flowing. Because what I’ve found is one, explaining things to people helps your understanding immensely. But two, also taking in a counterpoint of view, or putting yourself out there a little bit, and then somebody is like, Well, no, actually, I look at it this way, can ultimately reinforce your beliefs. And sometimes it is belief, let’s be honest about what is the best thing to do. Or maybe you have somebody that has had a situation that’s different from your situation, and you get to learn the depth of the information. You know, again, we can take this sort of conversation that we’re having around research, but we can also apply that same to our own knowledge game,
Dr. Michael Kennedy 51:56
absolutely. And you know, as I was prepping for this conversation, just like as a bold recommendation. I mean, we could use your platform as a clearinghouse of that exchange mobilization. It could be as simple as having a Dropbox where coaches write in and say, You know what, this is, what I’m struggling with. Are there any research out there that can help me out with this, either just from an advice standpoint, or do some research with me, or connect me with someone in my community that maybe could help me do some research. And there are enough applied researchers out there across not just sort of the physiology, but also the psycho biology and the psychology and the other domains of sports science that do love sport and want to contribute. And that exchange mobilization Clearinghouse, maybe it starts here with you two and creating something where that exchange of ideas can happen more effectively
Trevor Connor 52:54
if we could help with that. Would love to help with that so
Dr. Michael Kennedy 52:58
well. That’s inspired me. Then really, us, actually?
Trevor Connor 53:03
No. I mean, absolutely, it’s such an important thing, and if we can be even a small part of helping make that happen, that would make me feel really good. Because, I mean, as I said, That’s what I read in your study, and immediately made me say, Oh, we’ve got to reach out. We have to get you on the show, because that’s what you did. You pulled researchers, you pulled coaches, you pulled practitioners, athletes together, and said, How can we work together? What do you need? Where are the disconnects? And it was just such an informative study. And as I said, the quotes that you put in there, just hearing what they need, hearing their opinions. Was just, I’ve read 1000s of studies, and it was the first time I was hearing some of that stuff. And going, those are really good points. I’m glad somebody has finally expressed
Rob Pickels 53:50
that. And Trevor something, I want to point out that I think that you’ve done really well with fasttalklabs.com, and the repository of information that’s there, right? Because, you know, people need to remember that fast talk is much larger than just the podcast, and that content that’s on fasttalklabs.com some of it has been created by you, some of it has been created by me, but really a lot of it has been created by other people. Most of it, 90% of it, is the large universe of voices that we have out there that have contributed to this fasttalklabs.com library, and I think that’s really important, because if it’s just me and it’s just you, then it’s sort of an echo chamber. It’s the same message bouncing around a room 100 times, you know, and nothing changes and nothing new is brought in. So that has always been the vision with fast
Trevor Connor 54:37
talk. Appreciate it, and I just found out today that we’re doing in content ads
Rob Pickels 54:44
for so check out fast talk labs.
Trevor Connor 54:48
Rob has got the perfect voice for that.
Dr. Michael Kennedy 54:50
He does very, very good.
Trevor Connor 54:54
The last thing I’m going to point out, because, as I said, I look for other research in this, and I found. Editorials, and one that was very encouraging to me again, 2017 This is the International Journal of Sports physiology and performance, where the editor wrote just a one page piece on this and said they really welcome applied research in their journal, and made recommendations like we would love to see in studies, an application section. How is this applicable? And the other recommendation that you brought up is getting researchers to work with sports organizations so that they can be talking with the athletes and the practitioners and learning what they need.
Dr. Michael Kennedy 55:37
Absolutely, I am inspired by having this conversation again, to reinvest in reaching out to some of the coaches in triathlon and cross country skiing and having that conversation again, because it is so important to end a research paper with the application section like, what Does it mean? And the British Journal of sport medicine, I think does that really well, where you have to write a very specific what does this mean, typically, to the sport medicine or to the physician, because it’s a clinical journal, but what does this mean to clinical practice? And I think we need to hang on to that point when we think about applied research in sport and sport science. Well,
Trevor Connor 56:23
I hate to say it. I would love to continue with this conversation, but we’ve hit the hour mark, so I think it’s time to start wrapping things up. So we generally finish out with a question for our forum. I had a question, but I’m going to change it. Oh, I’m inspired here, too. So our question for the forum. Anybody out there, if there are things that you need answers to, whether you’re a coach or an athlete, things that you haven’t seen in the research, that you would love to see be studied, go to our forum. We’ll put up a forum section for this and put in what you’d like to see. I’m very interested in seeing what everybody’s interested in,
Rob Pickels 57:01
and then they can compare to our potluck and see if their responses are the same as ours on the fast talk team here,
Trevor Connor 57:10
there was no no, just with the potluck No,
Rob Pickels 57:14
dude, I got to plug stuff
Dr. Michael Kennedy 57:15
I have then a suggestion, because it’s something I really want to Do, and I’ve thought about it for five, at least five years. And back to training principles, a follow up to probably the future proofing article was, or is, myself interviewing some of the people that are my heroes in sports science, like Dr Seiler, like Dr Foster and getting in their personal perspectives on what training principles are that are most important, laying them out as definitions, and then the application of that principle to applied sports science and coaching practice as A additional legacy of how sports science researchers, can, I think, influence the evidence based information, prescription and designs of athlete training programs?
Trevor Connor 58:12
That would be fascinating. If you decide to do this, please let us know. We’d love to get you back on the show and then talk to you about how it’s going.
Rob Pickels 58:19
I would love that it could even make a cool episode. You know, to get all of you in a room together would be fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have we talked to Carl, Dr foster I think
Dr. Michael Kennedy 58:30
I ever have? Oh, my God, you should, yeah, we should.
Rob Pickels 58:32
I’ve met him at conferences and what, but I don’t think I’ve. We’ve never professionally
Trevor Connor 58:37
spoken with in the case of Dr Seiler, we’ve had him on so many times we did an episode eating hot chicken wings. So
Rob Pickels 58:43
sick of that guy at this point,
Dr. Michael Kennedy 58:47
he’s the external on my current PhD students thesis defense coming up in May 21 so we’re very excited to have him as the
Trevor Connor 58:55
external. Fantastic. Well, this is your first time on the show, so the way we finish up the episode is with what we call our one minute take homes. So each of us has one minute to say what we think is the most salient or important thing for the listeners to take from this episode, and usually start with the guests, but take a minute think about what it is that you really want to communicate, and then you can go first,
Dr. Michael Kennedy 59:24
okay, I’m going to speak directly to coaches and people that are on a day to day basis, working with athletes, and I’m just going to say that I hope you found what I said and what we talked about today as empowering and inspiring and that you need to be brave about, re engaging in research, reinvesting in how you find that research, and that if you have research questions that you have in your own sport, reach out to individuals in your local community at universities that might help. You drive research and the innovation that comes out of that for your sport and sport performance,
Trevor Connor 1:00:07
fantastic. Yeah,
Rob Pickels 1:00:08
I think I’m gonna piggyback on that a little bit in that. I feel like at times in this episode, we might have come across as a little bit negative about some research, right, but I do want everybody to know that I do think that research is very important in our learning and our understanding. You know, because we talked about applied more qualitative research, I do think that quantitative, laboratory based research is amazing, and it’s the foundation for a lot of our knowledge, but that people ought to take away from today, that it might not explain everything, it might not explain the nuance and that each individual ought to be empowered to fill in those gaps, to fill in their understanding and to use that to apply their knowledge in a more effective way when they’re either working with themselves or they’re working with athletes or whoever it may
Trevor Connor 1:00:59
be, you know, going back to feeling inspired. That’s kind of where I’m at. So we had an episode not that long ago with Dr Seiler where he told the story of giving a presentation to a room of researchers and coaches, and was talking about something that he observed in the field. So this is the early days of coming up with the polarized model. And he said all the researchers in the room were going, No, no, that’s dead wrong. And all the coaches in the room were nodding their head, going, Yep, you got it right. And he talks about those days where there was that complete disconnect. And I would say, if we were having this conversation 1520, years ago, there would be very little interest in closing that gap. What’s inspired me was reading your study, reading this editorial in the International Journal of Sports physiology and performance, and reading a couple other similar editorials where the issue has been recognized, and there is a big push, both among coaches and within the research community, to say we need to shift. We need to communicate with one another. We need to make sure that the research is applicable and that we’re studying what needs to be studied, and that coaches are learning what they need to learn, so that they could use this. So to me, this is all very inspiring to see this shift, to see this communication starting to happen. Well, Dr Kennedy, a real pleasure. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. That was another episode of fast talk. Thoughts and opinions expressed in fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk. Whoever prefer to find your favorite podcast, be sure to leave us a rating and review. As always, we love your feedback. Tweet us at at fast talk labs, join the conversation@forums.fasttalklabs.com or learn from our experts@fasttalklabs.com for Dr Michael Kennedy. Dr, Paul Larson, dr, Steven Seiler and Rob pickles. I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.
