06 Nov 2019
Doha, 6 November 2019. The second day of the 4th ASIA Congress at Aspire Academy featured presentations from experts in various fields and the day put a strong focus on the implementation of research and innovation into performance programmes.
One of the international speakers was Prof. Stafford Murray, the Head of Innovation and Research Advisory Group Chair from HPSNZ, who shared on some of their findings from working with athletes in New Zealand. “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got” was one of his examples to show the importance of being up to date what’s going on in the field.
According to Prof. Murray some key considerations when seeking out to be innovative in elite sport is to identify and define amongst others, project application and impact measurement, targeted funding and to allow room for inhouse engineering. “At HPSNZ we say that innovation is something that solves a measurable performance issue with a new approach or product which will result in sustainable change for a sport, athlete or high-performance sport system.”
Dr. Marcus Lee, Senior Sport Biomechanist at the Singapore Sport Institute, also discussed important approaches on the question of “Bridging Sport Science and Coaching to enhance performance” and stressed the importance of effective systems and a good relationship between the involved people such as coaches, sport scientists and athletes. “Acceptance among them is a key to be successful. And therefore it’s important to know that people don’t care about what you know until they know that you care.”
Prof. Marco Cardinale, Head of Sports Physiology & Research at Aspire Academy, showed a number of high-profile examples how research from the lab was transferred into sporting success and medals. As he pointed out in his presentation, there are several things in sport science that can improve performance if they are done properly: Collecting and sharing training and competition data, interacting day-to-day and developing “the coach library”, being involved in special projects and make sure to have regular debriefs.
Furthermore, the second day featured presentations on “Performance Monitoring & Injury Prevention” (Selwyn Griffith/Brisbane Lions) or “Translating Data into decisions” (Prof. John Newell/NUIG), practical demonstrations from the event sponsors Quintic, Vald and Fusion Sport and it also offered a lot of insights into the work that has been done at Aspire Academy in the sport specific forums for squash, fencing, table tennis and athletics.