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The quadrennial pre-Olympic conference, this year held in
Glasgow prior to the London Olympics, has the immemorable acronym ICSEMIS (pronounced
iks-miss), standing for the
International Convention on Science, Education and Medicine in Sport. The
omission of Olympic from the title
began with the 2008 conference and is obviously but mysteriously deliberate.
Is Olympic too exclusive and elitist?
Certainly the speakers at the opening ceremony at the Glasgow venue and
keynote overplayed the legacy of
the Olympics for population physical activity and health. The best of these
speakers was Princess Anne, who spoke effortlessly, with humility and humor.
Thereafter the conference was memorable more for the poor logistics
(critiqued at the end of this report), but a science café for young researchers
and presentations relevant to athletic performance (the focus of this report)
made the conference worthwhile for sport scientists. Networking with other researchers
and research students amongst the 3000 registrants in all the disciplines of
exercise and sports medicine and science was also useful.
Impressions of Two Young
Researchers
by Sian and Rita
The organizers can be commended for
introducing a series of development workshops housed within a science café
and directed towards early-career researchers. The sessions included an
opportunity to meet the experts on sports science and nutrition strategies
for elite sports performance (Ken van Someren, Ron Maughan), advice on how to
network (Walter Thompson), and strategies for developing international
research collaborations (Greg Whyte). The workshop we attended on planning a
career pathway in science in sport (Jo Doust) was a dynamic affair, encouraging
interaction and discussion between attendees. Aside from providing a refreshing
respite from the impersonal and generally uninspiring atmosphere of this
large congress, we came away with several top tips for securing the job of
our dreams: build a "Web identity" to advertise yourself, develop a
strong teaching/working philosophy that you can clearly articulate in
interviews (always ask yourself beforehand “what will I add to the
organization?”), and find a good mentor to guide your career development.
Performance Presentations
reviewed by Will, Sian and Rita
PDFs of abstracts are available at the
conference
website for
the podium and poster
presentations. Find the abstracts referred to below by putting the first author's
name and initial shown in brackets […] into the advanced search form. Only
three posters had originality and applicability to athletic performance
sufficient to include in this report. In a re-run of this year’s
ECSS conference,
none of the eight young-investigator awards went to a study of athletic
performance, although one dealt with performance of "healthy
participants".
Two of the most
valuable sessions we attended were on the topic of the development of the generic
skills
of the sport
scientists
who provide service on behalf of the English Institute of Sport. The sessions
were chaired by Sarah Rowell and delivered by her, psychologist Tim Kyndt and
sport-science manager Ken van Someren. [Rowell, S will get both sessions.]
These three have introduced a broad program of work placements, sponsored
studentships, professional-development workshops and mentoring to fast-track
the development of generic or non-technical people skills, which they and the
sports consider to be as important for their sport scientists as the
discipline-specific technical skills of assessment and evaluation.
The presentation
format was novel and engaging: Sarah introduced each topic, Tim gave a
mini-lecture on it, then Ken provided an interactive commentary. At times
their presentation was an overwhelming litany of buzzwords from business
psychology. Reflective practice
got its first of many airings at this conference. It refers to
communicating with everyone, including yourself, about everything in your
work (or in your training and competing) before, during and after you do it.
Other concepts that came up here were self-awareness,
values, insight, foresight, motivation, communication, consultancy, trust,
leadership, mentoring, problem-solving, decision-making, managing team
dynamics, dealing with conflict, influencing and inspiring others… In
question time Will contributed honesty,
and in writing this report and further reflecting on his own experience of
successful sport scientists, conscientiousness
in all its forms–including always going the extra mile–wins over the coaches
and other experts. It goes without saying that you still have to be good at
what you're going the extra mile with, your technical stuff. Will suspects
that just continuing to tell budding practitioners that all these things are
important accelerates them along the right path, provided of course that you
practice what you preach–that you have integrity,
in other words. The EIS team identified two areas for their own further
development: class-room simulation of real-world service-delivery situations,
and improving the mentoring skills of the more experienced sport scientists.
Reflective
practice
was the legacy of a visit by sport psychologist Zoe Knowles of Liverpool John
Moores University to a "leadership academy" for elite female soccer
players aged 10-14 in–where else?–California. The girls do such things as
identifying and interviewing leaders in their community and taking part in
mentoring programs with academy captains to find answers to such questions as
"what type of leader/enforcer am I?" And they play good soccer,
too! Seriously, it appears to be a very successful program. [Rhodius, A]
The psychologist
who qualitatively interviewed two "uber-elite" (cream-of-the-cream)
soccer players
identified the following 10 components of cognitive deliberate practice:
discussion, inquisition, study, evaluation, use of technology, visualization,
modeling, cognitive restructuring, social support, and elite mental attitudes.
"This type of practice should be given serious consideration by
governing bodies, directors of sport, managers and coaches." [Horrocks,
D]
Unfortunately none
of us attended the presentation of a case study of talent development presented by the
coach of England's top soccer player of 2011 in his early years (age
9-16). According to the abstract there were significant talent development
coaching issues, including a drastic relative age effect and conflicts within
the academy coaching process. [Holt, J]
The authors reported the
effect of a randomized controlled trial of the addition of core-training
exercises to the training programs of 15 female and 15 male swimmers
as a likely trivial change of -0.17 s in 50-m time, but by our calculations
the effect is -0.7%, with confidence limits of -2.1 to 0.7%. The thresholds
for small and moderate effects on swim time are about 0.25% and 0.75%,
estimated by multiplying the 0.8% typical variation a top swimmer shows
between competitions (Pyne et al., 2004) by 0.3
and 0.9 (Hopkins et al., 2009). It
follows that the effect here is moderate but unclear. Be that as it may, give
this kind of program serious consideration. [Hibbs, A; poster]
Flow in sport is another label
for the performance of an emergent expert skill referred to in
the report on the ECSS conference last year: perceptible to the athlete or
coach but probably beyond reach of reductionist biomechanical analysis. A
young investigator interviewed 12 European Tour golfers (10 in the abstract) for
insights into this "elusive and unpredictable" phenomenon. His
abstract refers only to "a novel model of flow, providing a tentative
explanation of flow states", but he presented two models explaining the
state in the eight golfers who experienced it: making it happen (where goals heightened focus, leading to the
experience), and letting it happen
(where performance itself was the factor). [Swann, C]
Ten female and two male athletes and
coaches were interviewed for an hour each for insights into the flow
experience in team-sport
athletes. The authors concluded that team flow includes most of
the dimensions of individual flow and several new team-specific dimensions.
[Mozek, E; poster]
Bright light is
supposed to affect circadian rhythm, but bright light at a time of day
predicted to accelerate adjustment to a 5-h eastward time-zone shift had
little effect on reducing jet-lag symptoms in a randomized controlled
trial of 22 elite female soccer players. [Thompson, A]
Winners in boxing
matches made more attacks (not significant and not presented in the abstract,
but probably clear) and more punches per attack in 84 boxing performances
across a range of levels and weight categories. [Thomson, E]
"Imagery
is the central pillar of applied sport psychology" according to Tony
Morris, and he proceeded to deliver a great study of
"self-modeling", in which five elite male players of futsal
(a sport like soccer) participated in an uncontrolled time-series study.
There were four 4-week phases in ABAB sequence; each A and B phase included
four competitions, where A were monitoring phases, during which players were
videoed, and B were intervention phases, during which selected clips of
various skills performed successfully in A were viewed at least once a day by
players on iPod Touch devices. "Analysis of individual graphs revealed improvement
in performance of all four targeted skills and increased self-efficacy for
all participants after the intervention phases." Cool! [Azizuddin Khan,
T; presented by Tony Morris.]
The presenter
declared the support of the makers of the Thought Technology equipment she
used in a series of case studies of the effects of "bioneural" feedback
in the preparation of 15 elite athletes. The "bio" refers to
respiration, heart rate, muscle tension (EMG), skin conductance and
peripheral body temperature, while the "neural" refers to recording
of the EEG. She was convinced these contributed to the "key psychological
skills" of focus, anxiety management and recovery by facilitating
learning of self-regulation. Well, probably, but it would be good to see
evidence from time-series data or controlled trials. [Werthner, P]
Measurement of the EEG
patterns
in archers
resulted in the inconclusive finding that "the patterns vary as a
function of skill level, but not simply as a function of score," [Casey,
M]
In a crossover with
12 healthy "participants", time to exhaustion (~12 min
in a constant-power test) fell by 20% following a 90-min cognitive test, but
when the subjects consumed caffeine blind, performance time increased
by 24% yet fell by only 3% following the cognitive test. Divide these effects
by ~12 to get their equivalent on mean power in time trials (Hopkins et al., 2001; Vandenbogaerde and Hopkins, 2011). Conclusion: caffeine
attenuates the physically fatiguing effect of mental fatigue, although the
title mistakenly proclaims that caffeine mediates
the effect. [Staiano, W; poster]
Three representatives
of the World Commission of Science and Sport gave convincing accounts of the
valuable contribution of science, particularly biomechanics, to elite
performance in giant slalom (Erich Müller), swimming (Kari Keskinen), and cricket
(Richard Stretch). The abstract [see Müller, E] doesn't convey any of the
information that was presented, so here's one example from each presenter:
development of skiing-specific training ergometers based on painstaking
quantification of kinematics and kinetics on the snow; a case study of the
successful change in the style of a 100-m butterfly swimmer (coincidentally a
study presented at the 2010 BMS conference and here again); and important changes in batting technique when
cricketers face a bowling machine instead of a bowler.
A similar symposium
with a focus more on specific examples of the delivery of sport science was presented
by Malcolm Fairweather and Alison Alcock of the Sport Scotland Institute of
Sport, with their associate Ross Sanders of the University of Edinburgh.
Malcolm and Alison framed their examples around skill acquisition/retention
(assessed by appropriate testing) and skill transfer (to competitive
performance). By training speed-endurance of rugby sevens players, they increased
the proportion of successful line breaks from 52% to 86% in one year. They reduced
a top badminton
player's unforced errors from 25% to 8% in six months, partly by training her
with a better player and focusing on the corner where she made most errors.
Timing in curling
is crucial, but they found that a top player was being misled by external
timing, which turned out to have twice the error of the athlete's own
perception. The Scottish success rate with the hockey dragflick shot was only
10%, but they increased it to the world-class rate of ~35% by applying
principles of deliberate practice, contextual interference and systematic
periodization. Ross spoke more generically about balancing service and
research in swimming,
in which each athlete is a case study involving the coach and all the support
specialists. Effects of asymmetry on swimming performance is a major novel
project still in progress. [Fairweather, M]
Innovations
in sports
science south of the Scottish border were the focus of a symposium
given by Ken van Someren and Steve Ingham of the English Institute of Sport.
The abstract [Ingham, S] is of the results-will-be-presented variety and does
not include the following two recent projects on performance enhancement
presented by Steve. In a crossover
with 11 elite middle-distance runners, Steve and colleagues improved 800-m time-trial
performance by 1.0% with a priming warm-up containing a continuous race-pace
200-m run (see journal abstract). EIS physiologists have also been measuring hemoglobin mass
in an attempt to optimize individual responses to altitude exposure. They
provoked increases in nearly all of 10 elite athletes and achieved a mean increase of ~1.5%.
For a commentary on this series of possibly unpublishable case studies and
details of other EIS-backed innovations visit Steve's blog.
In a symposium on research on effective coaching,
the first two speakers (Jean Coté and Paul Ford) spent most of their time
explaining their theoretical frameworks for research on expert performance (Côté and Gilbert, 2009; Ford et al., 2009). The most important
skill in coaching is apparently decision-making. The final speaker (Chris
Cushion) provided evidence of the difficulty in changing coaches' behaviors.
He also spoke of the need to raise coaches' self-awareness about what they do
and why they do it, but in question time he admitted that there was still
little evidence that greater self-awareness in the coach leads to better
performance in the athlete. In response to another question he said that
coach and player outcomes are difficult to measure in complex sports except
through self-reports, the validity of which he had earlier questioned.
[Search for Sports Coaching Effectiveness
to find their three abstracts; Mark Williams is in the program but was unable
to attend.]
The conference ended on
a high with a symposium on the development of expert athletic performance
focusing more on the athlete than the coach. It was introduced by Paul Ford,
who took us through all the physical, psychomotor and context-specific
tactical skills
of a top basketball
player. The skills are acquired through deliberate play in childhood, which
gradually gets replaced by deliberate practice (he prefers deliberate environments) in adolescence and
competition in adulthood.
Ed Coughlan then
reported on his recent exciting PhD studies on the roles of deliberate
and
reflective
practice
in expert and intermediate Gaelic footballers. Experts chose to practice their
weaker (non-dominant) kick while the intermediates chose their stronger
(dominant) kick. The experts also engaged in more reflections about their
practice at various times between training sessions, and they improved more
than the intermediate players. Finally intermediate players assigned to an
experimental group prompted to do reflective practice improved more than a
matched control group.
The final speaker,
Natalie Dunman, gave an equally exciting presentation of case studies of some
of the 18 elite
athletes
the UK Talent Team have fast-tracked to the London Olympics with far
less than Ericsson's estimate of 10,000 hours of experience needed to make an
expert musician. See a blog message
about the program posted in November 2011 by Natalie, but skip the silly
promo video. See also an item
about Helen Glover, one of their athletes who has
now won gold in London in rowing. It will be worth watching out for an
evaluation of this program after the Olympics. [Search for Expert Athletic Performance to find
the three abstracts; several speakers in the program were unable or chose not
to attend.]
Conference Logistics
critiqued by Will
Disappointingly, the conference organizers
did not put the poster abstracts on the conference website during
the conference or on the flash drive in the conference registration pack. No
explanation was given when I enquired. The poster abstracts were available
for a limited time via the smartphone conference app, but they were listed in
random order different from the unlabeled order of the displayed posters. The
app itself was anything but a killer on the Android, and the author search
form did not work, so the poster abstracts were effectively inaccessible. At
the time of putting the finishing touches on this report in early August, an
attendee alerted me to the fact that the poster abstracts had become
available at the site.
I had volunteered to present a colleague's
poster electronically, but I turned up to find no such facility for
presentation. I am afraid I therefore contributed to the high proportion of
poster no-shows,
an incredible two-thirds! Were these people actually present at the meeting?
If they were, the institutions who funded them presumably will never know
that they didn't present. What can the organizers do to prevent this sort of
thing happening next time? There was also an unprecedented rate of no-shows
for the podium presentations, something like 20%. For the first time ever I
witnessed no-shows of chairs. By the last day even the registrants weren't
turning up: a valuable symposium on sport science in the preparation of elite
athletes had a disappointing (but not disappointed) audience of 12.
Timetabling of the morning keynote lectures
was poor: they were scheduled for only 45 minutes, and they ran straight on to
invited symposia without a break. In the first keynote, the renowned
geneticist Claude Bouchard went over time by 10 min (the fault of the chair
and previous speaker), while speakers and audience for the next session
queued noisily outside. Bouchard never made it to his following symposium at
another lecture theatre some distance away, and neither did the chair or the
other speakers, but someone got up and gave a talk that wasn't in the
program!
At least two presenters we know of self-plagiarized
by giving original-research talks they had already presented verbatim at
previous international conferences: one by a student presenter at this year's
ECSS conference two weeks previously, and the one referred to above by a more
senior academic at the BMS conference in 2010. A colleague who was a coauthor
of the student's abstract informed me that there was no statement at the
ICSEMIS site about the work having to be original, so I guess the student and
coauthors are acquitted on a technicality. I suggest organizers in future run
abstracts through Turnitin. It's usual for big shots to give the same invited
talks at conference after conference, but I had little respect for the
speaker who gave the same talk practically verb-atim and visu-atim as a
keynote on one day and at a symposium the next.
In general the chairs were good, but some
moved talks forward to take up the slack of the many no-shows, and others
kept inviting questions when the speaker's time was up. I wanted to scream
"keep to the scheduled program!" That's what the
instructions to chairs should have stated in a large font on page 1.
The registration fee of UKP399 did not buy
lunches or even a biscuit with morning and afternoon coffee or tea. The
conference dinner cost UKP40. My two students and I opted instead for salads,
bread, berries and cherries from Marks and Spencer, for about UKP5 each. I
heard from someone who went to the dinner that it was a stand-up affair with
finger food that ran out early on. Incredible.
In summary I rated this conference C+, and
others I spoke with were even less generous. It's an embarrassment for the
chairs of the organizing and scientific committees (Celia Brackenridge and
Greg Whyte), who must have been given the impossible mandate of maximizing
profit and attendance without compromising quality. Nevertheless, young
researchers got a bad impression about the state of the science of exercise
and sport from this meeting. Let me assure you: it's not like this at ECSS
and ACSM annual meetings or at any number of speciality conferences organized
at a fraction of the cost by their professional organizations. The IOC should
have spent money more wisely to honor the hype of their website banner
proclaiming "sport… inspiring a learning legacy".
I didn't go to the closing ceremony, but a
colleague who did told me that the Brazilians put on a fabulous dance show to
promote the conference before the 2016 Rio Olympics. Let's hope those running
this next conference have learned something from the legacy of this one.
Acknowledgements: Teesside
University, ECSS and High Performance Sport NZ and Will's consulting account
all contributed to the authors' expenses for this conference tour, while AUT
University provided Will's salary.
References
Côté J, Gilbert W (2009). An integrative definition
of coaching effectiveness and expertise. International Journal of Sports
Science and Coaching 4, 307-323
Ford P, Coughlan E, Williams M (2009). The expert-performance
approach as a framework for understanding and enhancing coaching performance,
expertise and learning. International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching
4, 451-463
Hopkins WG, Schabort EJ, Hawley JA (2001). Reliability of
power in physical performance tests. Sports Medicine 31, 211-234
Hopkins WG, Marshall SW, Batterham AM, Hanin J (2009). Progressive statistics for studies in sports medicine
and exercise science. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise
41, 3-12
Pyne D, Trewin C, Hopkins W (2004). Progression and
variability of competitive performance of Olympic swimmers. Journal of Sports
Sciences 22, 613-620
Vandenbogaerde TJ, Hopkins WG (2011). Effects of acute
carbohydrate supplementation on endurance performance: a meta-analysis.
Sports Medicine 41, 773-792
Published August 2012
©2012
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