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SI article features Longo prominently. Pretty interesting.
College football technology: Getting smart about strength - College Football - SI.com
The white board in Paul Longo’s office looks how you would expect the Notre Dame director of strength and conditioning’s white board to look: a congress of numbers and names, featuring the weekly training regimen for the Fighting Irish’s football team this summer. The names of each day’s exercises run in vertical lines made up of colored cards: WHIPSNATCH on a green rectangle. TURF MOBILITY on yellow, CLOSE GRIP BENCH on red. In the Guglielmino Athletic Complex’s nearby weight room, players will grunt through all of these as they aspire to be a top-10 unit in the fall.
But in a long conversation about how you train a top-10 team, Longo doesn’t refer to these lifts even once.
As for what’s increasingly crucial to that mission, what the 28-year strength coach really wants to talk about, Longo reaches to his left for a leather bag. He pulls out a small device and lays it on his desk. It looks like a digital watch, circa 1985. It is, in fact, a Basis tracker, one of Longo’s newest toys, arriving in early June.
When one of Notre Dame’s players wears the device, the strength and conditioning staff will be able to track the amount of sleep the player gets, the quality of that sleep, his heart rate upon waking and other variables. The data may offer clues as to why a player is sluggish or not recovering well from workouts, be it stress or over-training. Those clues may inform an adjusted plan to keep the player sharper and healthier. Or they may prompt Longo and his staff to lecture a player on better habits. Either way there is objective evidence at Longo’s disposal. The interpretation is the art of it, but the numbers don’t lie.
COLLEGE FOOTBALL
Technology in college football: The evolution of video and film study
by Zac Ellis As programs across the nation begin their summers of training for the 2015 season, strength and conditioning is increasingly becoming a complex numbers game. The question is not only how much you lift but also how efficiently you lift it, how you train muscles literally from head to toe, how you feel before and after and all the forward-looking ways to measure those nuances. Out of the Stone Age, into the Information Age.
“We’ve gotten to the point where you really can’t outwork anybody, so to speak, because the work level is maxed out,” Longo says. “Any more, you get into that area of over-working, injuries, those types of things. You have to work smarter is basically what it comes down to.”
To accomplish that, programs have gotten, well, programmed. Schools like Notre Dame, Northwestern, Nebraska, Texas A&M and others use a system called EliteForm, which tracks the speed of bar movement and the watts produced during exercises and then displays the results not only for the lifter but also on interlinked tablet screens hanging on stations throughout the weight room. Cincinnati is entering its sixth season using Dynavision, a large light board that helps hone ocular reaction time and enhance peripheral vision—essentially a workout for eye muscles. Many schools, USC and Florida State among them, use trackers like Catapult GPS to monitor the work rate of players or position groups that do a lot of running.
Not every innovation is worth exploring, and encouraging players to strain against their limits, whatever the numbers say, remains a key component to any strength program. Old school isn’t out entirely; at Northwestern, a good old tug of war remains part of training. But there are only so many hours in a day a player can work, and there are only so many players on a roster. Efficiency, therefore, becomes key.
“As a strength coach, if I keep consistently loading you and loading you and loading you, yes, you’re getting the weight, but is it at optimal speed and optimal velocity to transfer to football skills and to be able to recover?” Northwestern director of football performance Jay Hooten says. “I tell recruits all the time, if I keep loading you like that, something is eventually going to give. And [EliteForm] just takes the subjectivity out of it. It allows me to see that.”
COLLEGE FOOTBALL
brian-kelly-notre-dame-dear-andy.jpg
Video
Which surprise team has best shot to make the playoff? #DearAndy
by Andy Staples At Notre Dame, touchscreen tablets latched to a line of weight racks measure progress—both in the technological sense and the conditioning sense. EliteForm was established in 2012 and it arrived in South Bend in early ’14. The essence of performance has not changed over nearly three decades, in Longo’s estimation: It is about force production into the ground—what your legs and core put in determines what propels you forward or upward. EliteForm, by calculating bar speed and weight and translating that into watts produced, allows Longo and his staff to get their most accurate measurement of the player’s force.
“Power is pretty simple,” Longo says. Proving the point, he in fact scribbles the equation for it on a sheet of paper on his desk: (m x d)/t. Mass times distance divided by time. The Olympic-style lifts that Notre Dame does stimulate and adapt force production and basic power. During a particular lift, the EliteForm radar collects all the data and flashes a number on the touchscreen tablet attached to the rack. If a player misses his target, the number appears in red. If he hits or exceeds his target, it appears in green.
In striving to hit the target, heavier is not necessarily better. “Like anything else, it’s the impetus in your brain to move fast,” Longo says. “You have to try to move that bar as fast as you possibly can. It’s kind of like telling you to jump high—if you have a target, you’re likely to jump higher. This gives us competition without opening the how-much-can-you-lift injury window.”
Indeed, if a player produces the best number of the day across every rack in the room, it appears in yellow for everyone else to see…and envy. And it remains there until someone beats it.
“It’s instant feedback for the athlete,” Hooten says. “Today we had a clean day, the guy who hit the most weight with the most velocity—boom, flashes gold. Guys can see it. It’s huge. Guys want to know.”
With GPS devices becoming more ubiquitous in college football, there is that same desire to know hard numbers—but aimed at ensuring a workload doesn’t squash a player completely.
USC outfits its starters, and then some, with the Catapult GPS devices that slip into a vest under their practice gear, according to head strength coach Ivan Lewis. When the Trojans’ performance staff evaluates the data churned out after a given practice or conditioning session, they’ll have a Player Load, the all-encompassing number that gives them insight on how taxing a workout was. They’ll look at high-intensity yards—how intense the running was and when they were doing it. And they’ll look at the number of high-intensity efforts per session, paying special attention to high-intensity accelerations and decelerations. (Decelerations, ironically, are more taxing on the body.)
COLLEGE FOOTBALL
How can mobile apps impact the college football recruiting cycle?
by Lindsay Schnell These numbers inform the management of a player in order to prevent injury. “When we get all this data on these players, like maybe a linebacker that’s on every special team, his player load would be through the roof,” Lewis says. “So we can really start saying, ‘Hey man, this guy is red-zoning for a soft tissue injury if we keep running him like we have the first couple weeks of practice.’ It’s being able to better prepare a player, basically.”
It’s also being able to better validate a practice plan; should coach Steve Sarkisian want an intense workout, the data spit out by the Catapult device will reflect whether he got what he wanted.
But as intent and excited as Lewis is about continuing to use Catapult—“It’s just the beginning,” he says—it cannot box players in. Nothing of any appreciable worth in athletics gets accomplished without players attempting to transcend boundaries or limitations.
“At the end of the day, your great players have that mindset—they’re going to push themselves through these limits,” Lewis says. “They might be on that teetering edge of how much is too much. At some point, they’re all going to be there. I guess this is just another tool to help us manage that. But the reality is, yeah, we’re going to push them.”
College football technology: Getting smart about strength - College Football - SI.com
The white board in Paul Longo’s office looks how you would expect the Notre Dame director of strength and conditioning’s white board to look: a congress of numbers and names, featuring the weekly training regimen for the Fighting Irish’s football team this summer. The names of each day’s exercises run in vertical lines made up of colored cards: WHIPSNATCH on a green rectangle. TURF MOBILITY on yellow, CLOSE GRIP BENCH on red. In the Guglielmino Athletic Complex’s nearby weight room, players will grunt through all of these as they aspire to be a top-10 unit in the fall.
But in a long conversation about how you train a top-10 team, Longo doesn’t refer to these lifts even once.
As for what’s increasingly crucial to that mission, what the 28-year strength coach really wants to talk about, Longo reaches to his left for a leather bag. He pulls out a small device and lays it on his desk. It looks like a digital watch, circa 1985. It is, in fact, a Basis tracker, one of Longo’s newest toys, arriving in early June.
When one of Notre Dame’s players wears the device, the strength and conditioning staff will be able to track the amount of sleep the player gets, the quality of that sleep, his heart rate upon waking and other variables. The data may offer clues as to why a player is sluggish or not recovering well from workouts, be it stress or over-training. Those clues may inform an adjusted plan to keep the player sharper and healthier. Or they may prompt Longo and his staff to lecture a player on better habits. Either way there is objective evidence at Longo’s disposal. The interpretation is the art of it, but the numbers don’t lie.
COLLEGE FOOTBALL
Technology in college football: The evolution of video and film study
by Zac Ellis As programs across the nation begin their summers of training for the 2015 season, strength and conditioning is increasingly becoming a complex numbers game. The question is not only how much you lift but also how efficiently you lift it, how you train muscles literally from head to toe, how you feel before and after and all the forward-looking ways to measure those nuances. Out of the Stone Age, into the Information Age.
“We’ve gotten to the point where you really can’t outwork anybody, so to speak, because the work level is maxed out,” Longo says. “Any more, you get into that area of over-working, injuries, those types of things. You have to work smarter is basically what it comes down to.”
To accomplish that, programs have gotten, well, programmed. Schools like Notre Dame, Northwestern, Nebraska, Texas A&M and others use a system called EliteForm, which tracks the speed of bar movement and the watts produced during exercises and then displays the results not only for the lifter but also on interlinked tablet screens hanging on stations throughout the weight room. Cincinnati is entering its sixth season using Dynavision, a large light board that helps hone ocular reaction time and enhance peripheral vision—essentially a workout for eye muscles. Many schools, USC and Florida State among them, use trackers like Catapult GPS to monitor the work rate of players or position groups that do a lot of running.
Not every innovation is worth exploring, and encouraging players to strain against their limits, whatever the numbers say, remains a key component to any strength program. Old school isn’t out entirely; at Northwestern, a good old tug of war remains part of training. But there are only so many hours in a day a player can work, and there are only so many players on a roster. Efficiency, therefore, becomes key.
“As a strength coach, if I keep consistently loading you and loading you and loading you, yes, you’re getting the weight, but is it at optimal speed and optimal velocity to transfer to football skills and to be able to recover?” Northwestern director of football performance Jay Hooten says. “I tell recruits all the time, if I keep loading you like that, something is eventually going to give. And [EliteForm] just takes the subjectivity out of it. It allows me to see that.”
COLLEGE FOOTBALL
brian-kelly-notre-dame-dear-andy.jpg
Video
Which surprise team has best shot to make the playoff? #DearAndy
by Andy Staples At Notre Dame, touchscreen tablets latched to a line of weight racks measure progress—both in the technological sense and the conditioning sense. EliteForm was established in 2012 and it arrived in South Bend in early ’14. The essence of performance has not changed over nearly three decades, in Longo’s estimation: It is about force production into the ground—what your legs and core put in determines what propels you forward or upward. EliteForm, by calculating bar speed and weight and translating that into watts produced, allows Longo and his staff to get their most accurate measurement of the player’s force.
“Power is pretty simple,” Longo says. Proving the point, he in fact scribbles the equation for it on a sheet of paper on his desk: (m x d)/t. Mass times distance divided by time. The Olympic-style lifts that Notre Dame does stimulate and adapt force production and basic power. During a particular lift, the EliteForm radar collects all the data and flashes a number on the touchscreen tablet attached to the rack. If a player misses his target, the number appears in red. If he hits or exceeds his target, it appears in green.
In striving to hit the target, heavier is not necessarily better. “Like anything else, it’s the impetus in your brain to move fast,” Longo says. “You have to try to move that bar as fast as you possibly can. It’s kind of like telling you to jump high—if you have a target, you’re likely to jump higher. This gives us competition without opening the how-much-can-you-lift injury window.”
Indeed, if a player produces the best number of the day across every rack in the room, it appears in yellow for everyone else to see…and envy. And it remains there until someone beats it.
“It’s instant feedback for the athlete,” Hooten says. “Today we had a clean day, the guy who hit the most weight with the most velocity—boom, flashes gold. Guys can see it. It’s huge. Guys want to know.”
With GPS devices becoming more ubiquitous in college football, there is that same desire to know hard numbers—but aimed at ensuring a workload doesn’t squash a player completely.
USC outfits its starters, and then some, with the Catapult GPS devices that slip into a vest under their practice gear, according to head strength coach Ivan Lewis. When the Trojans’ performance staff evaluates the data churned out after a given practice or conditioning session, they’ll have a Player Load, the all-encompassing number that gives them insight on how taxing a workout was. They’ll look at high-intensity yards—how intense the running was and when they were doing it. And they’ll look at the number of high-intensity efforts per session, paying special attention to high-intensity accelerations and decelerations. (Decelerations, ironically, are more taxing on the body.)
COLLEGE FOOTBALL
How can mobile apps impact the college football recruiting cycle?
by Lindsay Schnell These numbers inform the management of a player in order to prevent injury. “When we get all this data on these players, like maybe a linebacker that’s on every special team, his player load would be through the roof,” Lewis says. “So we can really start saying, ‘Hey man, this guy is red-zoning for a soft tissue injury if we keep running him like we have the first couple weeks of practice.’ It’s being able to better prepare a player, basically.”
It’s also being able to better validate a practice plan; should coach Steve Sarkisian want an intense workout, the data spit out by the Catapult device will reflect whether he got what he wanted.
But as intent and excited as Lewis is about continuing to use Catapult—“It’s just the beginning,” he says—it cannot box players in. Nothing of any appreciable worth in athletics gets accomplished without players attempting to transcend boundaries or limitations.
“At the end of the day, your great players have that mindset—they’re going to push themselves through these limits,” Lewis says. “They might be on that teetering edge of how much is too much. At some point, they’re all going to be there. I guess this is just another tool to help us manage that. But the reality is, yeah, we’re going to push them.”
