Latest / The Layback Podcast / Gary McCoy, High Performance and Strength Coach (Ep. 60)

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Gary McCoy, High Performance and Strength Coach (Ep. 60) · The Layback Podcast

• 0:00
  Hey everyone, welcome back to the Lay Back podcast.
• 0:02
  Joining us today is an incredibly special guest, Gary
• 0:06
  McCoy. Gary is a celebrity in my eyes
• 0:10
  and the Flex Pro Grip team's eyes.
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  We're going to try to make him blush up front.
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  Don't know if we'll be able to do it, but he is sporting his
• 0:17
  patented black out outfit with the black and white background.
• 0:20
  This is so standard it makes me feel at home on a Zoom call with
• 0:24
  him seeing this on the other side.
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  Gary is a staple in the high, high performance side of
• 0:31
  baseball. He's done some really incredible
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  things. I am going to bury the lead
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  right now and let him talk a little bit more about it later
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  on. But he's currently involved in
• 0:41
  some consulting. He's always kind of on the
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  CIAFBIS commissions in the background of the baseball in
• 0:48
  the sports performance world. So maybe we'll poke and prod and
• 0:51
  get some things out of him as we go.
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  But Gary, thanks a ton for coming on.
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  I tried not to butcher anything in the process, so hopefully you
• 1:00
  can take this off of my hands and tell everyone a bit about
• 1:03
  who you are. Yeah, thank you, Adam.
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  And it's, it's an, it's an honour to be here anytime, you
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  know, I join a podcast or get the opportunity to share a
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  little bit of the journey that I've been on here, It's it's
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  always a pleasure. So entirely mine.
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  And yeah. So look, it's been a really
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  interesting ride for me. The accent your listeners are
• 1:21
  picking up on is Australian. And probably the first thought
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  is, oh, damn it, another sports scientist from Australia, right.
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  That's you must be a sports scientist.
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  Grew up in a sports science environment, which was totally
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  different from what I that is kind of preached over in the
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  United States is preached here is is more around strength and
• 1:39
  conditioning. You know that those were the
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  models that were primary and look, sports science in
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  Australia growing up in that. Why was it prevalent there?
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  Well, in 1976, Australia didn't medal at the Montreal Olympic
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  Games. We didn't medal, wasn't a single
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  medal. So the Australian government
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  turned around and said, you know what we need to do?
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  Don't worry about curing cancer. Don't worry about this massive
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  pole in the ozone layer. Don't worry about anything
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  environmentally. We need gold medals.
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  So we set up this thing in 76 called the Australian Institute
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  of Sport and it really became where we put scientists, we put
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  the best scientists we could find in the country to try to
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  figure this out. And Fast forward within eight
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  years, Australia's, you know, the highest per capita gold
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  medals winner across the Olympic Games.
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  So at that that level. So I knew coming into the United
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  States when I first moved here that, yeah, I did have a
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  different background, It was broader than just strength in
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  conditioning. So worked for two organisations
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  in baseball and it was right after the 2006 World Baseball
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  Classic. We were the only team that
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  didn't have an injury. Team Australia, we didn't have
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  an injury and that prompted a lot of thought because there's a
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  lot of fear around WBC at the time because it was at the start
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  of the baseball season. And what if I lose 100 million?
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  What if Shohei Otani goes down playing for Japan in the WBC?
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  The Dodgers are going, Oh my God, right.
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  They're tearing their hair out. So the fact that we had no
• 3:00
  injuries, everyone was like, what did you do different?
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  Well, we had, we had very specific recovery protocols that
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  we were putting in place that I think helped enhance this.
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  And we were also kind of monitoring load without knowing
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  what that even meant back at that time.
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  So, yeah, went to work then for the Florida Marlins was a AAA
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  and, and up and down in the major leagues with them
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  recruited over to the Houston Astros in 2010, three years with
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  the Astros. We had a massive ownership
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  change, a lot of changes going on in the organization.
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  Fast forward, I end up of all places in Taiwan working with
• 3:32
  Manny Ramirez, with this team, the Edar Rhinos.
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  What was amazing, even the time I had in Major League Baseball,
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  the time I had in Taiwan to be isolated in a language, you
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  know, the language was, you know, I was learning simplified
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  Chinese to go about my day-to-day activities, had an
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  interpreter with me most of the time.
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  It was so isolating that it gave me the opportunity to really
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  expand thought and get outside of traditional strength and
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  conditioning modalities. And so started down a pathway
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  there. I was there for about 6 months
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  before Catapult Sports found me and brought me over to that, to
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  that company. A CEO and a headhunter flew in.
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  They, they heard my name in the US.
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  They wanted to hit the US market.
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  So they said, hey, would you be interested in being the senior
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  applied sports scientist for Catapult?
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  So I looked at the tech, looked at baseball and said this is the
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  wrong technology for baseball because you don't want to go
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  into baseball. You definitely want to be in
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  soccer, the NFL, this is where we want to be.
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  And so then I kind of was out of baseball for a while.
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  I implemented tech stacks for 21 NFL teams, got to know guys in
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  the NBA league office really, really well.
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  I got to know basically every sport and learn about every
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  sport outside of baseball through this technology, which
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  was fun. So got to do that, came back
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  into baseball, was recruited over to Woop, the consumer
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  wearable. And the first thing I did was
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  set up a study in Major League Baseball and communicated with
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  the Major League Baseball Players Association and MLB.
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  We had 247 athletes in the minor leagues, non 40 man guys wearing
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  the device. Did a lot of work with the Cubs.
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  My buddy Bobby Basham, who's there, was one of the first ones
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  to implement and look at this. We're looking at recovery.
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  We really want to understand how well these athletes were
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  recovering between games. So we did a Big 12 month project
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  with them. I had some concerns around the
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  quality of the data itself and there was some kind of black box
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  things going on. I knew the photo Plato
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  thermography is the technology. I knew that wasn't optimized,
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  especially when it's wrist worn. This is a lot of noise and a lot
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  of artifact going on there. I knew it wasn't optimally
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  giving us the data that we needed for the long term in
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  Major League Baseball, but at that point, when I left loop,
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  where did I end up? Straight back in baseball.
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  So my interpreter over in my first round at Taiwan becomes an
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  assistant GM with the biggest team near the brothers.
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  And so in 2017, he brought me back to really focus on reducing
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  injury. And that's where we had a zero
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  injury season. Took four years to get it but we
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  had a zero injury season. There, that's really an
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  incredible process, and we could probably spend an entire episode
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  on any single one of those adventures that you took on.
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  But maybe where we should spend the majority of our time is
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  talking about the translation of some of the marketing of the
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  Brothers baseball team and how it looks in English with posters
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  such as Brothers Got Balls. That's probably the most
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  important thing we could spend our time talking about.
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  Some of the translation stuff, yeah.
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  There's that movie Lost in Translation for the reason,
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  right? I'd see things, I would hear
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  gangsta rap being played over the speakers with 40,000 people
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  in a stadium going, hang on a minute, you can't say that yet.
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  And I was like, no, you can say that because no one understands
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  what's what's where you said here.
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  I was like, my God, just weird stuff like that would happen all
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  the time. But yeah, look, my time in
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  Taiwan was stunning. Like if someone said to me, OK,
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  you've got a chance. You can go and relive your time
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  in Taiwan or relive your time in Major League Baseball.
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  Yeah, I'm going to Taiwan. Just the the energy, the the
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  desire still like very much a team based sport and the desire
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  to to hold up the team and be to be proud of the team is
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  something that kind of missed in sport for a long time that I
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  would see in certain pockets in the US, but a lot more more so
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  internationally is what I would see.
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  Yeah, Taiwan was phenomenal. It was a great place to be.
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  I tried to catch you off guard a little bit maybe maybe treat
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  that like I was going to say something serious and just go
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  right into some of the marketing or the the jokes that I know you
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  kept with you over the years. Because I've even seen you make
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  a couple presentations where you bring up the brothers got Balls
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  poster, which is just a great one.
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  But let's let's talk about now the structure of the brothers
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  kind of, I guess organization in a sense, because obviously
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  having an injury free season wasn't just you.
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  I would love to give you the credit for it, but there's so
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  many incredible people in place, whether it's athletic trainers,
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  strength coaches, the on field coaches, being in touch with the
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  front office, everybody communicating.
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  And it wasn't just like you guys stepped in, did it in one year,
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  but you saw continual improvement over time.
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  So maybe if you could take us through kind of the bird's eye
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  view of everything that happened, your call if you want
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  to do it year to year or take breaks like chapters.
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  I just want to pass this over to you so we can get a look at how
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  you and your team. I've accomplished just
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  tremendous injury rate reductions with the brothers.
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  Organization and yeah, good way to look at this too, is like if
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  you're driving through a city right now listening to this in
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  your car, I mean, you look around, you see some incredible
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  buildings. Think man team that built that
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  building as aesthetically beautiful as it is, but it's
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  like, wow, that's phenomenal. And it's just started with an
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  architect, right? And that's who I was.
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  I was just the architect, right? Just the architect alone.
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  You imagine that guy standing in the field with his, with his
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  rolled up plans ain't building the building, right?
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  It's everybody else that has to build the building.
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  So I had a phenomenal team and this was something that I dove
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  into really early. So we started out how this
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  started, Adam, I had to audit, do an injury audit across the
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  system. So the brothers were averaging
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  over the four years of data that I looked at 2012, 1314 and 15
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  was the data sets that I was looking at.
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  It was 2016 when I first started there, not 17.
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  When I was looking at that four years data, the average some
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  some years were 34, some years were 3130 was average of about
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  32 significant injuries which accounted for about 800.
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  It was somewhere around 890 man games lost per season, right?
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  So when you think about, right, maybe it's a grade 4 hamstring,
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  what we call a grade 4 hamstring here in the US and that's going
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  to maybe lay somebody out for four weeks, six weeks somewhere
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  in there, right? So it was all those days.
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  And in baseball, those days add up because it's fan games lost.
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  We're playing every day, right? So they add up.
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  So 890 man games lost. If you look at the business
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  efficiency of that, it's really poor, right?
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  I mean, so the very first thing when my interpreter got over
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  there and became the assistant GM, Ellery Chen, his name is
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  brilliant guy too. He's going to be one of those
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  sports executives in the future that we're all going to look at
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  and say that's the GM of the future.
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  This is who this guy is. He turned around and said, look,
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  come on, look at this data. I said, so let me get with the
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  head athletic trainer. Firstly we have to translate
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  everything, get everything out of simplified Chinese into, into
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  English. And then I and then I requested
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  film. I spent about 3 months just
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  doing a really solid audit on the mechanisms of injury and,
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  and what was preventable versus what was ballistic, what we
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  could see coming, what possibly couldn't, what data we had
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  access to at the time. Upon all this, when I realized
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  we're losing 800 man games a year, we need to put systems in
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  place. Let me look at the strength and
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  conditioning models, very similar replicated models from
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  Major League Baseball in the United States, right?
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  These are the heavy lifts and everything that we're doing.
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  And there was no consideration on something like asymmetry in
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  baseball, which I believe for a long time, even by last year at
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  WOOF was doing a presentation, Adam, to all the team doctors at
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  Major League Baseball and the head athletic trainers.
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  This was in Washington, DC at the at winter meetings.
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  And I remember just looking out of this room prior to giving the
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  presentation on WHOOP and, and the findings we had, I asked all
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  the team docs. I said, guys, how many of you
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  believe asymmetry is the leading cause of the preventable
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  musculoskeletal injuries that we have in baseball?
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  And every hand in the room went up.
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  Yeah, this asymmetry plays a part.
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  I said, do me a favor, leave your hand up.
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  If your organization has a strengthened conditioning model
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  that is offsetting asymmetry. Every hand went down.
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  So there was a major disconnect for me even at that point in
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  time. And I always knew symmetry was a
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  consideration that had to prevent long term injury.
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  And I started this like even as training Cy Young Award winner
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  Dallas GEICO with the Houston Astros.
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  And GEICO could go out and throw 120 pitches.
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  And then when I had him at AAA and when I had him in the major
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  leagues, we'd go, we'd go and train the other side of his body
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  to try to reflect the volume of work that he did on his left
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  side. We'd want to do it on his right
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  side and we would start to open it up.
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  I created exercises and everything to offset the
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  asymmetry. We didn't have a lot of
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  measurement tools in Major League Baseball at that time.
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  And I remember Dallas, the, the thing he said to me was he came
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  to me in August and he goes, my body feels fresh, feels brand
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  new. And I was like, OK, well, that's
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  and that helps me a ton, right? That helps me give some credence
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  to offsetting asymmetry may be a thing here.
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  So going into this opportunity with the brothers, I thought
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  there's one thing I'll try out of the gate, because you can't
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  change everything overnight, right?
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  You can't all of a sudden be implementing 12 different new
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  modalities to A, to a staff that has has never seen this before.
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  So I thought I'm just going to take it a step at a time.
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  I think asymmetry from what I can understand from the
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  mechanisms of the injuries that we were looking at after this
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  was the leading cause of this. I said we're going to do some
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  asymmetry offsets or we're going to do year 1, Adam.
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  Year one, we had a 75% reduction in preventable injury, 75%.
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  We took it from the average of 32 incidents.
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  We took that down to 8 in the first year and so that was a lot
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  of it was OK. Guys, the hitters, I'd have
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  them, yeah. How many swings they're taking
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  the cage in Asia, we have an overtraining situation there
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  right as well. I turn around and say, guys just
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  take some swings from the other side for me, let's get in the
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  habit of getting the other side trained pitchers when they would
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  come out again. So I'd get them start working
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  the other side of their body in terms of defense.
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  One of the things we did with with all the defensive players,
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  like we would run the lip of the infield from 3rd to 1st.
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  We'd turn them the other way, right, to try to make sure that
• 14:07
  like when I was looking at hamstring injuries across Major
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  League Baseball, they were always left leg and they were
• 14:12
  lead leg and they were outside, you know, from a curvilinear
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  aspect of base running. So where we'd see all these
• 14:17
  injuries. So we put systems in place year
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  1 to offset asymmetry and that had a 75% reduction and
• 14:24
  preventable injury. And I knew we were on to
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  something then That was that was the very first step we took to
• 14:31
  to understand the model. I mean, the one of the, I think
• 14:34
  the massive failures we have in Major League Baseball is a lot
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  of things live in silos. And I know you've experienced
• 14:40
  this, right? Whether it's the strength and
• 14:42
  conditioning silo, the athletic training silo, those two things
• 14:46
  are often in different, different offices and set apart.
• 14:48
  It's like if anything should be joined at the hip, it's those
• 14:51
  two, right? But quite often we'd see them in
• 14:54
  silos, coaches disrespecting, disregarding strength and
• 14:57
  conditioning, a lot of them right, just pushing it off to
• 14:59
  the side. The fault there was nothing was
• 15:02
  athletes centric. And I said, look from a model
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  perspective, everything we do is got to be like, it's almost like
• 15:09
  Formula One right when the car pulls in, the car is the centre
• 15:13
  of activity. These athletes at the centre of
• 15:15
  our activity, strength and conditioning, athletic training,
• 15:18
  sports psychology. I want everybody on the same
• 15:21
  page and we want transparency entirely through this process.
• 15:25
  So we set up the model I set up and Will Carroll actually
• 15:29
  printed this in his book The Science of Baseball.
• 15:31
  It's done really well. That book, the model I had was
• 15:34
  it starts and finishes well, starts really at the at the very
• 15:37
  core with understanding the emotional and psychological
• 15:42
  state of the athlete, right? What are they presenting with?
• 15:44
  Are they young athletes that's been up all night taking care of
• 15:47
  a baby? What was their sleep like?
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  What was their emotional state and what was their cognitive
• 15:51
  state like? We had nothing to really measure
• 15:54
  that. I had my, my staff go up and I
• 15:57
  say check in with the player, ask them how they're feeling and
• 16:00
  try to make notes daily on how are they feeling.
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  And so we, we were trying to understand that as good as we
• 16:05
  could. And then we would get data from
• 16:08
  the next layer, which was physical systems, understanding
• 16:11
  physical systems. So one of the very first things
• 16:13
  I implemented was Trackman. We weren't capturing any data
• 16:16
  during the course of games in this league.
• 16:18
  Now the entire league is set up with Trackman, but I was the
• 16:21
  first one to implement it. I said I really want to
• 16:23
  understand externally. We want to look at things like
• 16:28
  arm acceleration and velocity. I want to understand those those
• 16:31
  things. So we were starting to get some
• 16:33
  really good data and it got to the point in year 3, Adam, I'll
• 16:37
  Fast forward to this. In year 3, I'd have the data
• 16:40
  scientist from under the stadium roll up, tap me on the shoulder
• 16:44
  and go, you need to come and look at this.
• 16:46
  And I could go and look at where a picture was relative to his
• 16:50
  certain markers that we were looking at.
• 16:52
  Like we actually, and this for anyone who's in Major League
• 16:55
  Baseball, there is an absolute goldmine of data sitting in
• 16:59
  track man that no one appears to be tapping into.
• 17:04
  So we know about injury, right? So if if you're a medical
• 17:07
  practitioner or if you're strength and conditioning coach
• 17:10
  or even a coach, you may understand how injuries like non
• 17:13
  contact, non ballistic injuries occur.
• 17:17
  There's a three-step pathway to that injury.
• 17:20
  It's fatigue, then it's compensation, then it's the
• 17:24
  injury that occurs, right? It's that pathway, fatigue
• 17:27
  compensation injury. So one of the markers that I
• 17:30
  pulled out actually did this with a couple of the guys at
• 17:33
  zone 7, the AI company, their CTOS, like unpack this data with
• 17:37
  me. You know, let's, let's start
• 17:38
  really ripping into this one of the, one of the data sets we
• 17:42
  found because I was like, if I could find out where
• 17:44
  compensation was starting, I could offset that injury.
• 17:49
  So one of the markers that you can find inside a track man, you
• 17:52
  have to build an algorithm to do this.
• 17:54
  Track man will take a measure of maximum horizontal position,
• 17:58
  maximum vertical position, and also release point.
• 18:01
  And guess what, those three things are a millisecond time
• 18:04
  stamp. So you can go A + B + C, you can
• 18:07
  create what's called arm acceleration on those 3 markers,
• 18:12
  right? Arm acceleration and velocity.
• 18:14
  Now let's correlate those two markers, right?
• 18:17
  If I've got arm acceleration of X and velocity of 95, and then I
• 18:22
  go to arm acceleration of Y and velocity of 95.
• 18:26
  Like if I've had to increase my arm acceleration to maintain
• 18:30
  that velocity, which is kind of a subconscious pattern, right?
• 18:34
  If I'm doing that, then if my arm acceleration is faster, what
• 18:38
  has changed in my physical body, right?
• 18:42
  My leg survive is could have fatigued, trunk not have
• 18:45
  fatigued. Something has changed at that
• 18:47
  point in time. So as long as you look at this
• 18:51
  not as a one off, not as just on one pitch, but if you look at
• 18:55
  this over a temporal kind of in inning kind of position, like,
• 18:59
  oh boy, I would end up walking up.
• 19:02
  Once I got that tap on the shoulder from the data scientist
• 19:04
  three years in, who knew what we were looking for, I'd start to
• 19:07
  see that. I would immediately go up, go up
• 19:11
  into the dugout, look to see our pitcher, say Nick Addison, one
• 19:15
  of our bigger pitchers, big lefty was if he was between
• 19:18
  innings, I'd check in with him. Just say how you're feeling.
• 19:22
  I'd go up and look at the hitters he was scheduled to face
• 19:25
  on the very next, in the very next inning.
• 19:27
  I'd look for things like, OK, if he's he's a lefty and he's going
• 19:31
  to be throwing, we got three big righties coming in.
• 19:33
  He's going to be throwing a lot of cutters with a high strain on
• 19:35
  him. We'd start to look at things
• 19:37
  like that to try to understand and I could look at our manager.
• 19:41
  I had three different managers in the time I was at Taiwan, but
• 19:44
  Scott Butner, who was formerly of the Mariners, was was our
• 19:47
  manager of the time. He'd seen me coming towards him.
• 19:50
  He'd go, how much more time has he got?
• 19:52
  And so we, we had this relationship where he knew I
• 19:55
  wasn't making. You've got to make the tactical
• 19:58
  decision. Pitching coach.
• 19:59
  This is I'm just giving you the information.
• 20:01
  Just know that if he goes more than this, say next inning or
• 20:05
  you, if you're pushing him out two innings, we may have to,
• 20:07
  depending on time of year it was, we may have to pull his
• 20:11
  bullpen back a day. We, what are we sacrificing in
• 20:13
  the future for what we're trying to achieve now, right.
• 20:16
  So those discussions were coming up and they're all database
• 20:18
  decisions, which I love, right? These were not.
• 20:22
  Guesses or opinions, and I'm sure there are a lot of
• 20:24
  arguments early when we're trying to implement a
• 20:26
  data-driven model, but over time it was like the data, well, it
• 20:30
  didn't decide. It informed us really well,
• 20:33
  right, on how to do things. So we had physical systems,
• 20:35
  data, technical, tactical, strategic in this whole model
• 20:39
  that when we lost the game, we could actually go back through
• 20:42
  and look at where potentially we lost the game.
• 20:45
  Did we lose it technically? Did we lose it technically?
• 20:48
  Did coaching Staffs make bad decisions?
• 20:51
  Was the athlete fatigue? Was he just not in the mind
• 20:53
  state to be able to execute that day?
• 20:56
  There were so many variables that I understood we needed to
• 20:59
  look at to try to get to 0 injury.
• 21:02
  I think one of the biggest mistakes, and we've talked about
• 21:04
  this, I think, Adam, a few times, about how we look at
• 21:07
  data, especially in sports, we tend to look at it in linearity.
• 21:11
  1 + 1 = 2. It's the human body,
• 21:14
  unfortunately. Is chaos theory right?
• 21:16
  It's a number of interdependent interrelated physical systems
• 21:21
  depending on the outcome you're trying to achieve.
• 21:23
  Those systems have a hierarchy of priority importance to that
• 21:27
  outcome. So that's the way I've always
• 21:29
  tried to look at things. And in our approach to zero
• 21:33
  injury, if that is the approach. And I remember year three, at
• 21:37
  the end of year three, we had two injuries, we're down to just
• 21:40
  two. And I thought that was pretty
• 21:42
  good, right. So I go up to the president of
• 21:44
  the team and I said to him, I said mate, I said listen, I said
• 21:49
  I think we can take some more risks now in training and
• 21:53
  practice and stuff that may establish a little bit more
• 21:56
  power lines for some of these guys.
• 21:58
  But know that it's risk, right? They were so enamoured with the
• 22:03
  injury reduction and the fact that we're in championships
• 22:06
  every year because of this, that they decided no, no, no, just
• 22:09
  keep doing what you're doing. And so, you know, so I thought 2
• 22:12
  was pretty good. But now, thank God, we got down
• 22:14
  to zero that last year and the two we had in Year 3, we're in
• 22:17
  the last AM, two weeks of the season, 2, these two injuries,
• 22:19
  he had a rain delay and our oldest player on unkempt ground
• 22:23
  pulled a hamstring around in first base, hit a wet patch on
• 22:27
  the dirt and then hamstring gone.
• 22:29
  And then I had the other one I joke about a little bit.
• 22:32
  We had a pitcher come in, can't pitch today.
• 22:35
  My back's killing me. What happened?
• 22:37
  What'd you do? I said, looking at all the data,
• 22:39
  like he should be perfect, Ready to get started, Ready to go now.
• 22:42
  I had a fight with his wife, slept on the couch the night
• 22:44
  before, and his back was really bad because he doesn't have a
• 22:48
  good couch. I'm like, dude, look, I'm not a
• 22:49
  marriage counsellor, but I said get a better couch, please.
• 22:52
  You know? So that was a that was a start
• 22:57
  that we lost in that in that third season.
• 23:00
  But this was the other thing, Adam.
• 23:01
  We weren't chasing zero injury either.
• 23:03
  We were trying to stay focused on the individual qualitative
• 23:08
  nature of what was going on. It was in the last two weeks
• 23:11
  actually of Season 4 where I looked at our head athletic
• 23:14
  trainer. I said we even had an injury
• 23:16
  this year. And he's like, yeah, we're at 0.
• 23:18
  And I was like, shit, you just get caught up in it and you're
• 23:21
  so focused on the individual needs of the athletes that it
• 23:24
  wasn't something we chased it. It came about because of the
• 23:28
  because of the focus that that our staff had on those
• 23:32
  individuals. That's wonderful.
• 23:34
  That could again be a podcast in itself.
• 23:38
  There are, of course, so many ways we can stem from this.
• 23:42
  I'm going to call out a few and hopefully in the process we we
• 23:47
  can avoid too much skipping around and still keep it
• 23:50
  succinct. But we're going to start walking
• 23:53
  this way back to the beginning when you talked about the audit.
• 23:56
  There's so many people now at different levels that could be
• 24:00
  in charge of an audit. Everybody has a system, whether
• 24:04
  you're a Little League all the way up to professional baseball.
• 24:08
  So whether it's at the individual level or if it is at
• 24:11
  the highest level of the game, how would you introduce an audit
• 24:15
  where somebody, for example, is, I mean they had Tommy John or
• 24:20
  it's an athletic trainer at an underfunded division Two school.
• 24:24
  What would you encourage them to do to start to correct the
• 24:29
  process or make it better for the future?
• 24:32
  Yeah, there's really two ways to go about this.
• 24:34
  In my, in my opinion, the very first thing we want to
• 24:37
  understand is like when we're doing an injury audit, Let's,
• 24:41
  let's, let's just invent one. Yeah, we'll go, we'll go soft
• 24:45
  tissue hamstring injury just because it's so damn prevalent.
• 24:48
  The, the very first thing I want to understand is the mechanism
• 24:51
  of that injury. When did it first show up?
• 24:53
  We know that where it showed up wasn't the beginning of it.
• 24:56
  We know it's probably, it's probably a two week period prior
• 24:59
  to that injury showing up where there would be some data that
• 25:03
  will support that it was coming on.
• 25:05
  Most of the time we can see an injury two weeks out if we know
• 25:07
  what we're looking for. That's something that became
• 25:10
  very evident to me. We could see it.
• 25:12
  And back to that understanding of arm acceleration and
• 25:16
  understanding velocity and understanding when was one of
• 25:20
  the things within. Sure enough, within 10 days, 10
• 25:22
  to 14 days, you know, if we saw changes within that window,
• 25:26
  there was an injury likely. And I had the guys at Zone 7 was
• 25:30
  IL Eliakam at Zone 7. The CTO went back and looked at
• 25:33
  10 years of Major League Baseball data and we looked at
• 25:36
  the injuries and sure enough, yeah, they're all they're all
• 25:39
  showing against arm acceleration metrics and everything else.
• 25:42
  When they were doing deep meta analysis here, we could see
• 25:44
  these things. And so that's why I say that's
• 25:47
  that's a gold mine piece of information to understand it.
• 25:50
  But it really starts with the mechanism of that injury.
• 25:52
  The second thing we, well, the thing that's known, right, is
• 25:55
  the biggest, the most indicative projection of an injury is a
• 25:59
  pre-existing injury, right? If an athlete's had a hamstring
• 26:02
  injury, Chancellor is going to have another, right?
• 26:04
  So that always tells me that mentality told me that we might
• 26:09
  be addressing symptoms, not causes of injury.
• 26:12
  So my buddy Marcus Elliott over at P3, brilliant practitioner
• 26:16
  and researcher as well, he looks at, yeah, does so much work in
• 26:20
  the NBA now that we can look at a guy like James Harden and
• 26:23
  understand his superpower is his breaking ability on the court.
• 26:27
  He doesn't run fast. He doesn't jump high like
• 26:30
  everybody else in the NBA, but he can stop on a dime and change
• 26:33
  the geometry of the court, which tactically is is where his
• 26:36
  brilliance lies. So Marcus Elliott looks at a lot
• 26:39
  of injuries and a lot of kind of movement systems is what he's
• 26:42
  looking at. And in some of the discussions
• 26:44
  we've had, it's like there's individual movement signatures.
• 26:47
  We all have them, right? How did we develop go bring it
• 26:50
  back online to pitchers, for example?
• 26:53
  And I remember having this discussion with Brent Strong
• 26:54
  many a time. Brent's like, OK, we're going to
• 26:57
  drop his arm slot. We're going to take him from
• 26:59
  over the top. I'm going to get him down to the
• 27:00
  side. Very first question I'd have,
• 27:03
  it's like, OK, so you're making that change tactically.
• 27:05
  You want to get late run on the on the fastball, you want it to
• 27:07
  run in more. Is that the goal here?
• 27:09
  And it'd be yes. And then it'd be a plus a few
• 27:11
  things. Brent would tell me to blow the
• 27:13
  top of my head off right, because he's such a brilliant
• 27:15
  thinker. And then I'd go, OK, well, if
• 27:19
  we're adjusting from say a over the top to a three quarter arm
• 27:23
  position, guess what, everything changes in terms of the
• 27:26
  mechanics of how he decelerates. Now he might be using lat over
• 27:30
  the top for a deceleration muscle, whereas as soon as you
• 27:33
  drop to the side, we're using more trapezius.
• 27:35
  So there we go, there's going to be soreness.
• 27:38
  Let's understand soreness not as a pathway towards injury, but as
• 27:42
  a potential pathway to adaptation, right?
• 27:44
  We need that, we need to have that feedback.
• 27:47
  So in directing an audit, we need to understand the mechanism
• 27:50
  of the injury. We need to pull any data that
• 27:52
  we've got historically from that athlete as well, including their
• 27:56
  pre-existing injury history. Looking at the data sets, we can
• 28:00
  find something right that that say, yeah, this looks like it
• 28:04
  matches up to that injury. But then it's about getting down
• 28:07
  to the to the core aspect of it. If say it was a good girdle
• 28:10
  change just the way that that athletes moving, we need we need
• 28:13
  to make those corrections from a corrective exercise kind of
• 28:16
  position. But the other thing, Adam, too
• 28:19
  is once we've done that, it's kind of like you can't stay in
• 28:22
  that box looking for where the injury is affecting the rest of
• 28:26
  movement. You have to step back.
• 28:28
  Maybe the rest of movement is affecting that injury site,
• 28:32
  right? We've got to have a total look
• 28:34
  at this and we've got to look at it through child's eyes almost
• 28:37
  every time we look at an athlete.
• 28:39
  I had a local team here in spring training want me to come
• 28:42
  and look at a pitcher's rehabilitation, and I had the
• 28:46
  head of rehab standing next to me saying, let me tell you what
• 28:50
  we're looking at here. I said, no, I don't want to hear
• 28:51
  it. I want to see this through fresh
• 28:54
  eyes. And and then I'll tell you what
• 28:56
  I'm seeing after a, you know, a couple of runs, you know, I just
• 28:59
  watched him run for warm up, watch the throws and your
• 29:02
  typical Major League starting pitcher day.
• 29:04
  You know, I was watching that and I said, well, here's what I
• 29:06
  got. You know, here's what I'm
• 29:08
  saying. Wow, I wasn't seeing that.
• 29:10
  So yeah, look, there's things that you've got to look at.
• 29:12
  I think you've you've got to take a holistic view of movement
• 29:16
  to understand what what is affecting the potential of an
• 29:19
  injury and what isn't from the mechanism standpoint.
• 29:23
  When did the injury occur? Film of it, if I could get it,
• 29:25
  data supporting it, pre-existing injury, go through the
• 29:29
  rehabilitation process, reassess, step back and re
• 29:33
  evaluate and step back and not look at it through the injury
• 29:36
  itself. To me, that was those were the
• 29:38
  most important things and that methodology from an audit
• 29:42
  process served us pretty well. Awesome.
• 29:45
  Now we are going to accelerate a little into that previous
• 29:48
  conversation. We're going to leave the audit
• 29:50
  where it is and now we're going to talk about the stages of the
• 29:55
  injury. So the fatigue, the compensation
• 29:58
  and ultimately the event, the injury actually occurring.
• 30:02
  And I, I want to dig deeper specifically on compensation
• 30:06
  fatigue. I feel like as an industry, we
• 30:10
  have a decent understanding of it doesn't just mean we're tired
• 30:13
  and we need to sleep. It could be an endurance thing,
• 30:17
  it could be a workload management thing.
• 30:19
  There are a lot of components now that fall into the basic
• 30:23
  fatigue discussion Now. Bringing up compensation, I
• 30:27
  think still offers the visual of my right hip hurts, so I lean to
• 30:33
  my left to compensate right that that is what we see.
• 30:37
  Or a change in a walking gait. Now from the work that we do
• 30:41
  with Flexpro Grip, we've become Privy to what compensation can
• 30:45
  actually look like. Meaning the stress of a certain
• 30:49
  musculature changes because of fatigue elsewhere.
• 30:53
  Something has to take on more than what it really should be
• 30:57
  taking on. So I, I want to pass this back
• 31:00
  to you given that you've done it more globally of what
• 31:04
  compensation can actually present as versus what we
• 31:08
  normally discuss it as in the industry.
• 31:11
  Yeah, I think we normally discuss fatigue.
• 31:13
  Anytime we talk about fatigue, I think the immediate images,
• 31:16
  athlete hands on knees blowing and that's fatigue, right?
• 31:21
  Well, no, it can take on so many different like factors outside
• 31:26
  of physiological fatigue, local muscle fatigue, global muscle
• 31:30
  fatigue, neural fatigue, CNS fatigue continue to go down the
• 31:33
  list. There's a lot of fatigues.
• 31:34
  But as it as it applies to and this is I think one of the other
• 31:38
  failings we have in the industry here and apologies for this kind
• 31:42
  of getting scattered, but the yeah, we tend to stay in the box
• 31:47
  and strengthen conditioning quite often, right.
• 31:49
  We we're we're in this box where we've got us a set of modalities
• 31:53
  that served us well. Maybe I I continue here strength
• 31:56
  coaches, guys, 420 LB squat. That's his that's his best.
• 31:59
  He's a starting pitcher. He's starting in two days time.
• 32:02
  I'm like, I don't give a shit what he did in the white room.
• 32:04
  Yeah. How's that affecting the key
• 32:06
  performance indicators on the field?
• 32:08
  Because that's all that matters at the end of the day.
• 32:11
  We're in this sport, right. Pitching coaches.
• 32:13
  I go to them all the time. Tell me the KPI's for not only
• 32:17
  for your pitching staff, but for this individual pitcher and what
• 32:20
  are you expecting out of him and what is the goal with him this
• 32:23
  year? Where's what's his contract
• 32:25
  status? How much resources am I going to
• 32:27
  be able to apply to this guy? Sometimes you'd get a guy at the
• 32:30
  end of the season called up and sure enough you got a month with
• 32:33
  this kit and he's probably going to sign with another team at the
• 32:36
  end of that period anyway. So it's like what do you apply
• 32:39
  in terms of resources? There's so many factors, firstly
• 32:42
  that go into this, but talking about fatigue and compensation
• 32:47
  getting to that marker, when does it happen?
• 32:50
  I like for pictures, the key performance indicators are going
• 32:54
  to be velocity and spin rate. Those are the two that I'm going
• 32:56
  to look at. What's coming out of their hand
• 32:59
  location could be a third one. We look at that.
• 33:02
  The hierarchy of today's came is pretty much that velocity, spin
• 33:05
  rate, location. It used to be location, movement
• 33:08
  velocity. It used to be the old yeah, it
• 33:10
  used to be something totally, totally the opposite, right?
• 33:12
  And that's when eras, yeah, you had a good ERA, you were in the
• 33:15
  ones, right, Ones and twos. Now eras are blown up, I think
• 33:19
  because of the change in the game and changing focus on on
• 33:22
  the key performance indicators. So to know when compensation is
• 33:25
  occurring from fatigue, we have to have an additional marker,
• 33:29
  something on those KPIs. So velocity was the one I would
• 33:32
  look at. I look at spin a little bit, but
• 33:34
  I know pitches can make just one slight adjustment on a grip
• 33:39
  because they've seen something dimensionalized off that hitter.
• 33:42
  Like I remember having this discussion at the at the Astros
• 33:46
  with Roger Clemens. Just I remember sitting with him
• 33:48
  was his was his 48th birthday. And we're in Vegas of all
• 33:52
  places. And that's and that's where that
• 33:54
  story stops. But I'll tell you what he told
• 33:56
  me about about pitching. I just learned so much from him
• 34:01
  in this conversation. It was I was so brilliant.
• 34:03
  He just, he had to own the 12 inches in front of the plate in
• 34:06
  terms of what that looked like. So he would throw a pitch hitter
• 34:10
  would just foul it off and he would he'd go, God, he was right
• 34:13
  on that. So I'm going to adjust
• 34:14
  kilometers of grip here and I'm going to pull this back a little
• 34:17
  bit. It's going to look like the same
• 34:18
  pitch, but I'm going to get him out in front.
• 34:20
  That's what I'm going to do, right?
• 34:21
  So without that, when, when I was kind of in those
• 34:25
  conversations and learning about the psychology of pitching and
• 34:28
  how those tactical adjustments are made at the elite level,
• 34:32
  compensation for us at the elite level is not something that is
• 34:36
  conscious. Adam is generally subconscious.
• 34:39
  And you know, this with the elite athletes, all they're
• 34:42
  trying to do is figure out the environmental change and how I'm
• 34:47
  going to get that hitter out. Like Clemens was trying to
• 34:49
  figure out how I'm going to get that hitter out.
• 34:50
  So I'm going to alter spin right on the baseball to do that.
• 34:53
  So if I looked at just velocity and just spin rate as a number
• 34:58
  and there was, no, it's not a Max effort every time, right?
• 35:02
  There's tactical change that goes on.
• 35:04
  So we need to look at this over a few different pitches.
• 35:06
  But those were the things I'd look at arm acceleration
• 35:09
  specifically against velocity, it was a good indication that
• 35:12
  some compensation had begun where I don't know, we tried to
• 35:17
  look at things like high speed film.
• 35:19
  There was a lot of core is where we thought we were starting to
• 35:22
  get a fair bit of fatigue was in trunk, the trunk kind of
• 35:26
  fatigue, but we didn't have anything to really measure that.
• 35:28
  But I knew that as long as I was correlating those two numbers,
• 35:31
  velocity against some acceleration, that marker that
• 35:35
  we developed, if I could see that our new compensation was
• 35:37
  happening. So yeah, always have to be a
• 35:39
  second marker. And specifically where I get buy
• 35:43
  in as if it's against the KPIs of the game, then perfect,
• 35:46
  right. That that's what we need to
• 35:48
  understand. So I want to now kind of go on
• 35:51
  the same mission we went on before applying the audit to
• 35:55
  maybe those without the technologies.
• 35:58
  So if we if we breakdown what again, what tech might be
• 36:02
  available at the lower levels of the game?
• 36:05
  What are ways an individual can look for compensation?
• 36:09
  I'm assuming it's very similar with a force plate or with VBT
• 36:14
  in the weight room or different things like that.
• 36:16
  No, it might not be on field data, but I assume if you see
• 36:21
  changes there and maybe the weight was able to stay the same
• 36:25
  or the jump height stayed the same but the forces changed.
• 36:28
  Different things like that I assume are where compensation is
• 36:32
  rearing. It's ugly.
• 36:35
  And it really does depend, I mean, most of the tests that we
• 36:38
  do in the lab, and I mean, this is where wearables have become
• 36:41
  come on strong as we want in situ measurement, right?
• 36:44
  I, I like to look at what's going on in the field.
• 36:46
  And yeah, it's not always the weight room measures.
• 36:49
  When I was track man, I called the president, the former
• 36:53
  president, a track man. And actually we've got a,
• 36:56
  there's a guy there now, Bill Fergus, who used to be head of
• 36:58
  sportsman over at the Houston Astros, who's now heading up
• 37:01
  track man, which I love because I think he's going to bring this
• 37:04
  in from a position of biometrics as opposed to just tactical
• 37:07
  stuff. But Bill's over there now.
• 37:09
  But it was the former CEO there, Hans Duimer.
• 37:12
  His name was Ann Hans's great guy.
• 37:14
  I love him to death. I called him, this is back in.
• 37:17
  It was my first year with the brothers.
• 37:20
  The guys over at Coach Me Plus was showing me some of the data
• 37:23
  they had from the Mets. They had brought me in to look
• 37:25
  at their data and understand, try to understand these markers
• 37:28
  on fatigue and everything else. I was asking questions about how
• 37:32
  to use that data from a bioanalytic standpoint that no
• 37:35
  one was asking. And Hans said, we've had that
• 37:37
  question asked by two teams in Japan only.
• 37:40
  And he goes, I like the way you're approaching this.
• 37:42
  Could we hire you to go and work with these two teams?
• 37:45
  And I was like, well, I'm out in Asia all the time with my team
• 37:48
  in Taiwan. I said, yeah, look, I'm happy to
• 37:50
  go over and work with it. I'll never forget the meeting I
• 37:52
  had with the Yokohama Basa. So we're in the four hour
• 37:56
  afternoon meeting in this conference room.
• 37:58
  My wife who's a professor in nutrition, she had to sit
• 38:01
  through this interpreted meeting with me for a long time, which
• 38:04
  was great. God bless her.
• 38:06
  She sat through the whole thing. But at the end of this pitching
• 38:08
  start, we had six pitching coaches from the organization in
• 38:11
  there. And I was showing them things
• 38:12
  like this arm acceleration metric which they use now today,
• 38:16
  showing them that, showing them how to look at that against
• 38:18
  velocity, where these things might be occurring and how it
• 38:21
  all kind of breaks down. I gave them so much information
• 38:24
  at that point in time that the the interpreter for the pitching
• 38:28
  coaches leaned in and said to me, Gary goes, there seems to be
• 38:31
  some confusion here. They're looking for one number
• 38:34
  to indicate what what makes a pitcher better than another
• 38:39
  pitcher or what makes that pitcher most likely to be
• 38:42
  successful today. What does that just give me one
• 38:45
  number? And I stood back and we had all
• 38:47
  the data kind of blown up on, on this board.
• 38:50
  I said, do me a favour. And the data scientists were
• 38:52
  brilliant in there. I said pull this out.
• 38:55
  I said I want to see the average ball exit velocity of the
• 38:58
  hitters this pitcher faces. If you want one marker for the
• 39:02
  sport of baseball that is going to indicate a pitcher is
• 39:05
  successful or not successful, look at the opposition teams
• 39:10
  average ball exit velocity because that'll take into
• 39:13
  account now things like deception, right?
• 39:16
  Because the one thing in Japanese baseball that I
• 39:18
  learned, I was looking for a load marker that would indicate
• 39:22
  OK velocity. Say Adam, your average fastball
• 39:26
  is 96 and all of a sudden you're throwing.
• 39:29
  Yeah, you're throwing 97. You're throwing higher spin
• 39:32
  rate, right? I was like, is that more load?
• 39:35
  Right. That's what we were, what I was
• 39:37
  expecting. Load on the body does not just
• 39:40
  come from spin rate and arm velocity.
• 39:44
  Pitchers in in Japan have really high spin rates, but they throw
• 39:47
  a damn forkball, right, which has no spin on it whatsoever.
• 39:51
  So the spin rate, high strain pitch on the arm, low spin rate.
• 39:55
  So you can't correlate spin rate against that.
• 39:57
  So but when pitching coaches were asked this question, how do
• 40:02
  you define a a pitcher? His value to me.
• 40:06
  If you want one marker that is an objective marker and not a
• 40:09
  subjective thought. It's four legs of velocity of
• 40:12
  the opposite team. And they had a discussion around
• 40:15
  that that lasted about 5 minutes.
• 40:17
  Lane didn't said fuck yeah, this is that's the number we want.
• 40:21
  So I we, we hit on something there that again, yeah, when
• 40:25
  you're developing high performance cultures, the battle
• 40:28
  is to just get out of your own way and look at things through a
• 40:32
  different set of lenses. I think that's stated
• 40:35
  beautifully because we are always looking for one specific
• 40:39
  answer in what is traditional to a certain extent, right?
• 40:43
  We're expecting it to be within our grasp for what we have
• 40:47
  currently as opposed to stepping aside in understanding.
• 40:53
  Kind of like the blind man and the elephant type situation
• 40:55
  where every every single one of those guys was entirely correct,
• 41:00
  but they're also entirely wrong. Of course, if somebody's
• 41:03
  touching a Tusk, it's very different from touching the
• 41:05
  trunk or the tail or the leg or the belly.
• 41:09
  And often times when we're in organizations, going back to
• 41:12
  what you talked about in your intro, talking about silos,
• 41:16
  every single department may be entirely correct, but every
• 41:20
  single department is also wholly wrong unless they're looking at
• 41:24
  the entire system and what we can produce out of that.
• 41:28
  So now maybe maybe this is getting out of the lens or the
• 41:32
  scope that you normally work in. But I'd be curious of your
• 41:37
  potential excitement now of these people or these entities
• 41:42
  that are creating kind of aggregate style data where
• 41:47
  they're making a prediction in a single number off of a bunch of
• 41:51
  different data points brought together.
• 41:54
  Do you think that is indicative of the whole story?
• 41:56
  Is it just a decent summary? How do you feel about all these
• 41:59
  things? Yeah, it's case by case.
• 42:02
  I mean, I, I, I get sensitive to statements that potentially A1
• 42:07
  size fits all because I've never seen one.
• 42:09
  Yeah. That was my problem in Major
• 42:11
  League Baseball was the fact that I had my days were so long
• 42:15
  because I had 25 individual programs when I was in the major
• 42:17
  leagues. I didn't have program for pitch
• 42:20
  as a program for hitters. I know everything was
• 42:23
  individualized and needed to be and it was the same with my time
• 42:26
  in Taiwan as well. So the very first thing, it's
• 42:28
  case by case is never one-size-fits-all.
• 42:31
  And I'd say this to to Strongy too, when he would say, OK,
• 42:34
  tactically, we're going to look at this shift.
• 42:36
  While I mentioned earlier, you know, changing say armslot and
• 42:39
  I'd go through and speak to the points that, you know, we're
• 42:42
  going to have soreness, we're going to have adaptation.
• 42:44
  And I go, it's not that simple to drop him down.
• 42:46
  I said because the neural pathway has been developing
• 42:50
  since that kid first stood up in the crib and threw his rattle
• 42:53
  out of his out of his crib as soon as he was on his feet and
• 42:56
  he mate and he threw something, that's when it started.
• 42:59
  That's when that signature movement pathway started.
• 43:02
  And how does, how do individual pitches provide force, right?
• 43:06
  How is that force production authored?
• 43:09
  And what is the signature of that movement look like?
• 43:11
  And we are also markedly different in the way we produce
• 43:15
  force behind that 5 1/2 ounce sphere, right?
• 43:18
  We're all different. So the very first thing is
• 43:20
  understanding the individual movement sequence and signature
• 43:23
  of the athlete. I do often look for leaks in
• 43:26
  that system like, oh, the elbow is really exposed, right?
• 43:29
  We need to get more protection around that.
• 43:32
  I'm not going to alter the way you throw.
• 43:34
  I'm just going to set you up in such a way that you can keep
• 43:36
  throwing that way and be protected, right?
• 43:40
  That was one of the one of the big kind of milestone kind of
• 43:43
  moments I think for even for the athletes that were in our system
• 43:47
  as well. They started to take a lot more
• 43:50
  ownership and personal pride in the programs because they were,
• 43:53
  well use that English term, bespoke.
• 43:55
  They were customized, you know, they were right on target for
• 43:57
  them. And that included things like
• 43:59
  asymmetry offsets, what we called vector force
• 44:02
  relationships, improving those as well.
• 44:04
  Yeah. And it was so individualized,
• 44:06
  Adam. There was never just one thing.
• 44:08
  And from a tactical perspective, yeah, I still like ball exit
• 44:11
  velocity for pitchers, right? Yeah.
• 44:13
  As an average or I think that's A to me that's a great market to
• 44:16
  look at but over time it depends depends on the pitcher it
• 44:21
  depends on the position he's in. Is he a starter is he an 80
• 44:24
  pitch starter Is he 120 pitch starter right?
• 44:27
  What does that look like or is he a reliever that's come three
• 44:29
  out of four nights out of the bullpen and is going to throw
• 44:32
  maybe 6 pitches right. They're the hardest guys in the
• 44:35
  world to to program because you never know you're reactive,
• 44:39
  consistently reactive. You can be proactive with
• 44:41
  starters. You got to be reactive with
• 44:43
  relievers. Because the last thing I held
• 44:46
  sacred, as much as sometimes my ego wanted to dictate the
• 44:50
  outcome of a game, right, to go up to a manager and go get him
• 44:53
  out of here. Now I wanted to walk out across
• 44:55
  the line sometimes and pull a picture.
• 44:57
  It's not about me. This is about the game.
• 45:00
  This is about the fans. This is about getting that win.
• 45:02
  And what do we need to do? And the data doesn't decide, it
• 45:05
  informs. And I'm just part of the
• 45:07
  mechanism to inform, you know, so I'd inform our managers.
• 45:11
  And yeah, I had some really good ones.
• 45:13
  I had three really good ones in Taiwan.
• 45:15
  Even Corey Snyder was was a former Major League player that
• 45:19
  we had for a couple of years. Corey culturally was awkward
• 45:22
  over in in Taiwan. But yeah, when he leaned in and
• 45:26
  realized that you don't have to be scared here, Corey.
• 45:29
  This is a wonderful environment to be in managers as as as you
• 45:33
  would manage it. And the reason you hear me keep
• 45:35
  bringing these things up, Adam, is looking back, the most
• 45:38
  important thing is developing that high performance culture.
• 45:42
  Are we considerate of that at every touch point from the
• 45:45
  moment that athlete hits our facilities or our stadium or
• 45:49
  whatever it is? Do we have a high performance
• 45:51
  culture in place? What does the food look like in
• 45:53
  the clubhouse? What's accessibility to massage
• 45:56
  to stretching? What's accessibility to the cage
• 45:59
  right now on a hitting coach? Where are these things right and
• 46:02
  how do we make them at every touch point?
• 46:05
  Can I get that 1% improvement? Because that's what we're
• 46:08
  looking for. It's like when we're training
• 46:09
  youth athletes, we might, and this is a Marcus Elliott
• 46:12
  statement. It's like in the system, how
• 46:14
  much slack do we have? You got a youth athlete at
• 46:16
  12/13/14, you might have a 40% improvement that you can render
• 46:20
  over three to four years. Major leagues, man, if I get
• 46:23
  half a percent improvement, I've done really well, right?
• 46:26
  So knowing that as well that what change can be made and is
• 46:31
  it positive to trajectory of that athlete, right.
• 46:34
  Everyone's on their own path and their own trajectory.
• 46:37
  But I think high performance cultures developing knows to
• 46:42
  ensure that the athlete feels like they are the most important
• 46:47
  person in the world. Every time they're in, they're
• 46:48
  in our care. And expanding on that culture, I
• 46:53
  assume a good bit of it is also changing the zeitgeist around
• 47:00
  medical care or around athletic training and understanding that
• 47:05
  we can do things that are preventative and helpful.
• 47:09
  Because so many years of sports, the adage was you can't make the
• 47:15
  club in the tub. But now, thankfully, things are
• 47:19
  changing a bit and the tub can be a supportive thing.
• 47:24
  It's not just, well, I'm hurt I shouldn't go in the athletic
• 47:28
  training room. So I, I, I'm guessing that's a
• 47:31
  cultural component as well, or just the way that a team or an
• 47:37
  organization sets up the support.
• 47:41
  Staff a percent and the the interesting part of that too is
• 47:46
  like I was saying earlier, we never chased zero injury.
• 47:49
  We landed there because of our intense focus individually,
• 47:53
  day-to-day on these athletes, even with the medical side of
• 47:57
  the equation, working with our athletic trainers.
• 48:00
  So was the nickname of our head athletic trainer.
• 48:03
  Brilliant guy. And Charlie, another guy who now
• 48:05
  works with the Taiwanese national team.
• 48:07
  They were really good at questions.
• 48:10
  They were really good at questioning.
• 48:12
  One of the very first teachings with them.
• 48:13
  Don't have preconceived notions in your mind about that athlete.
• 48:17
  Ask these firstly how you're feeling, how's everything at
• 48:20
  home. But you get a good night's sleep
• 48:21
  last night. And we would implement tech over
• 48:23
  time like ordering, and we had woop early stages.
• 48:27
  We started to implement the tech to give them an understanding
• 48:29
  that it's total care that we're interested in.
• 48:33
  While you're a member here at the brothers, we would do things
• 48:36
  like, I can't tell you how many, how many times players would
• 48:39
  bring their, their kids in for something, right?
• 48:42
  We had a real family approach here.
• 48:44
  We, we, we kept the walls up so the rest of the world couldn't
• 48:47
  see what we're doing because we had some proprietary, what was
• 48:50
  considered competitive advantage with reducing injuries the way
• 48:53
  we were reducing them. And it got to the point where
• 48:56
  there'd be outcry in the press that it's unfair that the
• 49:00
  brothers have such low. It's unfair now, it's
• 49:02
  intelligent. You're just going about it a
• 49:04
  little bit differently. But yeah, the high performance
• 49:08
  culture, I have to look at it every day.
• 49:11
  I would get off the bus coming from the team hotel.
• 49:14
  I'd unpack and I'd go in with fresh eyes every day.
• 49:17
  And I'd check in with all my staff first, first and foremost,
• 49:20
  check in with all of them. How are you doing?
• 49:22
  I'm I generally have a leadership style that is served
• 49:26
  from the back. Sometimes I'd have to get in the
• 49:28
  middle, but it was never me out front, was never me out front.
• 49:31
  It was like, OK, like we introduced AJ protocol for a
• 49:34
  hamstring rehabilitation in year 1 and I said I want you to look
• 49:38
  at the protocols that you've been using.
• 49:40
  I want you to look at a differentiated protocol here
• 49:42
  that is showing some research relative to getting someone back
• 49:45
  from grade two, grade 3, specifically getting some stuff
• 49:48
  done faster here because that's how I and everybody had a
• 49:51
  measure. If we had an injury was there on
• 49:54
  the athletic trainers, training staff, how quickly can we return
• 49:57
  them to full participation? How quickly can we get them back
• 50:00
  there? Strength and conditioning
• 50:01
  coaches working hand in hand with athletic training guys, how
• 50:04
  do you make sure this injury never happens again, right?
• 50:07
  And how do we how do we get that type of focus with these two
• 50:10
  divisions of the company? And how do we pull that into
• 50:12
  perspectives? There was always that going on
• 50:15
  during the course of the season. It was never just go in and
• 50:18
  apply a methodology. Adam, the biggest thing, one of
• 50:22
  the biggest changes we've made in like we did the asymmetry
• 50:24
  offset year one, but also, and I did this back in 2013 when my
• 50:30
  interpreter was just my interpreter.
• 50:31
  And we, we, I was there, I was with the Edar Rhinos with Manny
• 50:35
  Ramirez and I was looking around at the amount of volume of work
• 50:38
  that they were doing and there was kind of not enough time to
• 50:41
  recover. So I thought, you know what, the
• 50:43
  best thing I can do is get everybody to start foam rolling
• 50:46
  right self my official release. Let's get into that and make
• 50:50
  that a that's the first thing we do every day, you know, when
• 50:54
  teams together. OK, SMR, that's what we're
• 50:56
  starting with. And I remember going up to my
• 50:58
  interpreter and I grabbed one of the old trigger point foam rolls
• 51:03
  out of my bag that I brought from the US and I said, Ellery,
• 51:07
  I said, I've got 55 athletes on this Major League roster going
• 51:11
  into the season. We've got another 50 in in the
• 51:14
  minor leagues here as well. I said, I need you to go out.
• 51:17
  We're going to implement this. Everyone needs their own foam
• 51:20
  roll. Ellery looks at me and says,
• 51:22
  foam roll. What the hell is a foam roll?
• 51:24
  I showed it to him because I've never seen anything like this.
• 51:27
  I flipped it over. I said, look, man says made in
• 51:30
  Taiwan, everything is made here. You've got to go and find these.
• 51:33
  They're here somewhere. Sure enough, he comes back with
• 51:36
  55 of them and they they cost him like 4 bucks each other
• 51:39
  costing us like 30 bucks in the US or hilarious.
• 51:41
  But we had everybody, you know, start this process of self Maya
• 51:45
  fascial release and I the way we were talking, we talked to the
• 51:49
  athletes about it was like when you were a little boy and you
• 51:51
  carried your teddy bear everywhere.
• 51:53
  This is your new teddy bear. I think we make a lot of
• 51:55
  mistakes in in foam roll here, right?
• 51:57
  It's like when you feel that pressure point, hold it, hold it
• 52:01
  for 30 seconds, let's release IT.
• 52:03
  Band was a big one. You know, hamstrings, glutes,
• 52:05
  you know, we would get into everything.
• 52:07
  We'd have a good 15 minutes of self myofascial release prior to
• 52:11
  any activity during the day. That was the very first thing we
• 52:13
  would start with. So it was all those little
• 52:15
  things, but a lot of it was education.
• 52:17
  So asymmetry, foam roll first year, it was about all I could
• 52:21
  do, right? And it's about as much as we
• 52:23
  could absorb, but it was effective.
• 52:25
  At the beginning of that response, you brought up this
• 52:29
  theme in a sense of a stress free environment.
• 52:32
  The kids were coming in, it sounds like.
• 52:36
  Yes, the walls were up, but internally players and staff
• 52:40
  could be relaxed or be who they really are as individuals.
• 52:45
  I've had a couple conversations recently where the words being
• 52:49
  tossed around were isn't it amazing what a free mind can do
• 52:55
  for the body? So I'd love if from your
• 52:59
  perspective, if you can kind of take that away, talk about how
• 53:03
  you've seen just relaxation and stress free environments impact
• 53:10
  both performance and. Physical health incredible and
• 53:14
  and we're touching on stuff that really for the last couple of
• 53:17
  years, I am just personally learning as well.
• 53:20
  There's a lot of, and you've probably seen this and I, I'm
• 53:23
  waiting for one of the Major League Baseball teams to have a
• 53:26
  breath coach come in right and start teaching breathing
• 53:29
  patterns and systems. And there is something to be
• 53:32
  said for this. And I was giving a presentation
• 53:34
  like I was on a still am on a performance Advisory Board for
• 53:38
  the group leaders in performance who do these seminars globally
• 53:42
  and mostly across all sports. Their biggest seminar is in the
• 53:46
  United Kingdom. They have one in London every
• 53:47
  year around November. I was speaking at this one a
• 53:51
  year and a half ago. It was 320 of the world's best
• 53:54
  performance practitioners across all sports.
• 53:56
  People like Great British Cycling who are absolutely
• 53:58
  brilliant. And I'm giving this
• 54:00
  presentation. And so sure enough, gave this
• 54:03
  presentation. I was right on right before
• 54:05
  lunch, finished the presentation and chat.
• 54:07
  It was all around zero injury. And I had this woman come up to
• 54:10
  me show 5 foot 2. Oliver, I think Rachel Vickery,
• 54:14
  her name is a little New Zealand when we came up and she goes,
• 54:17
  Gary and she goes, I just loved your presentation.
• 54:20
  Your passion for working with athletes and seeing them succeed
• 54:23
  is fantastic. But you're a horrible breather.
• 54:26
  That's what she said to me. And I was like, what?
• 54:29
  And she goes, yeah, she goes, you really breathe shallow.
• 54:32
  You must have a lot of, like, childhood trauma.
• 54:34
  And I was like, hang on, what? What are you saying?
• 54:38
  And so I said, Rachel, I said, let's do this.
• 54:40
  I said, I said, when are you heading back?
• 54:42
  And she now lives in Australia and she lives in Brisbane, which
• 54:45
  again in the Olympics in eight years.
• 54:47
  I said to her, I said, when do you get back?
• 54:49
  And she goes, I'm not leaving the UK for another couple of
• 54:51
  days. I said, can we have lunch?
• 54:53
  And she's a neurophysiologist. And so I picked her brain
• 54:56
  entirely around breathing and how even exhalation is going to
• 55:01
  calm the parasympathetic nervous system and how that works.
• 55:05
  So I've been doing my most recent parlay personally is into
• 55:09
  yoga. I've been doing like I'm on my,
• 55:11
  like my I'm doing yoga daily now.
• 55:13
  And this is where linking breath to movement is being, being a
• 55:16
  phenomenal mental clearing process.
• 55:19
  So I think breathing is the precursor to pre set the mind
• 55:23
  for what's ahead. So I think that we all have a
• 55:28
  mechanism and an ability to understand breath, understand
• 55:32
  breath patterns. What does that do to set up a
• 55:35
  calm mind to move forward, to get out, get us, excuse me, out
• 55:39
  of that fight or flight kind of stuff that we get into in pro
• 55:43
  sports? It's so acute, it's so measured,
• 55:46
  it's such a fishbowl that those athletes have to walk into every
• 55:50
  day. Re upping practice again, I
• 55:52
  think I would start, I would be introducing breath work right
• 55:55
  before the foam roll and getting some stuff in there just to,
• 55:59
  hey, let's, let's bring this into perspective.
• 56:01
  Let's let's internalize now and get everything there.
• 56:04
  But back to that model cognitive and emotional state to me as a
• 56:09
  filter and a precursor to physical activity.
• 56:12
  And I've seen it so many times and artificially it's it was
• 56:16
  referenced so much on the TV series Ted lesser like it was
• 56:20
  such a brilliant, brilliant series.
• 56:22
  And I've I've much to watch that through on on background half
• 56:25
  the time, you know, because it's just brilliant.
• 56:27
  It's brilliant writing. It's it's it's beautifully done,
• 56:30
  but it shows. And this is there's there's AI
• 56:33
  read this statement once and I thought, you know what I said?
• 56:36
  It is so evident and it's so evident to take it on
• 56:40
  individually as well. This statement is when the power
• 56:44
  of love overcomes the love of power, That's when we'll know
• 56:47
  peace, right as a global society could be talking no more about
• 56:52
  this than what we like then right now, right power.
• 56:56
  It's like even the love of power individually inside of an
• 57:00
  organization is, is creating a mindset and boxes and walls
• 57:05
  around certain thinking to occur because we're not approaching
• 57:09
  this from the from the place of love.
• 57:11
  That athlete, right. No matter who they are, put them
• 57:13
  in the middle of the system. Love them to death through the
• 57:16
  work that you're going to put into them.
• 57:17
  And, and, and that's where we will extract.
• 57:21
  They will become our staff will become and, and great things can
• 57:24
  be expressed because of that. There hasn't been a study done,
• 57:27
  Adam, but there's an objective measure that we could dive into
• 57:30
  now, cognitive and emotional state through what's called
• 57:34
  natural language processing and artificial intelligence.
• 57:36
  We can listen to the voice as a biosignal and understand the
• 57:39
  cognitive state or the emotional state of the individual.
• 57:43
  And I've been looking at a lot of AI kind of implements of this
• 57:47
  right now. And there's a number of
• 57:48
  companies that are starting to go down this channel, number of
• 57:52
  industries, credit cards, CIA, all these people are going into
• 57:55
  this domain right now to get a measure against that.
• 57:58
  I would love to see an objective measure of cognitive and
• 58:01
  emotional state and look at it against physical expression like
• 58:05
  Max outputs. Because I'll guarantee if we got
• 58:08
  that clear, calm mind here that's ready to be
• 58:11
  operationalized, the body will follow, right?
• 58:14
  That to me is, is, is the process there.
• 58:16
  So to educate around that I think is is important.
• 58:21
  We've got to the point now, happily, that the sports
• 58:24
  psychologist is no longer the taboo lady or bearded lady that
• 58:29
  you got to go and see at the circus, right?
• 58:31
  Yeah, We accept that mental health is something that's
• 58:34
  important. But even when we say the word
• 58:36
  mental health, we're looking at it from a there could be a
• 58:38
  problem perspective. I don't want that, you know, how
• 58:41
  about mental adaptation and resiliency?
• 58:44
  And let's start talking about those things because those are
• 58:47
  the things that athletes need and that's what we need them to
• 58:49
  have in in in moments of crisis on the field.
• 58:52
  And that when that crisis moment hits.
• 58:56
  And I've had many a situation. We were playing Japan in the
• 59:00
  World Baseball Club. We're playing the Japanese team
• 59:02
  in Premier 12, we're at Chiba. We were leading 3/2, which was
• 59:07
  unheard of. In the 7th inning, pitcher came
• 59:09
  on with two outs and a runner at second.
• 59:11
  The runner at second took off with two outs or like what the
• 59:14
  hell is going on there? Batter at the last minute turned
• 59:17
  around and bunted the ball. We froze because we did not
• 59:21
  expect that as part of the tactics in that situation.
• 59:25
  It's like, jeez, we could just got surprised.
• 59:27
  They pulled this out of nowhere and it was a brilliant move by
• 59:30
  Team Japan, who went on and beat us for three.
• 59:33
  But at that, in that game, it's like that was something that was
• 59:35
  unexpected. But what I loved is our pitcher
• 59:38
  who didn't react to the bunk, who could have made that third
• 59:42
  out and hesitated straight after the game, came into the coach's
• 59:46
  locker room and said, guys, this is all on me.
• 59:47
  He goes, I'd never seen that before and he owned it right
• 59:51
  away. He had accountability to it.
• 59:53
  And that to me is one of the signals that you get from a high
• 59:56
  performance culture is people aren't afraid to walk in and own
• 1:00:00
  their mistakes, not try to defend themselves, but actually
• 1:00:03
  own their mistakes. What could I have done?
• 1:00:05
  And Dave Nielsen, our our manager on the Major League All
• 1:00:10
  Star, turned around and said to him.
• 1:00:12
  Right. None of us could have done
• 1:00:13
  anything because we just weren't expecting that.
• 1:00:15
  He goes, look, I just love the fact that you're approaching
• 1:00:18
  this now. Now we know, now we know you're
• 1:00:20
  right. I think we played Japan one
• 1:00:22
  other time since then. We got our asses kicked.
• 1:00:24
  It's those moments from a minute.
• 1:00:25
  It's not mental health, it's mental resilience and being
• 1:00:30
  having an environment where people are open enough to be
• 1:00:32
  vulnerable, right, to have vulnerabilities.
• 1:00:35
  And I'd always get like at the end of tournaments.
• 1:00:37
  I remember our former coach John Devil come up and said he's now
• 1:00:41
  ahead of scouting internationally for for the
• 1:00:43
  Dodgers. So yeah, he's in Japan getting
• 1:00:46
  Sasaki Otani. He's he's the guy, right?
• 1:00:49
  He said to me, because, mate, you really score well.
• 1:00:51
  You're the highest rated coach on our team.
• 1:00:53
  I said, yeah, people feel safe around me.
• 1:00:55
  I was the head of performance. I'm not the one that's going to
• 1:00:58
  make a decision whether you're in the lineup that day.
• 1:01:00
  All I'm here to do is serve you and make you feel good about who
• 1:01:03
  you are. Again, back down to those high
• 1:01:05
  performance cultures. It's there's so many touch
• 1:01:07
  points on them, but you got to have coaches that want to do
• 1:01:11
  this. It's in their heart to to act
• 1:01:13
  and operate this way. People see through artificial
• 1:01:16
  service right away. One of the things we had, even
• 1:01:20
  as we were making staff changes over in Taiwan, the biggest
• 1:01:23
  thing I had was I'm not going to write up position descriptions
• 1:01:26
  and stuff. Be the energy we wish to
• 1:01:29
  attract. That was The thing is like,
• 1:01:31
  don't chase attract. What is the energy with our
• 1:01:34
  staff? Who were the leaders on this
• 1:01:36
  team? Be that energy, expose it and
• 1:01:39
  see who shows up and that's who we're going to hire.
• 1:01:42
  I fired our strength coach in Year 2 and replaced him with an
• 1:01:46
  engineer that was interested in the human body and that was a
• 1:01:49
  big difference maker because he can understand vectors, he can
• 1:01:52
  understand pull, push, he can understand interrelationships
• 1:01:56
  between muscular systems and made a massive difference.
• 1:01:59
  And he'd never been a straight coach.
• 1:02:01
  He's like, yeah, we got him a certification for our insurance
• 1:02:03
  reasons. He breezed through that really
• 1:02:06
  quickly and in bank. I still think he's the best
• 1:02:08
  strength coach in in Asia right now.
• 1:02:10
  We covered a lot there. I'm sorry.
• 1:02:11
  No, no, no, no. That was incredible.
• 1:02:13
  That was quite the answer. And I was about to say, I feel
• 1:02:15
  bad doing this because I'm about to pull us back from kind of
• 1:02:20
  this softer conversation that we just had there to more maybe the
• 1:02:25
  hard information again. And it's one more piece that I
• 1:02:28
  really want to get into. You touched on it earlier
• 1:02:31
  talking about having all these individual programs and every
• 1:02:35
  individual having their own movement signature.
• 1:02:38
  That stuck in my head. I, I didn't want to leave it
• 1:02:40
  where it was. I, I knew we needed to discuss
• 1:02:42
  this a little bit. Now, there's a lot of hoopla in
• 1:02:45
  the industry currently about programming for the individual.
• 1:02:51
  And to me it gets a little wonky because they're talking about
• 1:02:55
  programming for the individual, but then bucketing the
• 1:02:58
  individual off of that. That's a, that's a different
• 1:03:02
  discussion, but I, I want to know how you go about actually
• 1:03:07
  assessing in programming for the individual.
• 1:03:10
  So what do you look at? Is it stiffness versus laxity?
• 1:03:14
  Is it biases or compensations that we mentioned earlier?
• 1:03:18
  Is it like postures different things?
• 1:03:22
  I just whether it's the assessment process, do you sit
• 1:03:25
  back and watch for a little bit? Please take it away.
• 1:03:29
  Again, out of it comes back down to that I'm looking at the KP is
• 1:03:32
  from the game, looking at things like good outing, bad outing.
• 1:03:36
  I'm talking to pitching coaches and the athlete especially to
• 1:03:39
  understand, OK, you want you want him to do this.
• 1:03:43
  And I'll give you an example of that non pitching examples.
• 1:03:48
  When I was with the Houston Astros, we had an all American
• 1:03:51
  out of Arizona State. He's now coaching here doing
• 1:03:54
  some assistant coaching at ASU. Brett Wallace, power hitting
• 1:03:58
  corner infielder, and I was standing behind the cage in
• 1:04:01
  spring training, I think might have been 2010, and we had two
• 1:04:06
  hitting coaches behind the cage. I just finished all the warmups.
• 1:04:09
  Wally was in one of the first groups coming up to hit with JD
• 1:04:12
  Martinez and a couple of other athletes we had.
• 1:04:15
  We had a pretty decent team this this second year.
• 1:04:17
  Still didn't do anything and Houston with them, but we had a
• 1:04:20
  decent team. Mike Barnwell was the head, was
• 1:04:23
  our Major League hitting coach. And Ty Van Berkeley, who I got
• 1:04:25
  to know really well, was our hitting coordinator.
• 1:04:28
  We're in West Palm standing right, right on the back of the
• 1:04:31
  Dome there. And I just heard Barney watching
• 1:04:34
  Wally take his first round of swings as a lefty.
• 1:04:37
  God damn it, he says. Wally won't pull the ball.
• 1:04:41
  That's all he said. Won't pull the ball.
• 1:04:43
  And I must have been having a good day because I wanted to
• 1:04:46
  challenge him on it. I said, hang on, I said.
• 1:04:47
  Barney, I said, is it that he won't or that he can't?
• 1:04:51
  What do you mean he can't? I said, I'm looking at this kid
• 1:04:54
  sling right now and I look at his hips look really locked up
• 1:04:57
  to me, like look at this sling back foot's not pivoting.
• 1:05:00
  He's not coming through. I said that is stiffness in the
• 1:05:03
  hips. I said, we've got we've got an
• 1:05:05
  imbalance there somewhere. I'd give an appropriate time.
• 1:05:07
  I'd take him out and check him out.
• 1:05:08
  He goes, take him out now he goes, we'll get him into the
• 1:05:10
  next group. I was like, Wally, you got a few
• 1:05:12
  minutes, man, can you come out? And we disrupted his routine,
• 1:05:15
  right? But I got him on a table in
• 1:05:17
  there and I thought the first thing I thought, hips, hips,
• 1:05:20
  what am I going to look at here? I thought, I'll look at hip
• 1:05:22
  internal rotation. He had a 40% deficit on his back
• 1:05:26
  leg to his front leg in terms of internal rotation, right?
• 1:05:29
  Couldn't open it up. And so that shows up.
• 1:05:32
  So all of a sudden I said, look, Wally, this is going to be
• 1:05:34
  painful, but we're going to do a little active release here on
• 1:05:37
  the piriformis glute medius. I'm really going to open up.
• 1:05:40
  No knee issues, work through everything with him, opened him
• 1:05:43
  up. I swear to God, I could not have
• 1:05:45
  scripted this better. His first, his first act bad in
• 1:05:48
  the spring training game. He launched the ball for it,
• 1:05:50
  pulled the ball 420 feet and I just watched his ball go out
• 1:05:54
  with the visiting team. Said any of that much cheering.
• 1:05:56
  You see this massive shot, Wally looking into the bench with a
• 1:05:59
  big smile on his face. I just see these two heads of
• 1:06:02
  the hitting coaches look down at me though.
• 1:06:03
  What the hell did you do? But there was a unique
• 1:06:07
  situation. It was a one off thing.
• 1:06:09
  They they thought I rubbed dingo oil on him or something, right?
• 1:06:11
  You know, no, this is a mechanical adjustment that I
• 1:06:14
  could see necessary just like a Red Bull's chief mechanic and
• 1:06:19
  say Christian Horne or the race director.
• 1:06:21
  It's what's happened. The driver, you look at these
• 1:06:23
  guys, they all have different roles to play.
• 1:06:25
  I was the chief mechanic in that role and I could affect the
• 1:06:28
  outcome of what they wanted me to do.
• 1:06:31
  So that essentially again, initialized getting it to that
• 1:06:36
  point of there's something technically that is going wrong.
• 1:06:41
  That is again related to a physical systems regression.
• 1:06:46
  And this is the other thing we have with the human body as
• 1:06:48
  well, the interrelated interdependencies of the
• 1:06:52
  physical systems. I don't have pitchers come to me
• 1:06:55
  in season and say I've got dead arm.
• 1:06:57
  There's a, there's another bullshit term we tend to use
• 1:07:01
  bucket term dead arm, right? And it's going to be 6 weeks or
• 1:07:05
  at least between two and six weeks.
• 1:07:07
  I get from from pitcher saying before I my velocity is going to
• 1:07:10
  come back. And I would call bullshit on
• 1:07:12
  that. I remember we had a reliever
• 1:07:14
  with the Marlins, Scott Strickland, who came to me with
• 1:07:18
  that. He goes, yeah, it's going to be
• 1:07:19
  weeks before I'm back. And I was like, yeah, no, I said
• 1:07:22
  here's my philosophy on this. I said you do the same thing,
• 1:07:27
  Scott, every single day. The body wants to go into this
• 1:07:31
  thing we call homeostasis, right, where it is more
• 1:07:34
  efficient every day of doing what it does.
• 1:07:37
  So what do you think's happening every day?
• 1:07:39
  The body goes, OK, by the time you pick up that baseball, human
• 1:07:42
  body's turned around. It's already calculated what
• 1:07:44
  knows what you're going to go through, right?
• 1:07:46
  What you're going to do is like, OK, well, instead of using 106
• 1:07:49
  muscles today for this, let's use 72, right?
• 1:07:52
  And let's shut these muscle systems down.
• 1:07:55
  That to me is what Dead arm was right was a reduction in neural
• 1:07:59
  acquisition strategies by the human body.
• 1:08:02
  So how did I get out of the how did I get Scott Strickland back
• 1:08:06
  in four days to Max velocity? I altered the vectors and
• 1:08:10
  relationships and fired up the neurological system in ways that
• 1:08:14
  had never been done before. I added extraneous load to his
• 1:08:18
  full laid back position and perturbated him on the table.
• 1:08:21
  There were so many different things.
• 1:08:23
  I just wanted to affect his body in ways that hadn't been touched
• 1:08:28
  through his normal day-to-day activities and it pulled him out
• 1:08:31
  right away. So again, these were things like
• 1:08:34
  I'm thinking on the fly half the time.
• 1:08:36
  There's no protocol for these things.
• 1:08:38
  It's like getting back to a core operating philosophy that says
• 1:08:42
  understand the way the body is working, how that individual
• 1:08:45
  athlete is navigating that body's working.
• 1:08:47
  And then pulling that into a position of there's always
• 1:08:51
  something to correct, there's always something to enhance,
• 1:08:54
  there's always room for improvement.
• 1:08:56
  And I think that's one of the beauties is we don't know where
• 1:08:59
  the finish line is for an athlete.
• 1:09:01
  So we can keep just constantly moving towards an adaptive
• 1:09:04
  process. And there's another long answer
• 1:09:07
  for you, mate, for a very simple question.
• 1:09:10
  But yeah, it's it is individual. For me, there was always a
• 1:09:13
  different problem to solve. Every interaction was a
• 1:09:16
  different problem to solve. I think that's a great way to
• 1:09:20
  put it, right? It sticks to your theme.
• 1:09:23
  Why? Why look for the cookie cutter
• 1:09:25
  answer? Why look for something in the
• 1:09:26
  textbook when every situation presents its own unique problem?
• 1:09:32
  And of course, there's a ton more questions that we can go
• 1:09:35
  into here, but one, forsake of time, 2, forsake of the
• 1:09:40
  audience. I don't want to give them way
• 1:09:42
  too much, so I'm going to pause on the baseball questions.
• 1:09:48
  Hopefully we can get you back on at sometime in the future as we
• 1:09:50
  can continue to go down this rabbit hole.
• 1:09:53
  These are fun for me, Adam, just to have the conversation, close
• 1:09:56
  me up. You're right here to get going.
• 1:09:58
  Yeah. Yeah, of course.
• 1:09:59
  Yeah, this was all, all the tease in a way just get you
• 1:10:02
  excited so you can ask to come back at some point.
• 1:10:06
  But there there is one other piece that we talked a little
• 1:10:10
  bit about offline and with me being in the tech side of sports
• 1:10:15
  to a certain extent and you did tease it.
• 1:10:18
  So this isn't straight out of left field.
• 1:10:20
  You talked a little bit about AI in the future of sports
• 1:10:24
  technology, there seems to be this massive push to integrate
• 1:10:29
  artificial intelligence into what we're doing today.
• 1:10:33
  From your experience, are we at a point where that is even
• 1:10:36
  accessible? Where can we go?
• 1:10:39
  What's the future of sports tech?
• 1:10:41
  Yeah, and super interesting. So I talked to a team yesterday
• 1:10:45
  that we mentioned earlier offline, and one of the reasons
• 1:10:48
  they reached out was to get my guidance on their implementation
• 1:10:52
  of artificial intelligence within their organization.
• 1:10:54
  And my very first question was, well, what do you want AI to do,
• 1:10:59
  right? What are you looking at this to
• 1:11:00
  do? And it's like, I think there's
• 1:11:02
  this misconception that AI is this big brain.
• 1:11:05
  You just bring it in, plug it in, sit back and watch it work.
• 1:11:10
  Right. Well, let's talk about this.
• 1:11:12
  There's so many different ways AI can affect sport.
• 1:11:15
  Where it's having positive effect is in the prediction
• 1:11:19
  potentially of tactical changes in certain sports, like how
• 1:11:24
  Arsenal's midfield in the EPL are going to compress in in
• 1:11:29
  pressure goal situations. And we can start to see some of
• 1:11:33
  this thing. OK, please.
• 1:11:35
  Players are patterning geometrically this way, then we
• 1:11:39
  know what that expectation is. There's like incredible
• 1:11:43
  opportunity with AOI tactically to help inform coaching staff.
• 1:11:47
  I think that is given movement capabilities and the
• 1:11:51
  two-dimensional nature of how we look at that, how we look at
• 1:11:55
  tactics, that's probably almost ready to go over on the AI side
• 1:12:01
  because I think we have enough repeatability and reliability in
• 1:12:04
  things like camera based technologies, in things like
• 1:12:07
  radar, Lidar based technologies that are coming online.
• 1:12:10
  Even some of the wearables are providing additional
• 1:12:13
  information. But therein lies the biggest
• 1:12:16
  issue we have when I'm looking at artificial intelligence from
• 1:12:19
  a bio analytic standpoint. If I'm looking at artificial
• 1:12:23
  intelligence in my purview to reduce preventable injury or to
• 1:12:27
  improve performance, they're the only two things I care about.
• 1:12:31
  Simplified, reduce preventable injury, improve performance.
• 1:12:35
  The data we're getting from wearables right now is so
• 1:12:38
  inaccurate, it cannot fuel the prediction capabilities of
• 1:12:42
  artificial intelligence. And I'll give you some
• 1:12:44
  indications on that. There is A and one of the valued
• 1:12:48
  at multiple billions of dollars and a consumer device that
• 1:12:52
  started its journey in professional sports and I was
• 1:12:55
  actually involved with this. The NBA did a study on this one
• 1:12:59
  device and showed it to be 74% accurate in detecting heart rate
• 1:13:02
  during sleep and 50% accurate in detecting heart rate during
• 1:13:06
  activity. It's a heart rate monitor, 50%
• 1:13:09
  at activity, 74% during sleep. What good is that data?
• 1:13:15
  93% and better would be considered scientifically
• 1:13:18
  interpretable data sets, Not this crap we're getting from
• 1:13:22
  this consumer wearable. It just does not apply in sport.
• 1:13:26
  You can interpolate it out. I think the company that does it
• 1:13:28
  does a brilliant job of presenting to consumers the need
• 1:13:32
  for balance and recovery against expression, physical training.
• 1:13:35
  They do a phenomenal job of that, and that's where that
• 1:13:38
  product needs to be. GPS monitors.
• 1:13:40
  There's half a dozen of those companies in the space now.
• 1:13:43
  They have a 2M error coefficient.
• 1:13:45
  So when we're talking about, say, an NFL lineman, their whole
• 1:13:48
  life is in that 2M box, you know?
• 1:13:49
  So the data coming off that could not fuel a load algorithm
• 1:13:53
  to give artificial intelligence the opportunity to say, hey,
• 1:13:57
  this guy is at risk of injury. So if I wanted to go into
• 1:14:00
  ChatGPT right now, maybe someone can do this.
• 1:14:04
  What sensors do we need to reduce injury?
• 1:14:06
  What do those need to look like? Where are they worn on the body?
• 1:14:09
  I am critically interested in foot ground interaction right
• 1:14:12
  now, Adam, because of the amount of non contact ACL injuries is
• 1:14:16
  one of the highest drains of resources in the world of sport.
• 1:14:21
  Are these non contact ACL injuries?
• 1:14:23
  It's a pandemic we have going on. 15% of all soccer players
• 1:14:27
  are going to suffer an ACL injury.
• 1:14:29
  You put those numbers against contracts, it's stunning.
• 1:14:32
  So foot ground interactive sensors are something I'm super
• 1:14:35
  interested in. Physiological response to maybe
• 1:14:38
  patch worn technologies as opposed to plastic box in noisy
• 1:14:42
  environments. We have to get more accurate
• 1:14:45
  data to fuel these algorithms. Artificial intelligence and
• 1:14:50
  look, AI is going to be a significant player in our
• 1:14:54
  industry, there is no question. But when it comes down to am I
• 1:14:58
  preventing injury? Am I improving performance?
• 1:15:01
  Not yet, Not yet. And stay tuned for next time
• 1:15:05
  when we go over how to get more accurate data.
• 1:15:08
  Yeah, exactly. And for 1995, we'll have a yeah,
• 1:15:12
  we'll have an infomercial that we can throw on the end here.
• 1:15:15
  Now it's, it's interesting from like for your perspective too, I
• 1:15:18
  mean from data sets coming off Flexprogrip with what you're
• 1:15:22
  getting there, where does that go currently inside of
• 1:15:25
  organizations? Are you seeing that housed and
• 1:15:28
  hung on to like it's gold inside of the athletic training models
• 1:15:32
  or you're seeing strength coaches go, hey, maybe you need
• 1:15:35
  three sets of 10 on this. Where do you see most of the
• 1:15:38
  application right now? Great question, appreciate you
• 1:15:41
  asking it now. Some of it is so org dependent
• 1:15:45
  or university dependent or facility dependent because you
• 1:15:49
  think about the levels that were implemented at and it it goes
• 1:15:54
  from a 10 year old that got the device with their father just
• 1:15:59
  because that kid wants to play baseball for a long time and
• 1:16:02
  hopefully get better all the way up to Cy Young Award winners.
• 1:16:05
  And the Cy Young Award winner might not necessarily care about
• 1:16:09
  getting better. The Cy Young Award winner just
• 1:16:11
  wants to monitor where he is AT and make sure that he can
• 1:16:16
  perform every time he is supposed to.
• 1:16:19
  Thinking about the more traditional wearables, right?
• 1:16:22
  What is my steady state and just making sure that I maintain it.
• 1:16:25
  Trying to reduce all the noise. And there's some organizations
• 1:16:29
  that we work with that literally just want to use Flexpro Grip as
• 1:16:34
  an extension of what they're doing in the weight room.
• 1:16:36
  So it is long term monitoring just to see if an individual is
• 1:16:40
  getting stronger now that there are others that are using it
• 1:16:44
  more. From a readiness perspective,
• 1:16:48
  they're using it to make truly informed decisions for how how
• 1:16:53
  do I want to structure my bullpen?
• 1:16:55
  Much what you were saying with your team back in Taiwan.
• 1:17:00
  It wasn't that because an individual scored a certain way
• 1:17:04
  on Flexpro grip, it means that they are all of a sudden going
• 1:17:08
  to be the number one man out of the bullpen or the number three
• 1:17:11
  man out of the bullpen more. What it means is how important
• 1:17:16
  is it that we win this game and how long of a leash do we want
• 1:17:20
  to give this individual? And that's normally the
• 1:17:22
  thinking. That's the entirety of the
• 1:17:24
  thinking pitching coaches have going into a game, right?
• 1:17:28
  It's it's all about now. It's all about now.
• 1:17:31
  And that kind of flies in the face from from load management
• 1:17:34
  and everything else. But idea.
• 1:17:36
  Yeah, it's, yeah, some of those short, short thoughts, the way
• 1:17:40
  they think. And it's not that you want to
• 1:17:42
  change that. It's like, how do you support
• 1:17:44
  that, right. It's like exactly giving them
• 1:17:47
  that. Are we giving them the right
• 1:17:48
  numbers? They need to see the.
• 1:17:50
  So, OK, he looks like he's got great strength today from the
• 1:17:54
  measurements we're getting. So therefore we think we can.
• 1:17:58
  What that has shown for him historically is we might get 3
• 1:18:01
  innings out of him today with a just the other part of this too,
• 1:18:04
  which I hate the linearity of, of pitch counts and innings, but
• 1:18:10
  some teams still use innings counts as an indication of
• 1:18:13
  fatigue over the course of the season.
• 1:18:14
  An inning can be 3, it can be 33 pitches, come on.
• 1:18:18
  So it's pitch distribution I think has a load qualitative
• 1:18:23
  variable that needs to be understood.
• 1:18:25
  And the ability for that to measure that as baseline on a
• 1:18:29
  day-to-day basis is where part of your magic lies.
• 1:18:32
  I think is is is to be able to see that.
• 1:18:34
  So you bring up a really interesting point there and
• 1:18:37
  specifically with Flexpro Grip and how it can kind of play into
• 1:18:43
  that specific load of each pitch.
• 1:18:46
  I know you've done some research on it.
• 1:18:48
  You've presented a few topics of when we look at a pitch count or
• 1:18:53
  they load on a pitcher individually, that a certain
• 1:18:57
  pitch might be more stressful for an individual.
• 1:19:00
  That example you gave earlier with your, with your big lefty
• 1:19:04
  cutters were particularly stressful for this individual.
• 1:19:08
  One of the things that we have research coming out on down the
• 1:19:12
  line, we, we've taken the data in already at this point and
• 1:19:16
  we're talking about it at the preliminary stages, is that the
• 1:19:20
  muscles that control our finger flexors, so the same muscles
• 1:19:25
  that are optimally positioned to offload stress of the UCL can't
• 1:19:29
  produce as much force when our forearm is in a supinated
• 1:19:34
  position as opposed to in a pronated or neutral position.
• 1:19:38
  Thinking about more of a traditional fastball release.
• 1:19:42
  So where or why does that matter?
• 1:19:44
  Breaking pitches are thrown out of increased supination versus a
• 1:19:51
  traditional fastball or change up pitches that are seen as less
• 1:19:55
  stressful. Granted, the research has said
• 1:19:58
  for the past, like the modern research has said that for the
• 1:20:02
  past 10 years, probably fastballs are actually more
• 1:20:06
  dangerous. And that's just because.
• 1:20:08
  Total torque is higher on the fastball now, where we would
• 1:20:12
  kind of throw this thing completely in reverse back to
• 1:20:16
  all those Little League coaches or the original researchers back
• 1:20:20
  in the early 90s that said breaking balls are the devil.
• 1:20:25
  We're not going to say breaking balls are the devil, but what we
• 1:20:28
  would say, although they might not be as high from the raw
• 1:20:34
  torque perspective, the elbow when the forum is in supination
• 1:20:39
  is not as well positioned to handle the torque.
• 1:20:44
  Now where this goes to the individual level is what we have
• 1:20:48
  also seen is that disparity between that neutral or pronated
• 1:20:53
  position versus the supinated position is less when we can
• 1:20:57
  classify a pitcher as a biased supinator.
• 1:21:02
  So you go back to what you were saying as assessing the
• 1:21:06
  individual, if that individual's movement signature biases
• 1:21:12
  supination and they've been in that supinated position or
• 1:21:16
  throwing supinated base pitches for their entire life, they
• 1:21:21
  might not show as much disparity in that ratio as somebody who
• 1:21:26
  can be classified as a pronator or somebody that throws in our
• 1:21:32
  baseball sense, the high ride fastball arm side change UPS
• 1:21:36
  versus what we're seeing now with sinker slider guys or guys
• 1:21:41
  with lower spin efficiency. Yeah.
• 1:21:43
  That's what I'm thinking now, like, so you get that number,
• 1:21:46
  you get those markers. Now you've given me a
• 1:21:48
  qualitative measure of load by pitch is almost what's going on
• 1:21:54
  here. I would like to look at data in
• 1:21:56
  terms of strength and pronation and supination and understand
• 1:22:00
  that disparity and see what that looks like.
• 1:22:03
  And would that give me my immediate thoughts, which will
• 1:22:07
  be I'll think stupid in a week because that's the way my head
• 1:22:10
  works. My initial thought is that give
• 1:22:13
  us the indication of, yeah, yeah, this is a slider based
• 1:22:16
  pitcher. He's got an effective slider.
• 1:22:17
  We can we can increase that distribution of that pitch
• 1:22:21
  because of the framework we've got to work with because of we
• 1:22:24
  know the parameters of load, what he can accept and what's
• 1:22:28
  acceptable. And it also I think there would
• 1:22:30
  be some data there that could directly correlate to how the
• 1:22:33
  fastball looks against the slider as well.
• 1:22:35
  There's going to be data sets there that I think because
• 1:22:39
  you're breaking it down at such a level of accuracy and
• 1:22:43
  importance there. I think we've got to collect a
• 1:22:45
  lot of data right now and what you're doing specifically
• 1:22:48
  because we don't know, but there's going to be as we look
• 1:22:51
  at metadata and analysis and understand injuries, soreness,
• 1:22:55
  all those pathways, all that data you're collecting, Adam, I
• 1:22:58
  think is going to be insightful over time.
• 1:23:00
  There's going to be some metric that is this number and this
• 1:23:04
  number, some average, some something that is going to give
• 1:23:07
  risk indication of injury, but it's also going to give
• 1:23:09
  performance indication. To your point, readiness, right?
• 1:23:13
  Readiness is a big thing we need to understand.
• 1:23:16
  Yes, we talk about it all the time.
• 1:23:19
  We. Know one thing for sure, with
• 1:23:20
  Flex program, we can claim a bunch of things and trust me, we
• 1:23:25
  do. We believe in the product, we
• 1:23:27
  believe in the system that we've created wholeheartedly.
• 1:23:31
  But the one thing we know for sure is we are collecting data
• 1:23:36
  that is never previously existed.
• 1:23:38
  So with that, we are going to be able to not necessarily provide
• 1:23:43
  answers, but we are going to give information for people that
• 1:23:47
  are in your position or that are in organizations or at colleges
• 1:23:53
  to find answers for specific problems that they have.
• 1:23:57
  I love it. Yeah, understanding the the weak
• 1:24:01
  link. In the chain is the UCL coming
• 1:24:03
  off everything that you've done relative to supporting and
• 1:24:07
  understanding the structures of the forearm that they're going
• 1:24:11
  to support the continual stretch and expression of this single
• 1:24:16
  ligament, right? It's like, my God, can you cure
• 1:24:19
  the pandemic is the question right?
• 1:24:21
  I think this is a big part of the solution.
• 1:24:24
  We don't know if it's all of the solution, but I think it's
• 1:24:26
  certainly a big part of it. I, I tend to look at a lot of
• 1:24:30
  injury from A and I always wondered this in strength and
• 1:24:33
  conditioning. Why do we train the arm in
• 1:24:36
  compressed states when all the time it's, it's extended and
• 1:24:39
  it's like, like the point where where something is going to the
• 1:24:43
  mechanism where something's going to pop.
• 1:24:45
  It's, it's in full extension. It's, it's at the point where we
• 1:24:48
  got full lay back and full exposure of, of the UCL.
• 1:24:52
  Or if it's at the shoulder girdle, it's it's at a point in
• 1:24:55
  time, whether it's a rotator cuff labrum base where we're
• 1:24:58
  outside of the normal range, it's always outside of those
• 1:25:01
  normal ranges that that these that the injuries occur.
• 1:25:04
  There's a combination kind of of interrelated systems relative to
• 1:25:09
  even cognitive state that could have brought that about because
• 1:25:13
  we haven't, we haven't dove deep enough into this yet, but we
• 1:25:16
  need to get that data. And I think where where teams
• 1:25:19
  are going in five years time, I think you're going to have a
• 1:25:22
  repository of elbow based measurements and data sets
• 1:25:24
  around the forearm and the elbow specifically that like we could
• 1:25:27
  dive into another whole podcast about the value of arm strength
• 1:25:30
  in in hitters, right? How critical that is.
• 1:25:33
  Many people taught me that. And it was like, wow, I didn't
• 1:25:35
  see grip strength as a major issue, but yeah, now I see it.
• 1:25:38
  So yeah, there could be. I think the data you're
• 1:25:40
  collecting is going to be mined and it's going to be formidable.
• 1:25:44
  It's going to be disruptive to the way we look at players arms.
• 1:25:48
  There's no question. I hate to finally do this, but
• 1:25:51
  I. Have to put the line in the sand
• 1:25:54
  and call it quits on this talk. And trust me, I'm not doing this
• 1:25:58
  for me. I'm doing this because I know
• 1:26:01
  you have a meeting that you have to get to.
• 1:26:04
  So thank you for being gracious enough to spend all this time
• 1:26:07
  with us. I think we did set a record, or
• 1:26:10
  we're at least close to potentially the longest episode
• 1:26:13
  of the late. Oh my gosh, yes.
• 1:26:14
  Felt like I was talking to you. Felt like one of our normal.
• 1:26:17
  Conversations. Exactly, except the difference
• 1:26:19
  is we had this one over. Zoom instead of over a bowl of
• 1:26:23
  orange chicken at Yeah, exactly. Well, that was great.
• 1:26:28
  Thank you for having me on. I mean, this is this is fun.
• 1:26:31
  Love these conversations because I learn things and you never
• 1:26:34
  know where it's going to go and I always learn something.
• 1:26:38
  Of course, Gary, this was a blast.
• 1:26:40
  One last. Question, is there a way people
• 1:26:42
  can follow what you're doing or reach out or anything like that?
• 1:26:46
  Sure, LinkedIn is probably where most people find me and I get.
• 1:26:50
  You know, calls out of the blue a lot of times from there.
• 1:26:52
  I find me on LinkedIn. I think it's strength coach 21,
• 1:26:55
  I think is the my handle on LinkedIn.
• 1:26:58
  You can find me it's gary@mccoyperformance.com.
• 1:27:02
  If you got a question, want to shoot over an e-mail to me
• 1:27:05
  caught me at a good time. I'm about to get involved in
• 1:27:08
  some more heavier stuff, but I've kind of got enough of a
• 1:27:11
  quiet period here during spring training that I can have some
• 1:27:13
  discussions, which is fun. This was great, man.
• 1:27:15
  I really appreciate the time, Gary and of.
• 1:27:18
  Course to the listeners, we appreciate you laying back with
• 1:27:21
  us.