Transform Data into Action: Improve Your Coaching with Athlete Dashboards - A Case Study

The Big Takeaway

• Athlete Dashboards make your data actionable allowing you to adjust your program based on your athlete's needs.

Introduction

Our goal at Output Sports is to simplify sports science. A large part of this is creating a platform that excels at assessing multiple qualities related to athletic performance. But testing only makes up half of the equation. The data collected should be actionable and meaningfully impact the athlete's program. This can be a major challenge, especially if data is not presented intuitively or if it requires the coach to have a PhD in spreadsheets to compare athletes to themselves, their goals, or their peers.

Enter our newest release: Athlete Dashboards in the Output Hub. This feature is designed specifically with your needs in mind, giving you the ability to create fully customized dashboards based on the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to you, your athletes, or your team. For more info on Athlete Dashboards check out this article. 

Let’s walk through an example of how Athlete Dashboards bring data to life, allowing it to impact your program and improve performance.

Performance Paddy: A Case Study

Paddy is a rugby forward who has come in during his off-season to improve his performance on the field. After performing a battery of tests, including mobility, lower body power, RSI, and strength, it’s time to sit down and define how you can best individualize his program to improve his weaknesses while maximizing his strengths.

Mobility

We’ve chosen the cutoff of >10% asymmetry between sides to flag as a potential area of improvement. This is effectively visualized in the Athlete Dashboard, making it time-efficient to find where Paddy can improve his mobility. 

Paddy’s mobility results:

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Looking at the asymmetry percentage, we can see two areas for improvement: ankle dorsiflexion and hip external rotation on the right side. Mobility deficits such as these can impact his ability to effectively change direction, accelerate, and change levels out on the pitch. With this in mind, we can change Paddy’s warm-up and strength training to focus on improving these ranges.

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Lower Body Power 

We have set lower body power goals for Paddy based on the norms of rugby forwards playing at the same level. This allows us to compare Paddy to position norms as well as his previous performance in the tests (we could also compare him to group results if we are working with multiple athletes). Comparing the countermovement jump to the squat jump gives us insight into how he produces force both with and without the slow stretch-shortening cycle (SSC).

Paddy’s jump results:

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Here we can see Paddy’s strength is clearly his ability to produce force concentrically (without help from the SSC). While his weakness is his ability to use the SSC to aid in force production. This points us to the goal of driving up his eccentric force utilization while maintaining his squat jump outputs. 

Reactive Strength

Reactive strength is an important performance quality for rugby athletes. This measure of “stiffness” has a strong correlation with top-speed running abilities and can be the deciding factor between breaking away from a defender and getting tackled. The drop jump is a common test for reactive strength, as it requires the athlete to jump as high as possible and as quickly as possible after contacting the ground from a drop height of 18 cm or more. This test provides us with a “reactive strength index” (RSI) measurement, which is calculated by dividing the jump height in centimeters by the contact time. 

Learn more about RSI in this article.

Paddy’s Drop Jump Results:

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Paddy’s RSI might not be world-class, but it is within the intermediate range for a rugby athlete. Though it may not be the primary focus of the program, we still would like to see this number improve over the course of his off-season.

Strength

Strength is another quality associated with on-field performance. On one hand, there is an obvious connection between strength and our ability to withstand or apply forces against other players. On the other hand, it can be a factor that affects performance in previous tests such as the squat, countermovement, and drop jumps.

Paddy’s strength testing results:

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Comparing Paddy to his positional norms through the established strength targets, we can easily see that this is likely his biggest weakness. Given the role that strength plays in jump, sprint, and change of direction performance, Paddy’s program should focus on improving his lower and upper body force production capabilities.

Bringing the Full Picture Into Focus

It’s one thing to look at these results in isolation; it’s another to see them all in one place. Athlete Dashboards allow you to visualize the metrics that matter most to your athletes, helping you find connections between mobility and strength or between strength and jump performance. This enables you to efficiently create more effective programs for your athletes.

Monitoring Paddy’s Progress Over Time

Once the assessment has been completed and the program is written, it’s time to train and monitor progress over time. The Athlete Dashboard allows you to easily view all of this information in one place, enabling you to make adjustments to your program based on objective data. It also allows us to view the trends of multiple metrics in a single chart. Performance on the field is multifactorial; as coaches, we want to avoid improving one quality at the expense of another. This feature helps us achieve that goal.

Paddy’s Progress:

Based on Paddy’s assessment we’ve chosen lower body strength and eccentric utilization as the primary qualities we want to improve. Back squat and CMJ represent two proxy measures for these qualities. We can see that over time both are improving, showing objectively that our program is working. This visual representation of progress not only helps us but can easily be understood by the athlete and other stakeholders. 

Wrap Up

At the end of the day, the data you collect needs to be actionable. To do this, it must be easily accessible and understandable. This allows you, your athletes, and relevant stakeholders to make informed decisions that improve performance.

Paddy’s case is just a small sample of the power of Athlete Dashboards. Regardless of what setting you’re working in, we’re confident that this update will make an impact on your program. 

Want to see the new dashboards in action? Book a demo today and discover how you can take your athlete monitoring to the next level!