How Top Athletes Use Data to Improve Their Performance

We love investigating the science of self-improvement.

Athletes in so many ways epitomise the spirit of self-improvement—they’re constantly chasing new PRs and improving their body’s ability to perform at higher and higher levels as they progress. 

Over the last few months we’ve had the privilege to chat with a couple of top level athletes, from Team GB sprinter Rio Mitcham to Team USA Weightlifting Coach Jessie Stemo.

Within our conversations, we made sure to ask them how scientifically they break down and track their training— and in this email,l we want to share a detailed summary of their answers on this topic with you. 

Whether or not you also have athletic aspirations, we think there’s a lot to be gained from learning from these world-class athletes about the mindsets, principles and tactics they’ve used to achieve true excellence in their fields.

If you’d also like to listen to the full interviews, you can also click here:

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1. Rio Mitcham: Team GB Sprinter

Benji: How scientific is your training? 

Rio: I did sports science at uni, so for me, I always find it useful—knowing the reasons behind why we're doing certain things like nutrition and recovery and all things like that. So I've always taken a bit more of a scientific route to becoming an elite athlete. But the actual training wise, you'll have like a team around you.

So every athlete will have, depending on the level that they're at, they'll have a coach, possibly an S&C coach, physio, a soft tissue therapist, an osteopath, a doctor, a nutritionist, psychologist. So you have this team around you, a biomech, which is literally just the data. And like, they all deal with all of that stuff in their respective fields. 

And then as an athlete, hopefully you could just turn up to training and deal with the session at hand and do what, do what you're good at. And then everyone else does the science around it.

Benji: For someone who maybe doesn't have a team around them, maybe they're not at the level that you're at, but they want to invest in their training from that science-based perspective, when you talk about scientific training, what does that actually mean for you?

When it comes to scientific training, obviously there's a world of information, as you said, but for somebody who doesn't have access to those resources, what are the small few things that they could start implementing and tracking, turning into data points that would lead to potential big impacts?

Rio: Yeah. What a lovely question.

Again, this was probably helped by the fact I was interested in sports science, but I think my interest in sports science originally came from the fact that I wanted to learn how to get fast and take a practical approach towards it. 

In turn, I had to look into anatomy and had to look into nutrition, all that stuff. So it kind of just sparked the interest, but yeah, what I would say for athletes that aren't in that position, I would say just like, if you are curious yourself, then just allow that curiosity to go into those different areas and just learn—you can never, you know, you can never stop learning about these things.

You can learn more about nutrition yourself so that you don't need a nutritionist. Because even now, the only times I would speak to a nutritionist is just to check something that I'm not sure about, maybe like a supplement or something like that.

But the basics, because I did all the research myself, I could say that I'm quite strong on that side of things. And then, yeah, I would say just like whatever you think that you need to know, there's always ways to learn it.

And there's so many ways that you can break it down in simpler ways, like especially in training. When I first started, there were so many YouTube videos that I would watch just to go through all that stuff that maybe the coach would do, but I wanted to understand it. 

You've got so much time to develop,  just be proactive with your time and learn what you think you need to learn. You don't have to learn everything right away. I mean, you can learn the beginner stuff and then develop on that. And then eventually, hopefully, you can get to the place where it's like a lot of it's just autonomous and you don't need to necessarily keep Googling stuff every single day and you just have like this bank of knowledge that just helps you run faster.

But yeah, I would just say be curious yourself and then just try and see where that takes you.

Benji: For anyone listening to this, what advice would you have for them? 

Rio: Yeah, I think the main thing I would normally say when I meet younger athletes is again, this Kobe Bryant quote that I've internalized so much. He said to be curious and it sounds really simple, but I think sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to actualize.

And yeah, it's basically just, be curious about everything there is around what you're trying to do and what the dream is like. Say you want to win an Olympic gold medal. You might not know what an Olympic gold medal actually looks like, what the race is like when you run it, what the athletes' day-to-day lifestyles look like, what gym they go to? Like, what do they eat? Where do they live?

You can break all of those things down into a thousand things, especially the training aspects. Like you break everything down to a thousand things. So just be curious and try and find out what all of those thousand things are. Don't overwhelm yourself. But I just find education so important. 

And you can do a lot of that work yourself if you are curious about it and just try and keep learning about the sport. And then most importantly, like keep learning about your body. Like you need to know, you just need to know everything that there is about a body, and unfortunately, more than a normal person—like you need to know what this feels like doing this movement, and if you do feel something you can pinpoint where it is most of the time, like elite athletes can do that. It's like some weird and magical thing.

You just need to know everything, like how you're going to respond to things physically and mentally. And like, once you get to that point, I remember, I can't remember who said it, but there's a sprinter one time that said “whoever knows their body the most when they're lining up wins the race.”

And it's just, yeah, being curious about all of these things is literally the main advice that I give people because it just, I think it just entails everything that it takes to become an athlete.

And that's why Kobe was saying it, because it's such simple advice. Just to be curious about everything that you come across. But if you bring that into your everyday life, you end up learning so much about yourself and the sport that it's just immeasurable.

Benji: Yeah. Yeah. No, love that. Love that. And what you said there, whoever understands their body the best is usually the one that wins. That really perfectly captures what we're about um at what counts.

2. Jessie Stemo — Team USA Weightlifting Coach  

Jacob: How do you go about tracking (improvement) and working with a specific athlete?

What does that look like on a day-to-day basis?

Jessie: Yeah, so we use Google Sheets for everything. So we can track all of the necessary data with an athlete. We track their volume, their relative intensity, their tonnage. We track average peak intensities. And we, at the beginning of a training cycle, lay out a plan for how we want to move through, say it's 12 weeks into their competition. And we plan out how we want to progress their exercises, how we want to progress their accessory work. And we break it down per movement. So if an athlete has a specific weakness, we make sure we're pushing more volume towards that specific weakness.

And then week to week, we use that plan sort of as guide rails, I guess, for the exact workouts that we're writing.

Benji: And how technically advanced is that? Is that something that somebody at home, if they have Google Sheets could replicate or would you really need to be working with a coach?

Jessie: You, I would say, probably would be wanting to work with the coach. I think working with the coach in weightlifting is generally the best way to go about it.

I think there are very few athletes who are successful without a coach, just because as an athlete, it's tricky to be objective about what you need. And so having a coach and having just a different perspective is helpful.

The coach is going to also take a very close look at technique and give an athlete feedback on that as well, and then write the program to help them make the changes that you want to see.

So yeah, I would say that you could probably figure it out for yourself, but it would take a lot of time and research to do that.

Jacob: In terms of tracking the day-to-day stuff, I'm intrigued to know, what sort of wearables are there and ways of tracking out there if you're a weightlifter?

Jessie: A lot of athletes use things like Whoop or the Oura Ring. I think at one point I got an Oura Ring from my support from USA Weightlifting. So it's definitely something that they support and use. 

So tracking sleep and everything can be good and tracking heart rate variability as well can be a helpful tool for just paying attention to trends in an athlete's recovery. Generally for testing readiness and especially FOR a sport like weightlifting, using a counter-movement jump test can be really helpful. And that's actually something that as a team, we're working on figuring out how to use more with our athletes. It's a little bit of a challenge because we're primarily a remote team. And so figuring out a way to get athletes with a system that gives us accurate information for a countermovement jump jump is tricky.

Whereas if you're in person at a gym, you can use things like jump mats and also force plates to gather information just about how they're responding day to day to their training.

By doing this we can answer questions like “What did this intensity range do to the athlete?” “How did they respond to this amount of volume?” “How did they respond to this specific exercise?” “Are we seeing the changes that we want to be seeing?”

Benji: A countermovement jump test. What is that exactly?

Jessie: Oh, okay. So it is basically a vertical leap with your hands on your hips and you measure the height of the jump. And then you can basically establish a baseline for an athlete. 

And if they're jumping higher than normal, then you can assume obviously (with running some different statistical tests on it all) they’re in their green zone and above what's average, and so then you can assume that they're more ready and recovered. If they're in the red zone, then you can assume that they're under-recovered. The important thing about that is when you are below that line or you're just generally under-recovered, that's when an athlete is more prone to injury.

And so I think that's why using those readiness tests, whether it be HRV or the countermovement jump test, I think that's why they can be so valuable is because, as a coach, the last thing you want to do is give an athlete too much and cause injury. 

And so having some more objective data for that is helpful. I think a lot of times, and what we currently do is we have to just rely on a lot of subjective information from athletes. How are you feeling? What are you noticing in your body? What are you noticing about your sleep patterns, about your appetite? Because we know, I mean, if an athlete starts not sleeping as well, or their appetite goes down, like that we're easing into that space of over-training. But it's subjective, and everybody experiences things a little bit differently. And so if you can use something a little bit more objective, like self-test, then you can track that over time more easily and really, really learn how to dial things in with the asset you're working with.

And usually, that average baseline for the countermovement jump test that you're running off of is, more so a rolling average to kind of account for strength gains and trends for time.

We hope you enjoyed these insights.

Sometimes it can be very easy to brush over these types of interviews but again, we just want to reiterate what a privilege it was for us to receive such specific answers from world-class competitors. 

If you enjoyed this email you’ll love the ‘What Counts’ podcast, where you can listen to these interviews in full.

Links found below…

Spotify

Apple

Podbean (in browser)

Until next week, 

Benji & Jacob.

P.S. We wanted to let you know that What Counts is evolving. We’ve noticed that the stories you like most (and we enjoy making most) are the personal stories we’ve been sending once a month—where we talk about how we’re implementing the science of self-improvement in our own lives. 

Going forward, we want to spend more of our time and emails focusing on these personal stories. We’ll aim to increase the frequency to two per month. 

We’ll finish this month on the usual schedule, but that new schedule will kick in starting next month. 

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