Evidence Strong
What makes an elite Olympic weightlifter - with Vicky Gottwald
As a sport scientist, we often got chatting about the questions that need answering and as any sport and any coat wants to be able to predict talent, right? They want the magic bullet, which I don't think exists historically as sport scientists and practitioners. We're really very poor at predicting talent. So welcome, Vicki, to an evidence-strong show. It's my pleasure to have you, and if you could briefly introduce yourself, that would be great. Hi, thanks very much for talking to me today about the paper. So I'm Vicki Gotwald. I'm just to give you a bit of a brief background, I suppose I'll wear a few different hats. So firstly, I'm a lecturer at Bangor University, so you should be able to see the picture of a bit of a Hogwarts building in the background. So I lecture my expertise is in skill acquisition, so I have a coaching background, and I probably have two streams of research. One is to do with coaching instruction, specifically in terms of internal and external focus of attention. I won't get into that too much today, but then the other stream of research is a bit more applied in terms of talent development, and I work with a number of UK sporting governing bodies, weightlifting whales, Welsh rowing, and I have some projects with UK sport and some of their pathway sports as well, which is where this project comes into play. And then I'm also, so the reason, one of the reasons I'm interested in skill acquisition is because I have a coaching background, so basketball is my background, I'm a level four coach, and I've done a lot of coaching with the basketball whales, national team programs from junior to senior, and then I suppose more recently I've stepped away from playing, I've stepped away from coaching, and I've just got a bit more into the performance strategy and leadership side of sports, so I'm also the talent identification and transfer lead on something called Whips, which is the Welsh Institute Performance Sciences, so essentially it's a three-way partnership between higher education institutions in sport whales, which is our national sporting governing body, and then industry, so individual sporting governing bodies, and just to try and answer the questions I suppose that are important for sporting governing bodies, answer the questions that they will want answering, so we're not just doing research for the sake of research, and then I'm also a board director of part of weightlifting whales that happened after this research, and I do a little bit of hope, help in terms of basketball whales, performance strategies as well, I don't think I've missed anything, that gives you a bit of an idea of a few different hats, so today we'll be talking about the paper titled retrospective inquiry into the holistic development of a lead British Olympic weight lift test, so I think it will be good to start with what was the study about, what participants were recruited, and what was the goal, and then we'll go into the details. Fantastic, so just to give a bit of context, so I suppose this started, I used as a basketball player, I used to train in one of the gyms up in North Wales, and the coach there, he was the national team, coach for weightlifting, he used to do a lot of my strength and conditioning, so as a sport scientist we often got chatting about the questions that need answering, and as as any sport and any coach wants to know, they want to be able to predict talent, right, they want the magic, the magic bullet, which I don't think exists, historically as sport scientists and practitioners, we're really very poor at predicting talent, and we didn't make that clear with weight lifting Wales, but we said that we would do what we could do, and have a look into that, and really this, the timing is quite good because I don't know, Alex, have you heard of the Great British, have you come across the Great British Medalist study? Yeah, so this was work commissioned by UK sport, that Bang University and a couple of other UK institutions, Exeter and Cardiff Met, had previously been involved in, they started off with a review of current knowledge on the development of the world's best sporting talent, so what makes people great essentially, and that's from a multidisciplinary perspective, so in terms of anthropometrics, practice hours, psychology, demographics, all of those things, and then that review then informed further studies, and one of which was a retrospective study, much like the one that we're going to discuss today, where they took some of the top athletes across the UK system, and what they wanted to do, these athletes were classified as either being super elite or elite, so super elite athletes, they were athletes who would, who were essentially serial medallists across Olympic Games World Championships, so the ones that really really made it, and then the elite athletes were those that, they might have had, they might have had a medallator world championships or an Olympics, but they weren't serial medallists, they weren't able to repeat that performance level again, and they wanted to know what are the commonalities between these two groups of athletes, so what things are very similar, and then what are the differences between those two groups, groups of athletes, so what are the, you know, what are the game changes in determining that sort of super elite element versus elite, so as part of that, they used, one of the studies used machine learning again, I'll talk about that in a little bit, they did a fantastic job of identifying some of these important biopsychosocial factors of elite, of super elite performance, but there were some limitations I suppose with that study, the biggest limitation from our perspective though, it wasn't sports specific, so we know that what makes super elite gymnast isn't going to be the same as what makes a super elite swimmer, for example, I'm sure, you know, there's going to be some commonalities, but it's not going to be the same, so we wanted to do a bit of a deep dive just in weightlifting, and then the other issue with that study from our perspective was, or limitation, I guess, was they looked at practice hours, and they did look at deliberate practice, I think they looked at deliberate practice versus play, but it was a bit of a superficial analysis of position side of things, and that's really where my interests and my expertise are in, so we wanted to look a bit more about how these athletes were training, what their practice looks looked like, so in relation to feedback, instruction, the way they structured their practice, so it's a bit more of a deeper dive there, so that was the why, so essentially we replicated some of the the GBM research with these quite structured retrospective interview questions, so it took a few hours with athletes that just discussing with athletes their journey, so that was in relation to we had four developmental themes, so demographics and family, so where they grew up, who their family were, did their family play sport, how many siblings did they have, did they have older siblings, younger siblings, same-sex, different-sex, their sport history, so what sports do they do growing up, so these things that we know are important determinants of expertise, and then they're weightlifting, a bit more about their weightlifting specific involvement when they when they started lifting, how much training they did, competitive milestones, so what age were they when they first got selected for an academy, or what age were they when they first got selected for whales, and then and so on, and then their weightlifting specific practice activities which I mentioned earlier in terms of the actual practice they were doing and what that looked like. What were the participants you recruited, and then we'll go into the method, how you collected the data then analysis. So what we did is we classified those athletes along with the coaches or the coaches to the lead on classifying those athletes, who do they think are the really sort of top-level athletes versus those that maybe were excellent athletes but maybe weren't going to go on to sort of my little come-off games or anything, and then the other thing that you know if you look at that statistically for those people that wanted a bit more of an objective and measure of that, the the our elite group they were in the top 20 percent in terms of their competition performance across the sort of top-level competitions, then they were in that top 20 percent of athletes, and then the other group were below that. So it was a bit of a combination between of a objective measure, and then also that sort of subjective input from coaches, which I think is important as well to you know to work with them as well. And were they all at the senior level or younger? Yes, so these are all senior athletes, so we've actually at the same time as this study we almost had a bit of a prospective version of this study running at the same time, but these are athletes that we've already we've already have that outcome. We know that these are the best of the best across British weightlifting, if you like, the senior athletes athletes and some cases have made it. These were current athletes in the in the Great British Medalist study, they actually used a lot of those athletes were retired, these were still currently performing, but they were athletes that had gone on to make it if you like already, so all senior athletes. How did you collect the data? So then we carried out the structured interviews, which we've lasted a few hours focusing on those those four developmental themes, so the demographics and family, sporting history, competitive male milestones, and then their weightlifting specific practice, and then there were two phases of the study, if you like. The first study was using something called machine learning, so for those of you that are not too familiar with with with data mining processes, it works really well when you've got maybe a small number of participants, so when you don't have huge you know we don't have huge numbers of top performing athletes in in in Wales and across the UK, so when you've got a lower sample size perhaps, but when you've got a lot of variables traditionally in in science we tend to look at relationships between a small number of variables, so for example the influence of practice hours on on performance for example, whereas I suppose we know the sport is a bit more complex than that and talent is a bit more complex than that, it's dynamic and it's multi-faceted, so machine learning is it's really good when you're trying to look at look at sort of short why short fat data sets where you've got a small number of athletes, but a high number of variables, you know, I think we had about a thousand variables in the end, so when you see so attributes is just another it's just a terminology, you might see it in pattern recognition sometimes as features, sometimes as attributes, but we're just talking about variables really or foul factors even, so we had our two classes of objects, so the goal of machine learning is to identify these features or attributes the best distinguish between they call it two classes of objects, so in this case our two classes of objects is our is our elite and our sub elite groups, so is there a pattern of variables that we can use to differentiate between these two groups of athletes, to try and answer the question of predicting talent I suppose in essence, so that was one side of it, so the pattern recognition is trying to identify this pattern that differentiated between these two groups and then the other side of it after that we're able to and Dior Anderson used the first author on this paper, he used the mastermind behind this bit, he used odd ratios and they used the line in the medical field really and in short it's quite a nice metric to assess the likelihood of an athlete attaining elite status based on particular variables or attributes and it's quite a nice, it gives quite a nice applied finding for coaches because it will tell you so for example it represents the odds of an outcome given the exposure to a particular condition, so for example one of the things that we found was that an athlete might be that we nine times more likely to reach that elite status if they're doing 30 minutes of flexibility training a week by age 14, so it's a really nice simple applied finding for coaches so that they can actually embed the findings to improve their pathway, sometimes in science we miss that, the findings are not always accessible to coaches, so the odds ratios was quite a nice way to give that a bit of meaning in terms of the for coaches, so what do we need to do with this data, so that worked, that worked really well. The first phase was machine learning and the outcome of this phase was you've got six attributes that were predictive with 86% of accuracy, exactly, what the difference is between sub-elite and elite athletes, and now what had an interface too? So in the phase two, and I'll just mention those those six, so we had to wait, yeah this is the interesting bit, so the amount of weight lifting training they're done by the age of 12, a really interesting one was the flexibility training, so the elite athletes, the better athletes were starting flexibility training a bit earlier, by the age of 14 they were doing at least half an hour of flexibility training a week, and then the elite athletes, the better athletes, they were doing some sort of anxiety-specific practice by age 15 as well, and then and then explain what it is. Yeah so basically, and you might have come across representative practice design, we talk about specificity of practice as well, depending on which theoretical underpinnings you have, but essentially the best practice is the practice conditions that replicate that of competition, there's lots of literature which shows the benefits of practicing a bit of stress, at least some sort of psychological stress in terms of preparing for future competition, and then also in terms of making sure your practice is representative the competition environment as well, if we only ever get put on the psychological stress when we're under the platform, then performance is going to suffer, so they were somehow they were trying to replicate any any way of younger athletes can replicate some of the psychological stress in their practice, and that didn't really well, and that might be just things like simulating competition, simulating that competition environment in the practice session, things like that, maybe some sort of consequences, anything like that, just to simulate a bit of psychological stress as well, and then the other one which was an interesting conversation with the coaches was whole practice, so a lot of coaches are very keen to break down the clean and jerk, it's got this quite distinctive separate movement, so but actually, especially the older age groups, they still needed to be doing that whole practice as well of the clean and jerk, and that links as well with your representative practice design literature as well, and then the finest one, the final one was about international representation levels, so essentially I think it's just really important that athletes are experiencing competitions early, and then what the second stage of the stage of the research, I said we've got these odds ratios, which gives you the odds of an outcome given the exposure to a particular condition, so they just put that into nice terminology for coaches, so they could see what that meant, so for example, if an athlete went to at least a continental youth championship representing Wales by by 19, then they're sort of from 17 times more likely to exactly incredible, so it's just making sure that weightlifting Wales, they're really trying to make sure athletes are exposed to competition early, and they'll send athletes to that competition when they're they are young and they're not they're not necessarily going to medal, but they're going to get that that competition experience, so they're really sort of future future thinking, looking ahead, even though they might not medal at that event, they're just planning for the future, so just puts that into nice nice terminology, we talked about the flexibility, and then you can look at the papers for the the other odds ratios, we've got if you want to know more, we could go one by one and briefly say what is the likely related to each one of them, because I think this is very practical, so if someone feels they will be like youth competition, this is crucial, so they it's it's a lot of aspects go to send and youth athlete to international competition, it's it's an adventure, and yeah exactly yeah, parents have to agree school like this, it's money, it's money as well, especially to the location of some of these competitions, yeah, but just a few times, it's it's way easier choice than saying oh it's probably important, if it's 70 times the 17 times more likely to go to the elite level to get to the elite level in the future, because they went to the competition when they were young, international competition, that that's that changes how much effort should be put into sending these athletes to the competition, without a doubt, you know, it's you know it costs a lot of money to get them you know sometimes they're traveling all over the world so it costs a lot of money, so but yeah it's worth and it's worth you know I think it's important that you don't just throw them in the deep end and send them off to a competition like that but they need to be supported and they need to be supported in terms of what the expectations are for them as well you know especially a young you know if they're competing at a young age and they're young within their age group as well, it might be they're a bit light in their body category as well, but it's that experience it's just making sure that the athletes are brought into that and on board with it that no you might not be going this time to to med it all but it's about the experience and just soaking up that experience at a young age because that's gonna be a bit of a game changer down the line and then and then some of the other ones that we had so we talked about the flexibility so nearly nine times more likely to make it if they're doing just half an hour of flexibility training a week age 14 so it's not you know it's not a ridiculous amount it's sensible it involves a lot of injury prevention as well and it's not you know it's not by any means unachievable but coaches need to be bought in coaches and athletes need to be bought into that as well and it's so you know it's something that they can start as they start doing it at least you know by sort of 12 years old you just build it into your practice habits don't you and so you're not unachievable at all and then we've talked about competition so in terms of these we talked a little bit about whole practice of the clean and jerk so they were the rate times more likely to make it if they were doing over about if about a fifth of their training so again it's not it's not unachievable but about a fifth of the training they're doing needs to be of the of the the clean and jerk as a whole not just breaking it down into its constituent parts you know you see a lot of athletes just doing their sort of half cleans cleans just the jerk independently it's important that they're also doing that movement as a whole as well and coaches were quite within the pathway there were some really interesting discussions because I don't always agree on these things and and one of the the performance director had been trying to get some of the national team coaches to do a bit more whole practice so this gave them some really nice evidence to support that as opposed to just saying you know we think you should be doing this it was a bit more grounded in in in science which was nice so that was that was one of the more exciting takeaways and then in terms of anxiety specific practice you'll see in the paper that we've got we've actually got two measures of that so one of the I think from an applied point of view Alex you would probably don't need to worry too much about that I think you just take the applied take-home message which is that you need to be building in some sort of psychological stress into practice as long as that's sort of matched with with support as well so we we've got there we've got something about the actual hours and then we've got something about proportions of overall practice as well so you can see their athletes were when nine times or eight and a half times more likely to reach that elite status if they were doing a certain amount of hours of anxiety specific training and in terms of proportions that looked like about 10 so the reason we've got both of those measures in there is just that you know it might be that if you get up just a proportion now in terms of nine percent what does that look like in terms of their actual hour is that I guess that could be skewed if they're not doing many hours so just it enables us to look at that a little closer but as I said from applied point of view it's just really important that the coaches and athletes are building in some sort of psychological pressure training I suppose from sort of at least the age of 15 or more so once they've specialized in the sport we know that weight lifting is a it's quite a high stress sport psychologically when you're on the when you're on the platform you're lifting the you know you're lifting in front of a big crowd it's just you you can't get away from that so we need to make sure that athletes are prepared to deal with that psychological pressure but also support it to be able to deal with that as well you can't just go and throw in a whole load of pressure training into practice without making sure athletes are supported so if you're thinking about if you're a coach or an athlete thinking about okay well what does that actually look like in practice how do I go about doing that it might be just simple things like just replicating trying to replicate the competition environment a little bit in practice like you're never going to replicate it to the extent of you know the Commonwealth games are a big competition but just simple things like how often in your practice are you literally doing you know warming up doing your preparation and then just doing your three snatches and your three clean jerks you know you might be able to do that with a training partner you might be able to do that with a group of you in the gym you could do that on you know there's no reason why you can't do that on your own as well set some some targets if you want to step take it a step further you might put some some consequences on that as well if you don't hit your targets so you can be quite innovative about how you go about that and you know have those conversations with with other people in a coach but just some sort it might be sort of kit washing that's another typical one is as well but just some sort of inducing some sort of psychological pressure into into practice as well and we see you know if you watch the Commonwealth games and Birmingham this summer then so it's quite stressful to watch like there's so many instances where where athletes have sort of missed their first two lifts potentially either on the while seeing worse on the snatch because then you're at risk at bombing out of the whole competition and that happened a few times but you know then it doesn't get more pressure than that in terms of that one lift you make the lift or you know if you don't make the lift you bomb out of the whole competition you know what you've been training for for for years and it all comes down to one lift and there are some there were some incredible sort of clutch performances when athletes would would make that lift but there was also some incidents where athletes would would bomb out as well in those you know it wasn't even a way that for them that was particularly heavily heavy it's just that psychological impact of any preparations you can do to get ready for for that then and the better and you know as we show you there from a from a young age as well from sort of 15 15 onwards okay so let's anxiety specific practice one more attribute to discuss is although weightlifting related practice and could you define how it was defining the study so we have a plan. Yeah so in the study we looked at we also looked at you know other sports that the athletes were were doing so when they were doing you know football cross country whatever it is but but this this practice was specifically in terms of sort of what they did in the gym so it might have been there um bar works or anything in terms of the Olympic lifts naturally in jerk it might have been some sort of accessory works or anything you know you know might just be some some squats or shoulder presses whatever they were doing in in terms of weight training in in the gym and then any that included any sort of flexibility mobility work as well so any work they did in the gym that didn't include your your other sports so your football your basketball whatever you know whatever else it was just the sort of the the weightlifting specific weightlifting related training so and what we saw with that is that you know from from a young age so from 11 12 onwards the athletes athletes were six times more likely to make it to a least status if by 11 12 they're already doing sort of an hour an hour and a half um to training in that sport and you know in in in the scientific literature there's there's lots of um literature about the importance of early sampling in terms of other sports and being cautious of um early specialization but what we see here is it's important not necessarily to specialize too early but you need to engage in the sport early engage in some sort of strength training early as well and then for you know for those athletes that that don't go on to make it or reach that elite level or maybe you know maybe jump to other sports then a set them set them up well in terms of those real sort of fundamental movement skills in terms of moving well and an injury prevention so set them up set them up well for for other sports and also just generally in terms of moving well in in in life which is which you know which is really important it's not just about the athletes that go on to make it to to elite status. What coaches should take out of it why it's important and what would be the main message for coaches and athletes? Yeah brilliant so it's in terms of the main message like coaches when they look at this data they're always very keen to to use this in terms of their talent identification protocols um so you know as with any sport weight weight lifting gets limited amount of funding and they you know they need to use that that money strategically um in terms of why athletes are funded and and whatnot so our advice would be to to not use that as an identification tool but use it as a development tool so in terms of though and you know that goes for the for the athlete but also the wider pathway as well so what can what can coaches be building into the pathway from a young age in terms of the type of training and it's also important that the coaches look at the pathways a whole we can't look at development and performance they're not mutually exclusive you know sometimes coaches look at them as almost separate ends of the pathway that operate independently of each other but they you know they don't what you do at a young age you know we're seeing here what you're doing at the age of 10 onwards even even sometimes younger is really influencing you know you know future senior level performance so you need to look at the pathway holistically and weightlifting is a real culprit as well in their talent ID they do a lot of the anthropometric and physiological a lot of anthropometric measures in in in terms of their protocols so it's maybe a step in a way to to look at talent identification development a little bit more holistically so you also need to look at the what practice looks like as well and then and then some of the psychological elements which haven't been focused on in this study but but we have done with weightlifting that this also really important so it's not just about limb length and and and height it's it's much more much more talent it's much more multifaceted than that you know expertise development begins young so we need to be building in that that competition experience young and supporting athletes with the it's not just throwing them in the deep end of competition but supporting them to deal with the pressure flexibility training begins with young and then from a coaching point of view it's just being a bit cautious coaches are always really keen to keen to break down the the clean and jerk especially but but the snatch as well in terms of its constituent parts so you know in terms of the half clean squats in terms of the jerk on its own but it's also remembering to make sure that at least sort of 20% of practice is doing the whole movement as well and we have some really interesting conversations with with the weightlifting coaching team because the the performance director was actually quite keen to implement a lot more sort of whole practice into into training but some some coaches were a bit cautious of doing that but this the study has just given them the data to be able to support that as well so the coaches aren't forget especially at the senior levels to be building in that that whole practice as well and it just you know links with the representative practice design that we talked about earlier in the conversation in terms of making sure that practice environment is matched to that of of competition so hopefully this will just allow coaches to you know invest their funding a bit more strategically and ensure that pathways are offering optimal development opportunities for for athletes well it looks like only big weightlifting practice but strength and weightlifting practice in general it's a good base for any sport and good base for life so it will not be wasted whatever will be invested in these young athletes and it's quite common for athletes to you know to jump across to other sports and you know you know we see we see that a lot and just in terms of teaching them those fundamental movement skills to move move well it's so important you know athlete weightlifting sometimes gets a bit of a bad reputation about you know people are worried that with young people it's going to stunt their stunt their bone growth and we see it here all sorts of rubbish which we know in the science is just not no accurate now so yeah without a doubt it's not just about those that that make it is you know it gives athletes a solid base for for moving into other sports as well or just you know to just for life so usually I make for the others and for everyone to enjoy also the end infographic of a study so just a visual representation what the paper is talking about and I try to make them in the color that the others will enjoy so I wanted to ask you what is your favorite color got to be blue color of the sea okay noted so that kind of paper will be in blue okay a last question where people can find you they want to ask question or just connect or follow your work where where they should find you oh yes great well first I suppose it's important to say this was a collaborative project with with weightlifting whales funded by Kes and then with co-authors Dior Anderson and Gavin Gavin Lawrence as well so I think you know you should have on the paper I think Dior was the corresponding author actually no I think I was actually so my email will be on that paper because I was the corresponding author and then on Twitch which is a nice way to come get in touch as well so that got Walter Vicki and then you should also be able to find Dior Anderson on Twitter and then Gavin Lawrence I think he sports like Gavin so you can find the other authors on on Twitter as well and just reach out to them but yeah Twitter or email is absolutely fine thank you so much Vicki I had some technical difficulties and you stood by so thank you so so much for your time today and your knowledge thank you really that's great thank you for thank you for inviting me You You