2013 Nike SPARQ Performance Summit

Thanks to Patrick, Keith and Charlie, I recently had the privilege to attend the SPARQ summit in Portland, Oregon.

This summit of "discovery" and "passing knowledge" was one of learning, sharing, building and networking and included some heavy-hitter presenters from around the globe. In addition, interspersed between the presentations included several exciting Nike-led presentations including the FuelBand, Designed to Move, etc.

While the days of having the time, energy and patience to provide full and detailed reports are long gone, here are highlights of some of my brain-engaging moments throughout the two days.

From Gabriele Wulf:

• Through an explanation of the Self-Invoking Triggering Hypothesis, Dr. Wulf mentioned that internal cueing leads to self-regulatory processes, whereby involvement of the medial prefrontal cortex is engaged. She mentioned that this provides a greater opportunity for "micro-choking".
• For me, my attention must have been diverted by a squirrel since from my understanding, self-regulation is often a necessity for long-term motor learning - think deliberate practice.
• I can understand from a research standpoint that cognitive processing may produce poorer short term results, but much like the differences between blocked, serial and random practice, I think our understanding must go beyond the simple dichotomy of internal vs external and include more variables such as context, individual, specific skills, etc.
• Lesson: perhaps I misunderstood Dr. Wulf!

From Michael Gervais:

• "Choking" was described as the inability to access one's skillset.
• Athletes should adopt a motto whereby "events are opportunities to explore". Doing so will be contrary to threat-based mottos and likely will lead to less likelihood of choking.
• His recommendation was that we need to help our athletes learn the difference between, and be aware of, positive and negative mindsets, and what - specific to them - does a positive mind look like (i.e. swag, confidence, technical thinking). Because the more an athlete adopts a positive mindset, the more he/she will move into the "no mind" (think autopilot, think Michael Jordan).

From Aaron Coutts:

• Much of Aaron's talk surrounded the notion of the athletes' response to the training dose. That the response is comprised of the easily measured (in the short term) fatigue, and (the difficult to immediately see) fitness...the difference between the two being performance.
• That Fitness minus Fatigue equals performance and that we really need to understand what (training) was implemented and how exactly did the athlete respond.
• One key recommendation he gave: look for non-typical responses!

​From Henk Kraaijenhof: 

• If you're familiar with Henk's blog, you wouldn't be surprised to hear that his presentation was one that was exciting, light-hearted, and principle based.
• "I learned more from my athlete than she learned from me" - a profound statement that can only be made by one who cares about his athletes, about what he does, and about continually learning.
• "Evidence-based can be a limitation for innovation" - he expands on this further in some of his recent blog posts which I'll link below.
• On monitoring - only measure what you don't know and only measure that which you think you will actually act upon. This is no different from his well known quote, "train only as much as necessary, not as much as possible". *Substitute "train" for "monitor" and you'll be in a good spot in this age of athlete monitoring.
• His focus when monitoring is on the dynamics of interventions. That he's not so much interested in the numbers per se, but in the responses (adaptation) of the stress and dose placed upon the athlete... be it a workout, a therapy session, etc. *Personally, I'm going to take this and run with it.
• His recent blog posts on "Ten Basic Dichotomies" - part 1, part 2, part 3. Enjoy!

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