Intro to the Science of Maximal Athletic Development: A practical guide to applied sport science for coaches & athletes

What is it? Why am I writing it? Who am I writing it for?

Canberra mornings are FFFFFreezing….

I still remember that morning like it was yesterday, even though thirty years have passed. I was fortunate to secure a practicum through my Sports Science Masters program with the National Swimming Team at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra. I had just finished my early morning swim when the head coach came up to me and said, “Alan, the Sports Science team are going to be doing VO2 testing on the swimmers today, I need you to head over & help them push the met-cart back.”

So, I got changed as quickly as I could and consulted my trusty map (which I still have, pictured above) as I headed out the door of the aquatic complex into the frosty air. Fortunately, as you can see from the map, I didn’t have far to walk.

The sports science complex was under this massive, beautiful, iconic dome &, as you might expect, had everything that a 1990’s sports scientist could possibly desire. One of the things that it had was a portable metabolic cart that I would come to find out would be used to regularly test the swimmers as they swam key test sets. For an ex-swimmer and sports science geek, this was truly a paradise and I reflected on that every time I walked that path, lugging one piece of equipment or the next, during the time that I was there.

And I walked that path with top sport scientists, with top coaches, many, many times during my stay there. The path connecting the two departments was representative of a larger, beautiful, symbiotic process…

The coaches provided the program, the swimmers did the program, the sports scientists tested the effects of the program, then the coaches altered the next phase of the program based on the feedback from the sports scientists! Simple. Effective. Olympic champion creating…

The world’s best sports scientists only a hundred yards away from the best coaches in the world - regularly coming together to work towards a common goal - the maximal development of the swimmers. That narrow, cold, path of a hundred yards or so that linked the two. That was the magic of the A.I.S.

And, it’s a magic that has stayed with me through the years. Something that I have always sought to replicate. At times, despite not having the full extent of the resources of the A.I.S. I’ve come close..

For example, in the early 2000’s, through a partnership with Gordo Byrn, we were able to set up a physiology lab in the heart of the endurance mecca of Boulder, Colorado. We were able to regularly test all manner of endurance athletes, from novices to some of the best in the World to see, on a physiological level, the effects that the training was having. In a similar vein to my time at the A.I.S. Coach and physiologist were on the same page, in the same room, sometimes, the same person.

Unfortunately, this situation is still incredibly rare and the link between elite sports science and elite sports coaching is far wider than a mere hundred yards in the majority of training programs and the majority of countries. Frankly, in most cases it’s an impassable chasm! At all levels, coaches are doing their thing, while scientists are doing theirs and there is an all too unfortunate lack of communication (& in many cases, respect) between the two.

Despite the advances in sports science, there is still a dire shortage of practical research concerning what happens over long periods of time, in the real world, with real athletes…

Athletes are devoting large portions of their time, large portions of their life, to training without monitoring, on a clear, concrete, quantifiable level whether the training is working, whether all of that time is doing anything!

That is why I’m writing this book.

My aim is to walk that path between the pool (the track, the velodrome, the weights room) and the sports science complex with you, dear reader, and explain clearly, practically, quantifiably just how you can implement effective monitoring to ensure that the training that you are doing is actually working &, just as importantly, what changes you can make to the training if and when it is not.

Along the way, I will provide case studies and examples of the myriad of mistakes that I have made and the lessons that I have learned as a lifetime sports scientist and coach so that you can avoid them in your own journey.

Whether you are a coach, a self-coached athlete, whether you are a beginner or a professional, we all share a common goal in that the training has to work. One might argue that, for the ‘time crunched’ this is even more true. The training must be focused on those things that offer the most physiological return & in order to determine that, we must first know how to properly assess it.

That is my goal with this book, to teach you the practical science behind athlete monitoring and individualizing the training to ensure your own personal, maximal athletic development for the time that you have.

I hope you’ll join me.