Since December I have been staring at the blog without much time to write. It is amazing how fast time flies by. It’s been busy time at work at the Aspire Academy. We are completing a move to a brand new facility which will be unveiled soon (it is pretty impressive by the way!) while carrying on with day to day activities to support the development of our young athletes. Results have been pretty impressive as we already have 5 athletes qualified for the World Junior Athletics Championships this summer and few hopefully to come, some have also won Asian Championships medals last night and things are going really well there. Our new Fencing programme is showing signs of improvement with some great placings and podiums in international competitions. Table Tennis and Squash continue to produce credible international performances and we now have some interesting athletes in Motor Sports and Shooting/Triathlon. Finally, our graduates are doing incredibly well showing that Aspire legacy is strong.

It’s been busy also completing some research projects and trying to get them published. A productive few months, but I have to say the whole publishing process is now starting to get on my nerves and I am not sure I still have the energy to endure such process when the reviews received show lack of understanding…but that’s probably a topic for another post.

One of the articles I am mostly proud of is this one on the Video Analysis of Injuries at the Handball World Championships played in Qatar 2015. This work is a true example of international collaboration with a lot of people involved in the project and an outcome which challenges the need to review refereeing in a sport in order to reduce the injury outcomes. This project is also one of the many published and led from Qatar which were all part of the Aspire Zone efforts during the World Championships in 2015 to do more work to enhance handball knowledge. New information and knowledge was in fact generated with regards to injuries, performance demands, goalkeepers performances and soon on passing/shoulder load. It is a long process to get data published and available but still all this work is a legacy for the Handball community to enhance our understanding of how to prepare players. I have further contributed to sharing more information about my beloved sport writing a chapter for the last book edited by Dr Anthony Turner on Strength and Conditioning.

The collaboration with my bioengineering colleagues in Tubingen to understand more about the implications of using vibration combined to exercise continues with a recently published work on an experiment conducted a couple of years ago on upper body vibration and H-reflex lead by Dr. Federica Sammali suggesting that fatigue mechanisms with vibration exercise may be different than typical resistance exercise. And finally this work from our unit reporting the typical variations in hematological parameters in adolescent athletes.

There are more papers currently under review and some about to be submitted which will hopefully see the light in the next few months on: Table Tennis and Squash performance, training load in adolescent athletes, new methods to assess training load and performance modelling and some work on Vitamin D. If the review process is not incredibly painful, they should become available this year.

Sporting season is in full swing, so time is even less, but every day is a chance to learn something new and help our coaching community in supporting the athletes to achieve their dreams.

In the sporting World, many things have been debated in the last few months. Doping stories triggered by the wonderful documentary Icarus (if you have not seen it yet, do so on Netflix) are continuing and hopefully some actions will be taken soon and everyone will get more clarity about some recent episodes.

The last aspect I will briefly touch on is expertise. I am not sure where the sports industry is going at the moment. The internet has clearly facilitated our way to access and share knowledge, however it has also generated a lot of confusion. I share the same worry many of my colleagues have.

The concept of “expert” seems nearly lost, especially when it comes to nutrition. Everyone eats – but does that make everyone an expert on nutrition? Would you take cardiac surgery advice from someone who did not go to med school? Be weary of self-proclaimed nutrition “experts”.

— Trent Stellingwerff (@TStellingwerff) April 3, 2018

Where’s the sports science in it? Can’t see anything evidence based. The sadness is sport enabling fake science https://t.co/k4oNuSMcaV

— Louise Burke (@LouiseMBurke) April 22, 2017

Few years ago (showing grey hair here), it was important to have credentials before applying for jobs and/or having the right/possibility to speak about topics. Credentials in the World of science refer to academic degrees and publications and in the World of Sport in a combination of the above + experience. I see now a lot of individuals discussing/presenting/debating/writing books on aspects they have no expertise/experience on. There is also a proliferation of self-proclaimed experts offering advice/consultancies and running “educational” activities. I will write more about “expertise” in another post, but my feeling is that our profession is in need of help.

What is your view?