There’s an old saying about career-building that is ostensibly about the power of projection and self-actualization:
“Dress for the job you want.”
And it makes a certain amount of sense. Whatever the occupation you aspire to hold, start by inhabiting the idea of it. More than just an affectation or a trick made to influence the opinions of those around you, it’s a way to begin feeling the part. In this sense, the “dressing” approach has as much to do with preparation and muscle memory.
It’s a concept that arguably can have plenty of applications: tasks, daily routines and hobbies for which a level of mastery can be achieved through volume of repetition and consistent practice. It could be typing or crocheting or pilates. Start small and slow. Ramp up over time – often over countless hours of activity – until the proper neural pathways are formed and the physical infrastructure is built to perform with excellence.
If this sounds familiar to performance practitioners, that’s because it should. Obviously, rehabilitating and training athletes is considerably more complex than, say, picking out the right outfit. But in the same way that a carpenter doesn’t wear the same clothes to work as an accountant, a goalkeeper shouldn’t be trained the same as a striker, nor a veteran like a young athlete. There’s a term for it in the performance space – position-specific training – and it’s almost certain that you’re already adhering to it.
Unlearning bad training habits
If we’ve learned nothing else over the past several decades about performance training best practices, it is 1) the importance of technology and 2) the need to specialize programs based on the athlete. But it’s important to note that the latter didn’t happen without the former.
For decades, most performance-training conventions were based on junk science and wild assumptions. Weight training was once thought to make athletes stiff and slow. For ages, the primary approach to injury prevention was static stretches – which, as it turned out, may have done as much harm as good. In the same vein, vague observations were passed on as vocational expertise. Consider the high school football coach who demands that his offensive linemen beat a prescribed time in a mile run. This makes as much sense as putting a marathoner through tackling drills. Dress for the job you want.
We eventually learned this, of course, through a different type of observational practice. Modern technology, such as Sportlight’s AI-driven movement-tracking and processing system, allows for the collection of dynamic and accurate kinetic data, as well as the ability to draw insights from those findings. With today’s tools, practitioners, coaches, teams and even the players themselves are able to better understand the capabilities of their bodies and what will be required to prepare them for the demands of their jobs.
Says sports scientist Bill Styles, the lead first-team strength and conditioning coach at Southampton FC: “With something like Sportlight, we always want to link it back to what the player is going to need to be able to do. So, what are the demands of this sport, this training session, for this elite competition?”
The importance of positional specificity
Pick a sport. In basketball, for example, the ideal physical makeup and athletic capabilities of a player vary from position to position. There is variation within those silos, and outliers, as well as cases of overlap across more than one of those silos. But, generally speaking, the laws of physics tend to dictate certain parameters. Frontcourt players – who are valued for their rebounding, shot-blocking and ability to muscle themselves near the rim and maneuver vertically – often fall in the upper percentiles of height, body mass and strength. Backcourt players – who rely more on shooting and driving ability – tend to be faster, quicker and more agile in a horizontal plane. The variation in lever lengths and gravitational and directional forces on these athletes’ bodies is pronounced.
As practitioners know, these differences matter. And body type and positional demands are just the start. They don’t account for age, injury history and current loads (or expectation for the future). But teams now have the ability to track these differences, store the data and learn – through the advantage of laser-detected accuracy and AI-aided processing – the best practices for position- and player-specific program-building.
“Data coming from something like Sportlight can really give us that – and then break it down into the most intense periods or, say, compare it to the typical profile of 10 players at the player’s position in the Premier League,” Styles says. “What are we benchmarking this player against? There's so much information that can help guide us towards where we need to go.”
Dress for the job you want. Train your players for the role they’ll fill. Call it what you want. But with the help of the latest in movement-tracking technology, practitioners can now identify and quantify player performance data with more accuracy and facility than ever to form insights that help keep more athletes on the field for longer, while also helping to elevate their performance to meet the needs of their positional demands.
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