Two Coaches & a Coffee

Season 2, Episode 44

• Darren Burgess & Jason Weber • Season 2 • Episode 44

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This week we explore the intriguing intersection of performance and medical roles in sports. Through engaging anecdotes and real-world scenarios, we unpack the delicate balance necessary to keep athletes at their peak while avoiding the pitfalls of working in silos. Learn how valuing people over models enhances collaboration and optimizes athlete care, as demonstrated by pioneering individuals like Jack Inman and Mitchell White who are not afraid to innovate.

Discover the journey of collaboration with renowned pain specialist Lorimer Moseley, who challenged conventional approaches to athlete rehabilitation. By embracing fresh perspectives, we explore how innovative strategies can break entrenched cycles and enhance recovery. Personal stories of professional growth, such as Dr. Jeffrey Boyle’s evolution from a focused physio to a broader performance expert, highlight the profound impact of interdisciplinary collaboration for both athlete outcomes and staff development.

Emotional intelligence takes center stage as we discuss its critical role in effective leadership, even under the pressures of high-stakes environments. Drawing on experiences with notable organizations, we challenge assumptions about leadership credentials and emphasize the importance of experience and mentorship. As we wrap up, we express our gratitude to our listeners and tease future thought-provoking discussions and stories from recent encounters with fascinating individuals.

SpeedSig Intro

Sponsored by SPEEDSIG.com

Jason Weber:

G'day and welcome to Two Coaches and a Coffee. We're back. No more special treatment, no more special shows. We're back to just grassroots, talking about performance with my good friend Darren Burgess. How are you, mate?

Darren Burgess:

Going all right. We're into our second week.

Jason Weber:

I'm late.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, what is it here? It's 6.25 am.

Jason Weber:

It's 8 pm here in London.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, nice mate. Yeah, it's pre-season time in AFL, so it's all going fairly heavy loads that the boys are going through, but no, all going OK. I've got four new staff members integrating, really well, but I think we're going to have to dispense with the 15 to 20 listeners joke because I was at a winery on the weekend the lovely Chalk Hill Winery here in Adelaide.

Jason Weber:

It's one of their new sponsors.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, a gentleman by the name of Tom and his wife. I hope I get her name right. I think it was Bec. She came up absolutely lovely people. Bec said she did sports science and she's now in a far more important position as an emergency medical doctor. And yeah, she said love the podcast. It's great. You've got way more than 20 listeners, so stop with the 20 gags. So that's it, we're done. We're done.

Jason Weber:

You owe me a little out if you say that again.

Darren Burgess:

Okay, all right, I'll be interested laugh if you say that again.

Jason Weber:

Okay, all right, I'll be interested to know how many we have.

Darren Burgess:

We're getting.

Jason Weber:

We're around about, we'll tell listeners. So we're around about. Average weekly is about 600 downloads a week. So I'm not sure what that means, but that's what it is. So we've got more than 20 listeners. That's fantastic. It's good news. I must say. One of my wife's best friend is from Sydney and she's got some sons who are up-and-coming athletes in all sorts of disciplines, but she listens to it as well. She's one of the head emergency nurses over over one of the big hospitals. So yeah, we apparently we appeal to quite a broad cross-section of the community.

Darren Burgess:

We do. And I must give a shout out to Jack. You might, you might be catching up with Jack from Bolton. Well, jack, Inman from Bolton. Oh, jack Inman, yeah, inman. Yeah, I'm doing a Masters in Sports Directorship, as you know, and we're doing an assignment at the moment and, yeah, jack helped me out enormously with it, so, yeah, I spoke to Jack. Well, jack.

Jason Weber:

I messaged Jack today. So it's just while we're on that point I might just make note of when I came up to England in the UK, rather in August, september this year, I put out a post on LinkedIn. I said hey, you know, I'm up here, I'm bringing up SpeedSig, I'm just keen to meet people and talk, to meet people and talk, and Jack was one of the guys who. There's actually a guy named Matt Donnelly who was there, one of their therapists at Bolton, but these were guys who just got on the blower and connected, had a conversation and it's gone from strength to strength.

Jason Weber:

I met another guy, mitchell White, who's first team conditioning and returned to play up at Rangers in Glasgow. Same thing Guy who just took an opportunity and I haven't spoke to Mitchell today and he won't mind me saying this, but we were talking about how SpeedSig can be a bit confronting. It's a new technology, all that. Speed SIG can be a bit confronting, it's a new technology, all that. And he literally I'll be blunt had the balls to take a step and to learn.

Jason Weber:

And I just think kudos to those sort of guys, to Jack Inman and Mitchell White, to those guys who are just willing to get on the phone and have a call. I've actually had a few calls from people who are head of conditioning teams in women's teams and the same thing kudos to people who are just prepared to have a go. I've been very, very impressed with those people and I think, for what I do with Speed Seeker around the world, same in America, the people that are genuine innovators. They're at the front of the, they're just willing to have a look, willing to learn, willing to put themselves out there and not have too much bravado. I think you know, as I said, absolute kudos to those sort of people. I think they're fantastic.

Darren Burgess:

Are they a particular profession? Are they, you know, more, fitness and physios?

Jason Weber:

Mostly strength and performance-orientated sports science. Look, you do get physios along the way. There's Gareth O'Neill, shout-out up to Ulster Rugby, I think is one of those guys. Gareth's a physio. He was at Waratahs for some time. He's now back at Ulster. He's another one of those cats who's just willing to have a look, willing to try, and I think, given what we want to talk about today, which is the performance medical model conundrum, so to speak, is Gareth's one of those guys who I think is fantastic at all. Let's just not blow the lines anymore. We're just practitioners doing different roles in the same continuum. Um, yeah, so I really I rate that, but the topic for today is performance models versus medical models. Now, where do you stand, my friend?

Darren Burgess:

get us out of the blocks oh well, we have discussed this briefly, but, but I don't have a preference because it comes down to the people.

Darren Burgess:

However, there's always a but.

Darren Burgess:

There, I guess my issue with when you know, in some of the models where doctors are running the show because they might be the more senior person, I think that it makes sense in a lot of cases to have a doctor or a medical person, if not in charge then really high up in the organisation, because there's diagnosis and there's communicating that information to agents and those sorts of things.

Darren Burgess:

When you know, I think I imagine an agent would have a more comfortable conversation with the doctor about somebody's torn achilles than they might have performed person. So I can, I can understand that, um, but when it, when it comes to as long as that person has a performance person around them close up, so that are close to them, so that when it comes to the performance of the team which is the most important thing I would hope and the performance of those players, they can lean on the performance person. So obviously I'm sitting on the front fence here big time. Um, I obviously have a bias because I'm a, in that traditional sense, a performance person, but I wouldn't want to label some of the really good um physios and doctors that I've worked with as non-performance people. But uh, yeah, I think you you do get into trouble when you medicalise your program too much, in that it is all about injuries and the efficient treating of injuries rather than the performance of the team, and there are people from all spectrum that can do that.

Jason Weber:

I agree. Listen, man, I think you're absolutely right. I said before conundrum, I think performance versus medical is one of the big problems that we face as an industry, and I think in a collaborative environment I caught up the other day with Tom Lovell and his team at Penrith Panthers Awesome, yeah, nice, awesome. I think they're all together. We were discussing injuries. Everybody was in Awesome. That seems to be great. I've seen plenty of environments and I will throw it out there a little bit. The US tends to be a bit more this way, where you have a very specifically medical doing this, this and that's it, and then when we hand them over, performance can happen and they're two silos that don't really talk to one another. I've seen that go diabolically wrong and as much as this year, an ACL that was handed over that just was not prepared. The medical group gave this player over and this player will probably be a top 15 draft pick this next year in the NFL.

Jason Weber:

But, they handed him over to the performance staff and there was three weeks to camp and they said he's good to go. The performance staff did have speed sig and they were running him and they basically rang me up and said hey man, can we review this athlete? Staff did have speed sig and they were running him and they basically rang me up and said hey man, can we, can we review, uh, this athlete. And I looked at the, I looked the signal and straight away you could see this kid couldn't produce vertical force at all, like and it was a patella, tendon graft, acl. And I said to them listen, you've got to go back and check like, have they gone through all the processes of that we would expect for an ACL? Have they done their hop test, their isometrics, their all those things? And they found that they hadn't so. But they had the authority to say you know, performance team aren't coming near this until we say it's okay and clearly that's a that's a one of the worst bad end of the spectrum type story.

Jason Weber:

But I did have opportunity this year to be involved in some pretty heavy reviews of AFL towards the end of the season this year, so I got my fingers right into the pies of what was going on.

Jason Weber:

There are a number of programs that people are defining as medically orientated, as in we don't train as much as we maybe should because we're getting too many injuries. We're going to just slow down everything. And then there are the teams that are clearly conditioning at what we would call an acceptable amount or a normal amount, maybe even some a little bit over, with a view to achieving certain things. Now, when you get to that point and I've been there where, yeah, you've got a run of injuries absolutely stopping everything is rarely the answer, and particularly when there's certainly one or two teams one in particular I can think of I'm not going to mention, but they have probably been categorized over a number of years as being down that medical model and the team just haven't trained, and that's as simple as we can put it. They've now regressed so far that even with new staff in trying to push the loads up, it's not going as well as they would hope.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, I mean, with all the research around about preparing the body for training, for games through training, it's amazing that you know you almost get that safety of oh, we didn't have an injury in training today, so we're okay.

Jason Weber:

We're okay, but God forbid we get to the game.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, it seems. I don't know. It's an interesting model and I guess it does provide some sort of safety if you go down that path of we've had a lot of injuries. Therefore the training must be wrong.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, but I would posit the idea, darren, that you'd mentioned before doctors Like there's no question. I've worked with some great doctors and they're absolutely irreplaceable a good doctor in your team but, in the same breath, a doctor that is obviously very medically versed but has no idea about the construct of preparing athletes to do what they have to do in elite-level sport is going to be a hindrance To that extent.

Jason Weber:

I will quote another quick story. Again, won't name the team, but the player was dealing with a forced flexion hamstring injury, so a proximal tendon from a contact incident. But this team was instructed by a radiologist to slow their rehab down as there were no signs. We couldn't see improvement in the MRI and I was involved in a review with that and we had some great again gratuitous plug. But we had great speed-seek data to be able to say we can see what's happening in the medical practice in the gym and then we can see what's happening on the field. So we ended up making some modifications to his training.

Jason Weber:

But he trained through and has done very, very well and gone out now N of 1. But if the kid did, if the team were going to take the radiologist's review, he actually said stop the kid training, stop him for a couple of weeks. I was like man, that is the most insane recommendation from a radiologist Again doctor who's clearly very skilled and again, one of my best mates is a radiologist and a savant at it. But how can that model, how can you accept that sort of recommendation?

Darren Burgess:

You take the information on board. Yeah, I think that's where the management over the staff running the club had that obligation to make sure that, um, everyone's appropriately um qualified to do that jobs and you know, to positions. And they've said yeah, yeah, we, you know, we want to speak to you about it. And no, no, we're going down a medical model and that's absolutely fine. I just don't think it should be necessarily labelled as that. I think your point of people is is right. Yeah, you've got the right people, it's it's not.

Jason Weber:

It's not the badge you wear, but it's the experience I know like. Again, if I mention uh gareth o'neill, I think he's a great running physio. He understands it gets it 100 um um guy. I used to work with Greg Mullings for many, many years, I think had he stayed in sport, he did more. He's gone more into his business now, but had he stayed in sport, he was a guy that was capable of overseeing, you know, a broader department.

Jason Weber:

But I think what I'm trying to comment on, that influence that you often get. You know you get the doc that's been there for many years and the physio and some younger conditioning staff in there, but the whole we're just going to stop and let him heal.

Darren Burgess:

Right, yes, mother.

Jason Weber:

Nature needs to do a thing.

Darren Burgess:

It's your healing line we're going to let the tissue heal. I walked into, I'll just say, a club and one of the players had multiple injuries on their ankle. And there was another player that was presenting with clear and obvious, literally within the month of starting at the club, clear and obvious signs of um sort of pain inhibition rather than anything, um, anything structural. And so I got, uh, my good friend and and, uh, one of the smartest people I've ever met in laurama mosley, involved and he came over to where I was and he operates by not by any sort of magic or anything like that he sits down and talks to people about the sources of their pain and where that might be. Anyway, so I got these two players to speak to Lorimer and, over the course of about five or six sessions, and he just has a coffee with him, that's it. I said to Laws, how's it going with, you know, player A who had missed a year with various ankle injuries? And he said well, I've had a look at his information and spoken to him and what I don't understand is that this player seems to have done over 100,000 metres of training in the last year, of which 14,000 is high-speed metres, and he hasn't done any training. There's not an unstable ankle in the world that wouldn't be able to tolerate that. So why hasn't he done any training?

Darren Burgess:

And and I saw, look, I've been there a month, I'm not sure I'll, I'll speak to the people involved and sure enough it was because, no, um, we're just playing it safe. And any presentation of any sort of discomfort was marked as no, can't train, can't train. We need a week or so, we need two weeks, we need three weeks for this person, you know, for this tissue healing to occur. So, yeah, it's just like we're going down by commenting on medical factors when we're not trained medical people, just as if it was a trained medical person talking about performance factors when they're not trained in that area. So I don't want to um, necessarily start a war, jason, um, it was just a really good example. And and um, a really simple question from a clearly an expert in the area, just saying well, how can this person not have trained when their ankle has tolerated a hundred thousand meters of running?

Jason Weber:

my benefit. Mate Lorimer is by profession a what so?

Darren Burgess:

he's trained as a physio, but he's a pain. Pain specialist Pain specialist is what he would call it. He's done all of Australia plus. He got the equivalent in America but refused to accept it because Trump was president at the time. He does a lot of work with Vietnam veterans and chronic pain. He takes on normally about six or seven athletes at a time. He does a lot of work with Vietnam veterans and crying pain. He takes on normally about six or seven athletes at a time, yeah, and does this sort of stuff with them.

Jason Weber:

But by your example, I think what you're showing is the leadership to be able to break the cycle. So clearly. The staff where you were describing were looping right. They're in a loop that you couldn't escape. They're just going backwards and forwards on the same information. Now, the key to problem solving is when you can identify a loop like that, where we're stuck and it's the same thing happening again. We've got to look for different information.

Darren Burgess:

We've got to be looking for something different.

Jason Weber:

And to introduce someone like Lorimer, who has a different perspective. Fresh eyes is good leadership.

Darren Burgess:

Well, I think also the thing that we have to be careful of. Perhaps and fortunately I was at a club with some resources that were able to invest into someone like Lorimer, and also it was a favour from him and I was worried about people coming the perception that, okay, this guy is not a doctor, he can't be telling us what to do, and that's certainly. I've never overruled a doctor in my life. But bring them in somebody who's well-educated and is of similar qualifications, academically, at least academically at least, who's written over I don't know, I think it's 1,500, 1,600 journals on pain and pain response. So then use that person to educate them, because me standing up and saying no, this player can train, he's done 100,000, they'll be like, no, no, I don't understand. You haven't been here the last five years, you know this is what this player is like.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, 100%, and I don't think again. I think I bring up these subjects like medical versus performance not because I think I want to create angst with medical bony stretch, but I think the discussion has to be had to see where you sit Now. I'll talk about very briefly a physio I work with for a long time named Dr Jeffrey Boyle. When I met him he did not like me at all Not one bit.

Jason Weber:

You know how cuddly and friendly I am, but he was you know I'm the big dude coming in this and that at Fremantle. But what happened was he'd been kept in a box for so long that his thinking was so limited to just the practice and the small aspect of rehab that he handled. But as he grew over a number of years with us he became operationally just the grazer, like we could work together seamlessly. He would talk about load and the need to get on the field, which he didn't do back when I originally met him. So I mean, in some regards, it's for sure we talk about people wanting to become high-performance managers and all that. But I think you've got to identify where people can grow and I do think I strongly believe that the need to have information that allows the medical and the performance communities to understand one another is critical.

Jason Weber:

Where we get overlap is good, right. Where we get people being isolationist or we've got this super duper metric from GPS or whatever we use and so you can't have it in medical, or the medical guys are doing, or we're doing, a particular isometric dynamometry and you know you won't understand it. Like, like, really it's about continuum, it's about and so the more we can generate that and get people having those conversations and working together collaboratively to have performance. Guys understand more. Medical be able to walk in a room and look at an MRI and understand what you're looking at, not be a nonce and have to ask what leg is that? Equally, medicals being able to understand the basics, the fundamentals of what we're trying to achieve, so you can work together. Anyway, that's my rant. That's my rant, man. Lucky I didn't have coffee at this later. Al.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, exactly no, it's a solid one. I think it's a good point, I think we're on the same page and hopefully, hopefully, the um the listeners will understand that it's. It's about, uh, maximizing performance, um, yeah, as you know, in getting the best result, and also, um, you know, staff management as well, I think, which is, um, which is underlooked, and, uh, something that we've we've spoken about a little bit in the past in terms of how you go into that, how you, sorry, get qualified in managing staff, which is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, and maybe a discussion how you get qualified.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, a discussion. You know how does a high-performance manager get qualified? I'm going to say real quickly, I don't know that you get or a director of performance, or a vice president of player welfare, or whatever the term is.

Jason Weber:

Yeah, I don't know about quality. I mean, your years in the game are going to. There's no piece of paper or anything like that. But we have talked before about I think if you're in the job now, your responsibility is to help train up your staff. So they're exposing them to meetings, bringing them into conversations where you might say, hey, listen, man, you're just going to sit there and listen, but I'm going to ask you questions afterwards and let's just learn the way things work, because there is going to be times to compromise, there's going to be times to put your foot down. There's going to be time. I mean, I used to always say I will listen to everybody's point of view, but if everybody in the room argues and it's 50-50, I will make a decision and we're going to go with my decision. That's what my job is, but we're going to work it out as a group. So understand the dynamics. To handle that is going to come through being exposed to it and at least formulating an opinion as to how you might handle that.

Jason Weber:

Might be wrong, but you'll only test that in the fire of battle, won't you?

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, I think. Yeah, we're on 33 minutes, so it's a rabbit hole.

Jason Weber:

We won't go down, yeah, but what. I do believe is we're in our sweet spot.

Darren Burgess:

Yeah, it needs to be trained, just like every other skill. It needs to be appropriately trained. And yeah, I'm not sure that just because someone's been in the military or just because somebody's been worked at Manchester City or I should say, liverpool at the moment, or somebody's worked at the New England Patriots, then therefore they are good leadership because they've worked in a successful organisation, or Kansas City Chiefs, or whoever it might be so anyway, discussion for another day.

Jason Weber:

You will Emotional intelligence under fire it for another day, you will Emotional intelligence under fire. How about that one? Nice, I've got some stories around that I've been hanging out with some interesting people the last couple of weeks. We can share that later. Anyway, to our viewers however many there are out there great to have you along for the ride. We will catch you again next week when, hopefully, darren and I can overlap time at some point. But thank you all very much and, darren, great to see you. We'll speak again real soon, thank you.