Stagnation in Sport Performance

At Absolute, it is our belief that there is a lack of development that is occurring in sports performance.

Lack of Development

Stagnation: a stagnant state or condition marked by a lack of flow, movement, or lack of development.

What really stands out from the above definition is “a lack of development”. At Absolute, it is our belief that there is a lack of development that is occurring in sports performance. This is occurring at all levels of sport. Performance is based on the continued development of both the individual and their physical impact on their sport. Meaning, are we doing enough to build the athlete physically to have an effect on their development within sport?

The biggest impediment to the development of any athlete, regardless of sport, is injury – more specifically, injury due to a lack of the athlete being physically prepared for sport due to incomplete and illogical training. It must be understood that the use of any training to cultivate any physical capacity must be done with the intent that the newly acquired capacity can be converted in a skillful manner during the performance of sport-specific skills. It is training with this intent that is the only way out of stagnation.

“Training with intent to acquire new physical capacity that can be converted in a skillful manner is the only way out of stagnation.”

The Stagnation of Tiger Woods

In golf, as in many other sports, there is always debate as to the greatest of all time. Much of it depends on statistical measures. Major Championship wins trumps all in the sport. If this is the lens, then Tiger Woods may not be the GOAT, but there can be no doubt that the most physically dominant and intimidating golfer of all time was and still is the Big Cat.

Tiger’s training during his run of dominance in the early 2000s was legendary and well documented, in that it was hard, it was demanding, and it was unheard of at the time for that type of training to be incorporated within the sport of golf. It is fair to say that Woods’ training during this time has subsequently influenced the training of many of the current top players in the game.

There is no question that the training led to huge performance improvements for Woods that allowed him to hit shots that other golfers simply couldn’t. This wouldn’t be seen clearly looking at driving distance data or ball speed measurements, but it is easily evidenced by his ability to do things that other golfers at the time simply couldn’t, whether that be to hit out of deep rough, carry obstacles on the fly, or to hit low penetrating shots that seemed to carry and then run forever.

Tigers Training Trade-Off

In his autobiography, Woods talked extensively about his training. At its peak, his training would last thirteen hours a day. From grueling miles long runs multiple times per day, to twice daily weightlifting sessions, to many hours spent grinding on the driving range, to his well-documented Navy Seal training. It was all designed to push the envelope and cement Tiger as not only the best golfer on the planet but also the one that worked the hardest. One of his old swing coaches, Hank Haney had this to say about Tiger’s training regimen:

“He knew he was paying a price that not many people would pay, and that gives you an edge mentally,” Haney said. “He walked to the first tee every week knowing he wasn’t going to run across many players who had outworked him.”

This is fantastic for the potential psychological advantage it brings to performance, but the big question is “Was it all worth it?”

Two things must be mentioned: firstly, Tiger does not currently train this way for obvious reasons, injury history and physical limitations being the major one, and secondly, Tiger is still playing at the age of 46. At the time of writing this, he is returning to the game this week at Augusta National to play the Masters Tournament, his first competitive rounds since a horrific car accident 14 months ago left him with a leg so badly injured that it almost needed to be amputated.

Car accident aside, accolades and wins aside, there is also no other golfer who at the top of his game has also missed so much time due to injury. Woods’ injury history is quite extensive. Numerous tendon issues (Achilles, patellar), a torn ACL, as well as a chronic lower back issue that has resulted in two surgeries ending with a spinal fusion of the lower segments of his lumbar spine. In all, these have caused him to miss a significant amount of time away from the game, specifically, at times where had he been able to perform, his accomplishments, especially in the Major Championships may have been even more impressive than they are, and the argument of the GOAT (based on Major wins) would be unanimous within the golfing universe.

Training into Stagnation

Tiger is a great example demonstrating the stagnation of performance and how inadequate or incomplete training can rob an athlete, even the elite ones of significant time away from performance. This may not be evident on the surface, but getting deeper into understanding his physical preparation via training it becomes clear that performance stagnation via incomplete or ineffective training was the norm. More specifically while away from performing, Tiger had to spend much of his training to re-acquire what was lost due to injury instead of training to acquire new capacities that when put in the environment of skill performance would have augmented his performance behaviors.

Tiger had to spend much of his training to re-acquire what was lost due to injury instead of training to acquire new capacities that when put in the environment of skill performance would have augmented his performance behaviors.

Injury = Black Swan

It is not known who directed Tiger’s training at any point during his career. There may have been an architect, however, no names have been written in the public realm. In actuality, it may be that Tiger directed most of his own training considering how small he kept his inner circle. This is an important detail in that having access to quality information from different quality sources allows for the ability to make the best and most appropriate decisions. Information after the fact does us no good as it isn’t actionable, although many accept this as being necessary to our understanding. In Woods’ case this is evident.

His injury history has been discussed at length after the fact and many reasons have been put forth as to why, most of which centered around his skill performance (necessary swing changes), not the physical capacities that allow him to do it. This speculation as to what Woods should have changed to minimize injury without fully understanding the depth of variables that could have been changed is a prominent retrospective bias that is related to the concept of Black Swans.

Injuries that change performance or cause performance stagnation are Black Swan events. By definition, Black Swans are events that are inherently unpredictable, that which is beyond what is normally expected and has potentially severe consequences.

Nassim Taleb has written extensively on the black swan concept. Taleb’s expertise is in finance, and he writes and discusses at length about financial crashes specifically the 2008 crash and other market events and how they are Black Swan events.

Taleb articulates three factors that are associated with Black Swan events. The first was mentioned above: the hindsight bias to always explain the event as if it were actually predictable. The other two are: that the event is so rare that the possibility that it might occur can never be known with any certainty; and the impact of the event with have the potential to be catastrophic to those involved.

One of Taleb’s most insightful thoughts regarding Black Swans, is that because they are unpredictable (as injury is) yet can have such disastrous consequences it is important that we always consider a Black Swan event as a possibility at any time. If this is the case, then it must be planned for accordingly. This is where logical and effective training that considers all relevant factors of physical capacity allows for the mitigation of risk associated with performance and subsequent performance stagnation.

At Absolute: Injury ≠ Black Swan

We at Absolute always expect a Black Swan to occur as this gives us the pathway to then develop the necessary roadmap to minimize the effect of such an event. The injury and subsequent performance stagnation was a Black Swan to Tiger Woods, but would not have been a Black Swan to Absolute.

The roadmap to minimize the effects of a Black Swan would have been to understand that Tiger was far and away the best golfer at this point in time, but also to understand and identify the specific performance demands that must be repetitively met by Tiger from a physical perspective that enabled him to master his sport. At that point in time, a system of training for Tiger should have been established with dual aims:

1. Use training as a mechanism to manage and sustain Tiger’s current level of physical capacity — which was at an all-time sports mastery level.

2. Use specific tissue-focused training to develop and acquire new physical capacity at the tissue level — this type of training would have enabled Tiger to push performance to even higher levels, while simultaneously behaving as a hedge against the volatility of Tiger’s ultra-aggressive play and repetitiveness of the sport over time.

The Devil is in the Details

Next time we will delve into the details of how we here at Absolute utilize training not only as a mechanism to develop and acquire the new physical capacity for sport required to stave off stagnation but also how we utilize tissue-focused training as a hedge against the volatility of sport.