I was privileged to speak at two conferences this past weekend, to two distinct audiences about HIIT Science. The first was the CSEP conference in Niagara Falls for the Gord Sleivert memorial address; the audience consisting largely of university professors and postgraduate students. The second was to a group of practitioners in Toronto at the RCCSS conference. For the larger CSEP conference, notwithstanding the great honour of giving Gord’s address, I was additionally privileged to have the session chaired by a leader in the science of HIIT, Dr Martin Gibala. Dr Gibala and MacInnis’ mechanistic figure on the metabolic adjustments that occur with HIIT in our muscle cells features in our book and course and provides a reference as to why we adapt with HIIT (Figure 1).
Prior to my talk, Dr Gibala and I discussed the two main aims of HIIT Science – raising awareness of the science of HIIT, but additionally appreciating the importance of context in its application. This, we believe, is our great divide. Such challenges have been spoken on at length by Martin, Steve Ingham and many others. As a case in point, note how Canada’s two national conferences for sport science / exercise physiology (CSEP) and sport performance application (SPIN) occurred at the same time in two separate cities.
Acknowledging this before the talk, Dr Gibala asked me the obvious question: how might we begin to bridge the divide? How could we do a better job of teaching context, building pathways for our semi-pros who desire a career in helping others perform better?
I thought about the question before my talk and added one slide to the end of my presentation, shown here (Figure 2).
Interestingly, the slide provoked more discussion from the CSEP group than anything else from the lecture. The Daniel Kahneman reference thinking fast and thinking slow relates to Aaron Coutts‘ editorial on the importance of being able to work fast and slow within a high performance environment. Both processes can be used to optimize a system’s performance – we all have a role to play, and my points related to what each side could contribute through partnerships. Remember that reference to CSEP and the Canadian government sport performance entities are simply representative organizations. The great divide is a global issue and includes amateur-professional sporting teams in the mix.
Why is this important?
We all have to start somewhere, and those of us drawn to the science of sport performance will, in our experience, often begin as semi-pros. As described by our friend Cesar Meylan, this may actually be an important first step of the pathway for the applied sport scientist, as sport experience (doing) means the practitioner can relate well to the head coach, understand jargon, and apply creativity to the application of the science. In essence, the semi-pro already began a portion of their professional development when they were growing up. They learnt some of that all-important context.
But fast-forward to today, where the twenty- or thirty-something semi-pro needs to evolve. Our background, love of sport, and innate human altruism make us want to not just know more, but use our knowledge and experience to help others. So if one wants to learn how to help others achieve sporting success, what immediately comes to mind? Obviously – go to university to learn how to become a sport performance expert of some kind. These learning institutions promise knowledge and insight into this type of work – knowledge that prepares you.
But move another 4-10 years, and 1-3 degrees later – why is it that we often feel ill-equipped to help an athlete, or any person for that matter, make progress towards their goals? We lack a true understanding of context and there’s been little if any connection of the dots between the science and its application.
Why the divide?
Clearly there’s a divide, but why? To start, most academics in university don’t know context. The teachers are not to blame, but they simply don’t know. Why would they? They’ve never had the experience. Martin and I began there too, and didn’t understand context ourselves until we got our chance to enter the high performance world. This experience bestowed hard lessons, but today allows us the ability to step back and forth across the void as needed, perhaps enabling us the ability to provide something a bit more digestible for everyone; academics and practitioners alike.
But to finish this point, we are today left with two issues on both sides of the divide that keep the worlds separate; we believe that both need addressing:
Figure 1. A schematic representation of how a muscle cell adapts to HIIT (MacInnis & Gibala, 2017).
Figure 2. The great divide.
We all have to start somewhere, and those of us drawn to the science of sport performance will, in our experience, often begin as semi-pros. As described by our friend Cesar Meylan, this may actually be an important first step of the pathway for the applied sport scientist, as sport experience (doing) means the practitioner can relate well to the head coach, understand jargon, and apply creativity to the application of the science. In essence, the semi-pro already began a portion of their professional development when they were growing up. They learnt some of that all-important context.
But fast-forward to today, where the twenty- or thirty-something semi-pro needs to evolve. Our background, love of sport, and innate human altruism make us want to not just know more, but use our knowledge and experience to help others. So if one wants to learn how to help others achieve sporting success, what immediately comes to mind? Obviously – go to university to learn how to become a sport performance expert of some kind. These learning institutions promise knowledge and insight into this type of work – knowledge that prepares you.
But move another 4-10 years, and 1-3 degrees later – why is it that we often feel ill-equipped to help an athlete, or any person for that matter, make progress towards their goals? We lack a true understanding of context and there’s been little if any connection of the dots between the science and its application.
Why the divide?
Clearly there’s a divide, but why? To start, most academics in university don’t know context. The teachers are not to blame, but they simply don’t know. Why would they? They’ve never had the experience. Martin and I began there too, and didn’t understand context ourselves until we got our chance to enter the high performance world. This experience bestowed hard lessons, but today allows us the ability to step back and forth across the void as needed, perhaps enabling us the ability to provide something a bit more digestible for everyone; academics and practitioners alike.
But to finish this point, we are today left with two issues on both sides of the divide that keep the worlds separate; we believe that both need addressing:
- Academic centres currently cannot teach context.
- A workforce in the high performance setting, who understand context, could use a sharpening of their knowledge.
