Benchmarking: or, Charting Your Progress
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Vertical jump testing is a lot of fun.
The Dartmouth men have an arrangement with the River Valley Club near Hanover; last Wednesday was our first session there.
After a good, dynamic warm-up (which your team should be doing, if it’s still static stretching), we met the trainer we’d be working with.
First thing he did with us? Took vertical and long jumps (best out of 3), and tested pull-ups (max reps) and push-ups (max reps in 60 seconds).
We also learned how to do a few exercises that we’ll be performing for the next 10 weeks or so.
What we didn’t do, in this first session of the season, was dive right in and get to work. Hard work IS important–the team has been busting their butts over winter break to come into our long winter training with a good base–but just as important as working hard is being able to track progress. What good is weeks and weeks of training, (even if you improve your lifts or what-have-you), if it doesn’t translate to increased explosiveness on the field?
Obviously these measures are not the sole indicators of athletic progress. Put some thought into what your goals are (do you want to jump higher? Have better endurance?), and make sure you’re keeping track with appropriate tests, keeping in mind what tools you have access to (you might not be able to test vertical precisely, for instance, but do have a stopwatch to time your shuttle run).
Re-test as you go. You’ll likely find that as you break your body down more from training, your scores will diminish; however, with adequate recovery, you should see significant improvement when go-time comes.
This isn’t just fitness wisdom. Part of any good goal-setting process is ensuring that your goals (or the means to reach it) are measurable. Part of what I’m attempting to do this year, in all walks of life, is to be better at keeping data on my life, from the time I spend working (and how I structure it) to how often I’m taking initiative and engaging people more, both of which are big goals for me in this new year.
As you know, CrossFit has some neat timed workouts that serve as good barometers.
Curious how you plan to come up with metrics to measure engagement & other ‘soft’ skills…
I’ve always thought that developing something akin to a Sparq Rating (http://www.sparqtraining.com/sparqulator/) for Ultimate would be a good idea. Maybe a list like so:
Vert Leap (20 pts)
40-yard dash (20 pts)
20-yard shuttle (20 pts)
Throwing consistency flick (10 pts)
Throwing consistency backhand (10 pts)
Max. Flick distance w/mark (10 pts)
Max. Backhand distance w/mark (10 pts)
Total: 100 pts
Seigs,
I’m not 100% sure which Crossfit workouts it’ll be just yet, but one day a week in the program explicitly calls for Crossfit, so we’ll hopefully repeat the same workouts a few times over the next few months so people can chart their progress.
Even the track workouts are incorporating more of a Crossfit-inspired approach, with some rounds of squats or “plyos” between sprints and less rest overall (there’s still some of the traditional run-200m-rest cycle, too). I’m excited to see how the guys deal with it, and especially how they’re running on the field come Spring.
As for charting my “soft” skills, I haven’t developed a metric for it just yet, as I’m focusing more on getting the “hard” data down first–things like study time. I plan to try something to the effect of establishing a daily minimum for starting conversation and noting when I do take the initiative–already, paying more attention to it is making me realize just how many opportunities there are–and taking “engagement” more on a feel sense. If I get to the point where I feel like I’m making some real breakthroughs there, I’ll let you know.
James,
That’s an interesting thought. The one reservation I have with “summary stats” like that, though, is the dilemma of weighting. The sample points you list are pretty arbitrary, and any given system will reflect the individual bias of the tester.
In an ideal world, I could get all this data, and take that along with gameplay data (especially an adjusted plus/minus) and try and design a system/test/rating that best correlates with actual on-field effectiveness.
File that one away in the “someday” folder…for now, my focus is on collecting data over analysis.
I hear you – I keep a few metrics on a daily basis with simple pass (1) and fail (0). Works well for diet, exercise, meditation, and other goals where it’s clear that I either did what I wanted or not. (E.g., I either went the day without eating fried food or didn’t.) I haven’t figured out an equally easy & efficient way to measure goals like “Be a better listener”…But you’re right that attentiveness is always step one…
I think a Sparq tester would argue that their tests have been designed to provide athletic measures directly relating to the sport(s) in question, and have largely eliminated personal bias. I certainly won’t make that argument about my list, but I don’t think it’s beyond the Ultimate community to come up with a generally agreed upon set of variables. While I’m a big fan of Crossfit, I have to think that such a list would be more useful in comparing/evaluating athletes than, say, Fran times.
Furthermore, if you’re testing Ultimate-specific skill sets, you can generate visual representations that can tell you a great deal at a glance (i.e. http://www.mediatinker.com/blog/upload/2008/04/Big5overTime.png). Plotted over the course of a season, that information might be very useful in evaluating a player (or line, or team).
You’re quite right on the “soft skills” though. I would gladly take “plays nice with others” over “hucks 120 yards w/mark” any day.
After my indoor game last night I was thinking on the progress my GPP has made in 3 weeks. And I realized that ultimate itself could be a good tool to track GPP, and work capacity and recovery times. The nature of most ultimate games, where you take well defined cuts
This was the system that I designed for testing that in a game.
Every cut, or cut covered is worth a certain amount of points,
handler cut: 1 point
mid cut: 2 points
Charging the pull: 3 points
Deep cut: 3 points
Deep cut with under cutback: 4 points.
layouts and big jumps add a half a point
For every 20 seconds of down time (turnover, foul, between points) subtract 1 point.
When you come off, rate your physical exhaustion on a scale of 1-10. The goal is to get higher scores, with less exhaustion at the end of the point. Divide by your fatigue rating at the end. Similarly, give a rating at the end of the game to measure overall fatigue.
I think the numbers need to be tweaked, and you’d need a dedicated scorekeeper to measure it, but it would be a form of fitness testing directly applicable to ultimate.
Now that I think of it, a stopwatch and pedometer/calorie counter could do something similar. IE, (Energey expended – time)/Fatigue = fitness level.
Interesting. I agree that charting that would be the hardest part, but hey, if you can keep track of how you’re feeling that well, more power to you.
You of course would want to factor in things like prior training (if you just worked out that morning vs you’ve been off for a week), weather (less of an issue indoors, but I’m thinking heat exhaustion comes in to play), and sleep, as they all have an impact on perceived exhaustion (to say nothing of performance). You can do a lot of that post-hoc though since they don’t really change.
As I recall, Leslie’s done some stuff with charting her caloric expenditure during a day of ultimate. I may be mis-remembering, but I think a weekend’s worth of ultimate added up to over 10,000kcal! You could probably correlate that with your perceived exhaustion as another measure of how “fit” you are (of course, it could just be an indicator of how much you’re eating over the course of a day, too…lots of potential confounds).
@Mackey
I think > 10kcal is a bit high, the most I ever seemed to burn last year was over 3500kcal in one day of Regionals:
http://resrie.blogspot.com/2009/05/85kcals.html
but more commonly it seemed like 5000-7000kcal per week rather than per tournament weekend.
Looking at some old logs in 2008, I recorded about 550-700kcal per game.
Saw this on Rif’s blog–KB swings can burn 20 calories/minute:
http://rifsblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/its-not-like-i-havent-been-saying-this.html
Other interesting ideas would be sports vision training metrics and FMS scores…