Breaking the Line: The ECNL Podcast
The Elite Clubs National League was founded in 2009 and continues to lead by daring to do things differently, embedded with grit, collaboration and tenacity – all things learned from the beautiful game. The ECNL protects and propels the integrity of the game and everyone it impacts by facilitating the perfect symmetry of excellence and humility, exclusivity and accessibility, freedom and community. We believe that challenging everyone to rise to their best creates game-changers that live well, long after cleats are unlaced. Born out of the belief in a better way. Continued in the ever-evolving pursuit of excellence.
Breaking the Line: The ECNL Podcast
The Power of Sleep: Why Nightly Rest is the Key for Injury Prevention feat Dr. Drew Watson | Ep. 115
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The Breaking the Line team returns with Dr. Drew Watson, a friend of the podcast and the ECNL's Chief Medical Officer.
In March, the ECNL launched the Center for Athlete Health a Performance, a research and education hub designed to identify, develop and share best practices in long-term youth athlete health, development and performance, and spearheaded by Dr. Watson.
Dr. Watson joined Breaking the Line this week to discuss the founding of this Center along with the first two published pieces of research: the ECNL Injury Risk Reduction Program and the relationship between sleep and injuries in elite athletes.
The Breaking the Line crew dives into these topics, discussing the vision for the Center and why it was founded in the first place, the relationship between the ECNL and Dr. Watson's Human Performance Lab, tips for athletes to be at the top of their game and more.
If you have any questions for the Breaking the Line crew, make sure to submit them at https://ecnl.info/BTL-Questions. And as always, make sure to follow the ECNL on all social channels, and don't forget to watch this podcast in video on YouTube!
And if you want to learn more about the ECNL's Center for Athlete Health and Performance, visit theecnl.com/CAHP.
This is the April 2nd edition of Breaking the Line, the ECNL podcast, featuring ECNL President and CEO, christian Labors, and ECNL Vice President and Chief of Staff, doug Bracken. On this week's show, christian and Doug are joined by the ECNL Chief Medical Advisor, dr Drew Watson, to talk about the Center for Athlete Health and Performance and its vision to identify, develop and share best practices in long-term youth athlete development. The three superstars will tackle the ECNL Injury Risk Reduction Program, sleep and injury in athletes, everyday sleep tips, travel sleep tips and how sleep can also help your mental health. That's right. All of that plus Doug Bracken's Brain Buster. And it starts right now with ECNL President and CEO Christian Labors.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much, Dean. Here we are with, as always, Doug Bracken, and then I almost said as always, not quite as always, but Dr Drew Watson.
Speaker 3:He's been on a lot. Yeah, he probably is our highest appearing guest, you would say.
Speaker 2:Every time he comes on, we have this conversation about how many times he's been on.
Speaker 3:So I'm sure that's not getting old. It's true. What does that say about our podcast and our need to have Dr Drew Watson on? We need medical advice a lot Concierge Dr Drew.
Speaker 4:Dr Drew, whatever the reason I'm happy to do it whenever you guys want.
Speaker 3:I've been having this shoulder pain. If you could?
Speaker 4:Yeah, a couple of Zoom consults, why not?
Speaker 3:christian. You're in a different spot here. You're looking very uh, cash, different thing, or you're?
Speaker 2:you're not in san diego right now nope, I'm uh, visiting the in-laws and, uh, my computer has died, so I'm now staring into a phone screen. So you know, I'm total improv right now. The one rule of improv, I've been told, by the way, is you never say no, you just say yes. And so I'm improvving right now with whatever technology tools I have available to me.
Speaker 3:And usually it's really hard. I'm always on Christian when we're at different public things, like the symposium about wearing an ECNL top, you know, with a logo on it. He has it on today, so my coaching is taking hold.
Speaker 2:That is, despite, despite everything.
Speaker 3:Right, that's right. Dr Drew, what's going on? How are things since the last time you were on our lovely podcast?
Speaker 4:I'm doing great. Always nice to see you guys. We're in the throes of kind of spring weather here in Wisconsin, which means like 40 and driving rain, but it does mean that we're on the cusp of maybe eking out into a little bit of decent Midwest summer in the next few months. We just got to suffer through this next little bit.
Speaker 3:Okay, wisconsin's a nice place in the summer.
Speaker 4:I mean you pay for it for like six months, but there's really nowhere better, I don't think. Once you get into July and August, it's just fantastic.
Speaker 2:That's rationalization at its finest, Dr Drew.
Speaker 4:That's right. Everybody in San Diego is like that doesn't make sense. Why don't you just live somewhere where it's sunny every single day?
Speaker 2:12 months. It's awesome. I'm just struck by the difference. In our background I have curtains. In the background, doug has scarves. In the background, dr Drew has a plethora of books.
Speaker 4:They're leather bound.
Speaker 3:Smells like mahogany in here. That shows you what's going on here.
Speaker 4:It would have been like a blurred background at home, but Jacob was like you have to be in your office with a backdrop full of textbooks, so I you know I aim to.
Speaker 2:please Do you have a medical license on the wall or anything that we can see to make sure?
Speaker 4:you're a doctor. I don't actually really remember what's on the wall back there. Most of them are actually like commemorative books from like bikepacking trips with my dad, but there's probably a few academic things back there. They got hung up like 10 years ago and haven't been touched, so I don't actually remember.
Speaker 2:We should send something to Doug, some sort of academic certificate he can put up on his wall that would be great.
Speaker 4:I mean you're welcome to have one of these. They don't get really used, they just sit there.
Speaker 3:I thought that was one of your prefab backgrounds, Drew.
Speaker 4:Yeah, well, as far as you know, it's real, let's put some books in there today.
Speaker 2:Enough of this banter, it's time to get serious here.
Speaker 2:And why we have Dr Drew on the show today? Because we launched a couple of weeks ago the ECNL Center for Athlete Health and Performance, which was our commitment to try and use the size, scope, scale of the league, the various resources, the access to information in the league through the clubs, through all the events. We have to do things in research and aggregation maybe is the right word of information, data studies to identify ways in which we can help improve the athlete health and performance within the league in terms of physical development, in terms of injury risk, in terms of young athlete development and all sorts of different ways. That's probably not nearly sophisticated enough of a description of the center, for which I will turn it over to Dr Drew, who is leading the center, among many, many other things. He has a lot of titles in his email signature now, one of them being director of the ECNL Center. So, drew, I'll turn it over to you to describe sort of the vision of the center and why we have set it up.
Speaker 4:Yeah, thanks. I mean I was thinking about this a lot over the last few months and I touched on this a little bit at the symposium. I actually think this sort of like snowball started for this, maybe like almost 30 years ago. Like I showed that grainy circa 1998 photo of Christian and I in the like closet-sized office we worked in in the back of this, back of this indoor soccer center, and I have these vivid memories from back then of trying to get our hands on information that we could use to sort of not just help teach kids but develop as coaches, and they're just really it was really hard to find right. I mean, granted, this is, you know, we were like on horseback, I think at that point and like using slide rules, but we were mailing away for stuff, asking anybody we could get you know, in touch with. There's so much information it's sort of hard to know what to do with it. You know, if you go Google searching for things, you're just going to find a whole lot of opinions that may or may not be based on good evidence and could lead you astray.
Speaker 4:And I think for me the overarching goal of what we're doing at the center is to try and give people within the league, try and give people within the league meaning coaches, families, players good information that they can use in their sort of day-to-day lives within the league to make decisions about athlete health and performance.
Speaker 4:And so it sort of has two big pieces currently.
Speaker 4:I think the first is that we're trying to identify important topics that people are interested in and are looking for good information around and go out and see whether it exists in a way that's relevant and specific to youth soccer players and if it is, then we sort of bring it together, curate it, turn it into deliverable and actionable information.
Speaker 4:If it doesn't exist, well then we're building out ways to collect the data and generate good evidence ourselves to try and fill in those gaps. And I think what sometimes gets lost in the shuffle around a lot of sports science is that most of the information out there is from adult athletes and you just simply can't translate evidence from 25-year-olds down to 15-year-olds and expect to be able to use it in a way that allows you to make good decisions and accurate predictions about interventions with kids. In the same way, you can't take information from football or basketball and apply it to soccer and expect it to have the intended effect. So what we really are trying to do is give people relevant information that's specific to youth soccer, so that they can use it to help youth soccer athletes. If we take a step back.
Speaker 2:it's fun always to go down memory lane. It's fun always to go down memory lane. I remember I had a binder of all the sessions that were done at Region 2 ODP camp that year, which was like the first foray into how do you design a session and what are different types of sessions for different topics and all that. So you have the technical side, which is the training environment and sort of the more standard coaching you think, which last year we launched the Coach Education Center, powered by the Coach's Voice, to provide some type of ongoing high quality information that is very related to the typical football or soccer side of the sport.
Speaker 2:This part of the sport is specifically about health and performance.
Speaker 2:That is not tied to the type of training activity that you're doing or the best way to intervene as a coach and provide feedback, but on things that are as broad as sleep and what's important and why Injury risk, what increases it, what decreases it, mental health and interventions that can be helpful there for players with anxiety and stress or whatever it may be.
Speaker 2:And then far more and I think some of it, drew, and you said this probably a little bit more cautiously than I am right now, but sometimes it's also just blowing up some myths that are not true, that are kind of accepted as gospel within the sport. I mean one of which, if we go back to the teaching or the footballing side, doug Lemoff would talk about the myth of the different learning styles, which persists across academia and teaching all over the place, that there are different learning styles, which is a complete myth and has been debunked over and over and over, but still is pervasive in people talking about how they quote unquote like to learn. There are similar myths, I think, out there in various aspects of athletic performance. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think I mean, if the internet does nothing else, what it does really well is create echo chambers, and I think those exist everywhere. They're in academia, they're in different sporting contexts, and I think sometimes things will get stated either on the back of some evidence or not, but by someone who's revered, and it just sort of gets repeated and it becomes accepted within a group or a population when in reality the underlying evidence for it isn't particularly good. And if you dig deep you find that it's not actually that strong of a foundation that the belief is built on. And in those cases, I mean there's a lot of motivation to try and identify and rectify that. Because if people are making decisions based on that sort of information, they may very well be making mistakes left and right.
Speaker 4:And I think we're going to be trying some of what we do. We'll be trying to really dig into some of these areas where maybe we overestimate the level of evidence around a certain topic. Others are going to be where there really isn't a lot of information period and we're going to be looking to try and generate it so that we can answer some of the questions that people want to know that don't have a good answer already, so I think it can run that whole sort of spectrum, everything from new information to inform unanswered questions, all the way to trying to understand whether or not the sort of pervasive thoughts around a certain topic are actually true in this context or whether they're just something that people have been saying for a long time.
Speaker 2:I do think it's important that we make it very clear that this is not ECNL doing these studies, doing this data analysis, doing the research. This is Dr Drew, through his lab at the University of Wisconsin, through grants, resources he provides. There is some things we are doing to help that in that process, one of which is actually activating the network of information that we have through events and through clubs, whether it's through surveys or injury reports or other things. But this is not amateur hour of Doug and Christian and a bunch of ECNL people coming up with theories. This is us activating the scale and scope of the ECNL and making it available. We joke a lot about Drew's background, but his very specific expertise in this area, within all the requirements that it takes to get something published, peer-reviewed and sort of approved in a very scientific way, is that an accurate statement, drew?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean, I think this is, at its core, exactly the sort of collaboration that you would want in order to generate meaningful information to youth soccer players that you can use to answer questions that help people make decisions of my lab and scientists and students that are part of that. With the framework that the ECNL has, which is a large and growing group of really high-level youth soccer athletes, it's an extraordinary way to be able to collect information that is relevant directly back to the membership of the league so that you can make decisions around things that are based on evidence specifically from that group that allows you to feel confident that what you do is going to have the expected impact.
Speaker 3:Let's bring this down to that simple level of, based on what you've looked at so far and evidence you've collected, what are two or three of the biggest myths that evidence shows are exactly that.
Speaker 4:Well, the first one that sort of lines up with some of the information that we released as this kind of first installment for the center. I don't know exactly how much of a myth it is, but there's definitely like a cultural push that we're trying to fight back against around sleep. So this is a little bit of a hobby horse of mine. I've been sort of trying as hard as I could to broadcast the benefits of sleep for athletes for years, and one of the initial projects we had within the center was to try and pull together relevant information specifically about the relationship between sleep and injury. There's no shortage of information about the benefits of sleep for a whole host of different outcomes, but just to sort of make it specific to athletes and injury risk, I think within our culture broadly it's getting better, but certainly within certain circles it's still this expectation that sleep is expendable. It's something you do when you're dead. You grind 22 hours a day and sleep a little and that's how you get ahead.
Speaker 4:But I think the reality is that, particularly within athletic context and especially within the context of adolescent athletes, if you try to treat sleep as expendable, it is going to cost you something really significant at the back end.
Speaker 4:It likely is going to undermine things like academic performance. It's going to undermine things like mental health. But specifically, as we tried to portray it within this first bit of information we released through the center, reduced amounts of sleep, both chronically and acutely, have really profound impacts on injury risk. And recognizing that sometimes things like injury risk actually land with young athletes, because it's very close to home, thinking about putting that sort of information into the hands of people that work with young athletes is a way to try and move forward or push back against this idea that it's okay not to sleep very much or enough or well. You can bank it later. Really, we're recognizing more and more and more that there's a very real increased risk of injury when people don't get enough or don't get good enough quality sleep, and so that's kind of pushing back on the grind never stops.
Speaker 2:hustle, culture, all that stuff. Whatever that you know and in your some of your presentations you show how pervasive some of that messaging is, and it's not to undermine the importance of you know. Intentionality and committing to working hard is to say that that doesn't need to exist at the expense of proper sleep, which we can talk about all day long. But I think you hinted at it Young athletes a significant injury is maybe one of the biggest fears that they have. So maybe by exposing this to them and their parents, you may win the battle for sleep a little bit more effectively than when talking about it just as a you know, a way to improve academic performance or something like that. And I think I'll add as well, because you know the center is going to come out with information either you know unique studies that you have done or aggregation of existing data, but some of this stuff has been in process for several years.
Speaker 2:In some regards it's just never been put under this center and under this sort of framework. So some of these things that you're going to be sharing, it's not like the data has just been done and collected in the last two months. It's been done over a long period of time and there's other stuff that will come out six, nine months from now that is currently being analyzed, collected that sort of thing. So this was not an overnight. Hey, let's do this. And here's the first study, or here's the first data points. It's hey, this is something we've been building towards in some ways for many years.
Speaker 4:Absolutely, and I think it sort of testifies to the need for this sort of thing, like we've I mean, I and other people have been generating evidence and publishing academic papers and presenting them at scientific conferences, you know, for the last decade around things that in my mind, are pretty applicable to the youth sports environment, but I guarantee most youth soccer coaches have never heard of any of it, right? So the question is like how do we not only generate this sort of information and answer these questions within an academic setting? As importantly, how do we actually get it into the hands of the people that are interacting with kids so that they can use it to benefit the people we're ultimately trying to help? Because if it just sits around in my office like that doesn't help. Anybody sits around in my office like that doesn't help anybody. So, figuring out ways to deliver actionable and relevant information whether it was done, you know, a year ago or five years ago I think the big goal of this is to try and build that bridge that in my mind, particularly in the youth sports environment, just hasn't existed.
Speaker 2:I'll use the quote and I'll stop Doug for you on this. But Raymond Ferhan used to say academics are great at answering questions.
Speaker 2:Nobody's asking no offense to you and your academic colleagues, but this is and I know it's been one of your real passions is how do you take science and research and data and apply it in a way that actually makes an impact and moves the needle in the real world and is not just a paper that nobody's read in some very long titled academic journal that nobody actually subscribes to except for a few other doctors?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's surprisingly difficult to build that connection because there isn't anything inherent within academia that promotes it right, like we want the work that we do to have an impact out in the real world. But it isn't immediately obvious how you get that information to people that are gonna use it in the way that they interact with young athletes. I mean, I coached for a while so I sort of have that perspective and I've been a parent of young athletes for a bit, so I have that and on some level it's trying to bring together all of those frameworks to try and figure out ways to actually get over this barrier and give the information to people that are going to use it in a way that's actually usable. Like handing somebody a manuscript is not going to do any good, but I like to think that if you give people relatively actionable information, they're going to take it and use it in a way that helps people.
Speaker 3:Let's give them some specific information, because I think we talk about getting sleep and all that, and probably the question is what does that mean, like what is good sleep versus what is bad sleep? And further, like what is the impact based on your kind of research and evidence to an athlete when they don't get good sleep?
Speaker 4:Yeah, so just I mean hard numbers, that to keep it relatively simple and not get bogged down in the details, the available work around chronic sleep, meaning like habitual sleep, those athletes that sleep less than certainly seven, in most cases eight hours that are adolescents are going to be at an increased risk of injury. The pooled information there is that you know, if you're sleeping an hour less on average over time, chronically your risk of injury goes up about 60%.
Speaker 4:Now 60% means a different amount depending on what your baseline risk is, but that's a big difference.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to say that's not like just hey, this is a marginal increase in risk. This is a significant jump in the chances that you're going to miss time because you get hurt.
Speaker 4:And if you look at the data, that is actually predominantly ours. An hour of acute sleep meaning like the night before, an hour of lost sleep the night before, increases your next day injury risk between 30 and 40 percent. So I mean these are really meaningful increases in injury risk. Now there's obviously injury is a multifactorial issue. There are a lot of things that influence it, but I think the recognition within academia and youth sports science is that it is probably an aggregator of a lot of different variables and so the effect that you're having by losing sleep is probably capturing the effects of a bunch of different things and translating into a meaningful risk of injury.
Speaker 4:So the hard part here is, I think if you talk with a adolescent athlete and you start talking about what the ideal amount of sleep is that they would get, it becomes a tricky conversation.
Speaker 4:So the idea is, if you were 16 years old, right, the National Sleep Foundation is going to say that you should get 8 to 10 hours of sleep.
Speaker 4:But that's the general population. In my opinion, if you're a high-level athlete who's trying to adapt to training loads, navigate academic loads, manage the social context of your life, all of those things you probably should be shooting for more like nine hours a night. Now most teenagers are going to look at you like you're crazy, because a lot of them are probably sleeping five or six without recognizing that it's having a profound negative effect on their health and presumably their risk of injury. But to me, that is the goal that we should be shooting for, and the difficulty of the conversation, I think, is that if you want that to be a reality, you're just going to have to prioritize some things, and there might be something you have to trade for it. But I like to think that you can convince people the value of it and then they can make an informed decision about whether they want to swap something for two more hours of sleep a night.
Speaker 2:If I had to say okay, well, why is that the case? Why does sleep raise injury risk? And I doubt you have causal data on this, but I would imagine it's things like your brain process is slower you don't. Those things raise the risk of either a collision that you otherwise may have avoided or even the muscle stabilizing a joint as you're landing. That wouldn't be the case if you were fresh. Is that fair?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think you're right. The specific underlying mechanisms I don't think are particularly well teased out and the speculation is a lot of the things you just mentioned that it probably influences things like motor unit recruitment. That influences how you fire muscles and the biomechanical results around joints. It probably affects reaction times, decision-making speed times, decision-making speed. It probably influences fatigue, which in and of itself has been found to be a particular risk factor for injury. So I expect that the sort of things that you get as a downstream consequence of insufficient sleep is pretty broad and a lot of them, either additively or independently, could be influencing your injury risk or independently could be influencing your injury risk. But when you see results like these that are so consistent from one population to the next even if you're not randomizing people to like good sleep and bad sleep, which arguably would be unethical you can still feel pretty comfortable that there's a causal relationship here, given the size of the effect, how reproducible it is and how many different potential mechanisms there could be that could explain the relationship between sleep and injury.
Speaker 4:Well, let's give some people listening, or athletes listening, or parents that can pass it on to their young athletes, some tips on good sleep and how to do it it's important to recognize like, uh, there are real medical issues around sleep and it's important to recognize that if you have a, an adolescent athlete who is having genuine issues with falling asleep meaning it's taking like an hour to fall asleep, persistent issues with waking in the middle of's taking like an hour to fall asleep, persistent issues with waking in the middle of the night and being unable to get back to sleep, I mean there are adolescents that have issues with insomnia and those need to be sort of managed separately For the general population of athletes, where they don't have an underlying medical issue that affects their sleep, what we're really trying to do is increase their sleep duration and improve their quality. Starting out with a set amount of time that you're shooting for, like I was talking about, and bracketing that amount of time and protecting it is step one. So to me, the age group we're talking about we should be setting aside nine hours from sleep time to wake time, and the things you do to improve your ability to fall asleep and stay asleep and get deeper quality sleep are pretty simple and intuitive. It's things like having a sleep area that is dark, quiet, cool. We tend to sleep best when the temperature's in the mid-60s Doesn't have distracting or stimulating things in it.
Speaker 4:It's crucially important to make sure that the place you sleep is just a place where you sleep. It's not where you do homework. You don't watch TV in bed. The reality I think the way to think about it it's sort of a shift in language, but I think is representative of the truth is that your brain produces sleep. It's not the sort of thing where we just decide, oh, I'm going to go to sleep and I'm out. There are people who can fall asleep pretty quickly, but it really is training your brain to produce sleep at the time and of the quality that you want, and so creating an environment that's conducive to sleep through all those things is crucially important. Before you go to sleep, ideally you shouldn't be eating and drinking things within at least two, preferably three hours For 20 to 30 minutes before you go to sleep.
Speaker 4:Set up a consistent routine where you do really simple calming stuff. For some people it's reading, For some people it's showering, Some people it's meditative practices. Whatever it is, you're teaching your brain to wind down, and if you do these things really consistently, sometimes just over like a week or two, you effectively train your brain to produce sleep over the time we're talking about at a better quality than you've had it before. That's sort of an idealized scenario.
Speaker 4:One of the other pieces that we tried to include in what we just put out through the center was recognizing that young athletes often have things in their lives that aren't under their control, and having that set sleep and wake time every day may not be feasible. So how do we, you know, manage things like travel so that we don't interfere with sleep? And we included simple things there about sort of, you know, minimizing or reducing caffeine intake, ensuring that you're hydrated, you know, If you're traveling across multiple time zones, ideally you would give yourself sufficient time ahead of time to adjust to avoid this sort of jet lag. But all of those were some of the relatively simple pieces to try and institute in order to potentially go from someone who's sleeping five or six hours a night really not getting great quality sleep to someone who's getting more like eight or nine and sleeping consistently and deeply through the entire time.
Speaker 1:We'll be back with more Kristen Labors, doug Bracken and our special guest, dr Drew Watson after this message from Discount Tire.
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Speaker 1:Now we return to Dr Drew Watson. Doug Bracken and Christian Labors will lead off Segment 2.
Speaker 2:To follow up, to tie sort of this specific thing again back to the bigger purpose. Sleep is one of those topics that's not the most exciting topic. Most people don't, you know, dream of talking about sleep and you know the impacts it has. But when we look at the purpose of the center overall, one of the biggest things that can impact, I think if I use the word acutely an athlete's development curve, is significant injury. If you have a major injury that causes a lost time numbered in months and months, it does have an impact on your development curve because it takes time to get back to where you were before.
Speaker 2:You continue to progress beyond that, and so by sharing this type of information made possible only because of how many clubs, how many players, how much resources available to it the hope is that more than a few but kids, families, coaches start to emphasize this a little bit more.
Speaker 2:We reduce injuries that happen training games, whatever to the degree we can, because people are sleeping a little bit better, which has a positive outcome individually, very specifically, on players that would have had that blip and that injury that changes their development curve that maybe don't, because they avoid that. I mean, it sounds grandiose at some level, but that's the hope here and when we talk about taking data and making it really practical, and I appreciate the sort of specifics that Doug's asking and Drew that you're saying, because those are the things that you want people to go home and say. There's three things I can take from this piece of information that will positively impact me as an athlete, as a young player, as a coach working with young players, whatever, and I think that's the exciting part, because this is just the beginning.
Speaker 3:I think one of the most important thing and I think this is true in coaching, but also what we're doing and what you're doing specifically is it has to be simple, it has to be something that kids can understand, families can understand, so that they can take it, and it's actionable. We're not digging through medical journals, to Christian's point earlier. This is something where it's pretty easy for me to go tell my son hey, man, you need to sleep for eight to 10 hours, and this is how we do that, and I think that's the art in all this is how can we take this information, which can be complex at some levels, and get it to a point where we can give it to people and they can use it and it's easy to understand.
Speaker 4:It can get as deep as people want. I think what we've done as sort of a template with this initial information rollout is try and provide relatively straightforward, implementable, actionable information, but we also link to as many details as people want to go get right. Like the manuscripts we're talking about are not opaque or hidden somewhere, like they're right there If you really want to dig in to the information that we're using to generate these recommendations. They're right there and available through the site. Again, like it just saves people so much time trying to figure these sorts of things out on their own and delivers it in a way that they can use right away.
Speaker 4:Just to double down on what Christian said, I mean, like obviously injury is its own health outcome we want to prevent, but I agree like lost time to injury is a tremendous impediment to development.
Speaker 4:The lost time to illness is not to be ignored.
Speaker 4:Like we tend to think of them as not as dramatic, but if you have somebody who's not sleeping well, they're at a much greater risk of getting sick. If you get sick five or six times through a year and you're missing for a week or more of those times, like that's a substantive amount of time you're lost from training. If you're trying to think about how can I assimilate memories from the training I just had and you haven't slept well, you will not be as good at assimilating memories and retaining information for the next one If you're trying to recover from a high load and come back to a subsequent training, ready to be stressed again, and you don't sleep well in between. It won't work. You're not only going to underperform, you're potentially going to be at an increased risk of injury. There are so many ways that sleep influences individual player development, not just even short-term injury risk, but long-term development, by the way that it influences all of these different things that ultimately touch on a player's ability to train properly over time.
Speaker 2:The other piece to this that we'll sort of learn, I think, to some degree by trial and error and this is sort of opening the door to the back room is how do we get this information out in a digestible way to the people that need it most? Because getting a kid to understand and hear what you just said is really important. Getting a coach to re-emphasize that, because a coach has a better relationship than Dr Drew on a podcast does. Getting a parent to reiterate that. We're looking at infographics, we're looking at social posts, we're looking at, potentially, webinars that go a little bit deeper To your point. We have some bullet points, but then links to all of the data behind it and all of the studies behind it. So we're going to try and play with that to see how do we get this out there to the people to make the biggest impact.
Speaker 2:And another thing I think that you said that is important to us is that these things are reproducible, that this isn't the one study. That's the exception to everything else that then people use, as it's something that is repeated over and over and over, so you really can rely on it, as opposed to because I'm sure Drew and you know more in this area than I do. There's always a study that comes out with some strange outcome that is not repeatable and therefore you really have to question its validity, but people don't. It's kind of crazy. You say anything and you say that's what the study says and you sound smart. But there's good and bad studies. I mean, there's studies with bad processes and studies with bad controls and studies that maybe aren't even bad in structure, but they're just a fluke in the data that comes out in a way that if you did it 100 times, you'd never get that fluke again.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and it's an, unfortunately, sort of perverse side of the information landscape that the weird result is the one that's the most likely to get all the attention an outlier, and it may not end up being reproducible, but it gets the most attention and it gets the most echo and it ends up having perhaps the biggest impact. But then when you repeat it, you're like, oh, actually that was just sort of an outlying result. It doesn't turn out to be true. So for sure, recognizing that any single study is rarely sufficient evidence on which to make confident decisions, but also that the studies that you do, the bigger you can make them and the more information you can capture out of them. That allows you to have a whole lot more confidence that what you're seeing is real and that if you base your decisions around that, you're actually going to be doing things that are effective rather than basing your decisions on something that turns out to be spurious or not true, and I believe I'm correct on this.
Speaker 2:You hopefully can correct me if I'm not, but the most cited study in skill acquisition is the Anders Ericsson study, which I think was done with musicians. That was the basis of deliberate practice and 10,000 hours and how much.
Speaker 2:And basically the outcome of that was that you know world-class performers practice 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over the course of their life and then doubt. You know lesser performance at lesser hours. And you know then the the worst quote unquote performers you know have the fewest amount of hours and that's the most cited study in the world in talent acquisition or skill acquisition. And I believe they tried to reproduce the exact study with the exact protocols in music recently and found none of those outcomes.
Speaker 4:Well, and you can imagine that if you try and take information, even if it had been reproduced, from something like music's performance and the skill acquisition there and apply it to something as completely different as your ability to perform on a soccer field, like those contexts share so little, the idea that you would successfully be able to take information around the acquisition of skill for music and apply it to something like youth sports, on its face seems a little strange and I think has turned out to not be translatable from one to the other.
Speaker 4:But a good example of something that got echoed a ton and picked up and just sort of carried forward.
Speaker 2:This goes to another purpose of what we're trying to do through your work in the center in debunking some of that stuff, because that 10,000 hours really went cultural and there was a very deliberate attempt in soccer to say this is how you become a pro is if it's 10,000 hours of this. You know, deliberate practice is a term of art with certain types of things. But I remember sitting in in meetings where I think the author of the book that popularized that actually presented Gladwell.
Speaker 2:And maybe there's a different one that referenced it and I remember sitting there and I was in a soccer, a very high profile soccer meeting, and they were talking about that. And I sat there and said you know, most players make their professional debut somewhere between 18 and 21. And if you say, okay, 10,000 hours, well, if I just assume they're going to play that from age eight to 18, sort of simple math that's a thousand hours a year. Well, there's 365 days in the year, so it's almost three hours a day, seven days a week for 10 years gets me my professional debut. And you said, well, wait a minute, anyone who played soccer that much will die. Like there's just no way that that's possibly translatable. Shame on me. I sat in the room and somebody could say you should raise your hand and ask them to justify that and explain that you didn't. We just went away and said, okay, well, I guess 10,000 hours in deliberate practice sounds good, but it made no sense at all.
Speaker 3:Did you start adding that to your training regimen, christian? You told your players all right, guys, practice is now three and a half hours.
Speaker 2:Three and a half hours. And, by the way, I'll see you Saturday and Sunday, every day of the year. We'll give you Christmas off, I suppose.
Speaker 3:And, by the way. By the way, games are only a couple hours, so we're going to have to stay an hour and a half after games as well.
Speaker 2:To the point, though, as a young coach, as a new parent, you're going to see these things, some of which are couched in verbiage and presented in ways that they do sound right or they do feel somewhat intuitive, and you can fall victim to some of that and listen.
Speaker 2:Some of the things that we take for gospel now, in 10 years, people will say that was wrong. So I think everything with a little dose of skepticism is probably right, but that's one of the goals here. I mean and we'll go the Center will be releasing things every couple of months. Go, the center will be releasing things every couple of months, some of which are original, some of which sharing other studies or aggregations that are presented in a way to help. Some of those things are multi-sport versus single sport, you know, and way more stuff that is in some ways taken for gospel and probably wrong, that we just want to share. I'm very excited that we're able to do this with you, drew, that you're able to collect all this and present it in a way that is going to be digestible and helpful.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean, for me it really is kind of like the culmination of what I've been trying to do for a long time, and the opportunity to really meaningfully build that bridge that we've been talking about is by far the most exciting thing that I'm doing, because I think it has the opportunity to make an impact in a much more tangible way than you otherwise might, through sort of like the typical, you know, academic endpoints. And this is really an opportunity that I think to deliver good, meaningful information to people that are going to use it in a way that directly impacts kids. And, to your point, I think there are certain areas where we actually have pretty good information. In some of those cases, the broader message seems right.
Speaker 4:In some cases I actually don't think it's right at all and we can clarify those. There are going to be some areas where I think we just have to be comfortable saying we don't know. That is a really uncomfortable statement in our culture, particularly when you're supposed to be in a position of expertise or authority. But if you're honest, I think that's the truth. If there just isn't information relevant to young soccer athletes, we shouldn't be pretending there is and extrapolating it from elsewhere. We should be recognizing the gap and then taking the steps to fill it, and that really is where the original research that we do within the league comes in.
Speaker 1:We'll be back with more Dr Drew Watson, Christian Lavers and Doug Bracken after this message from Nike and soccercom.
Speaker 5:Nike is a proud sponsor of ECNL. Nothing can stop what we do together to bring positive change to our communities. You can't stop sport because hashtag. You can't stop our voices. Follow Nike on Instagram, facebook and Twitter. Soccercom is proud to partner with the ECNL to support the continued development of soccer in the US at the highest levels. They've been delivering quality soccer equipment and apparel to players, fans and coaches since 1984. Living and breathing the beautiful game ourselves, the goal at Soccercom is to inspire you to play better, cheer louder and have more fun. Visit Soccercom today to check out our unmatched selection of gear, expert advice and stories of greatness at every level of the game.
Speaker 1:We now return to segment three of this edition of Breaking the Line, the ECNL podcast, and we hand it over to Doug Bracken.
Speaker 3:I wanted to ask a question, drew, and I know you have some research on this One of the things internally we've wrestled with over many, many years where we go back 20, 25 years and we would all go to tournaments and play six games in a weekend or five games in a weekend or something insane play six games in a weekend or five games in a weekend or something insane. We've gotten a little bit more sanity around it by playing three games on three days at our events. What have you guys found on injury risk as you play that third day versus earlier in the event? Is there any correlation to how many games you play in that period of time to increased injury?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I think time will tell if it remains what I think is the most exciting and interesting part of this, but for now I think the way that we're leveraging some of the existing competitive structure within the ECNL to capture injury data is really, really compelling. So just for background, I mean there are athletic trainers that staff the games at all the ECNL national events and we've collaborated to capture injury information from all the athletes that present to those tents and then, through a little bit of back of the napkin math, you can pretty quickly figure out how many hours are being played at a given event by age, gender. We can even bracket it by playing surface other sorts of variables, so you can see the total number of hours that get played within any group of athletes. And you can see the total number of hours that get played within any group of athletes and you know now the total number of injuries that present to the medical tents. So you can relativize the injuries as an incidence, which is really crucial. Right, just comparing raw numbers of injuries can be very misleading, but we can look at the things that seem to influence injury incidents at these national events and one of these, you know, sort of myths maybe that we were talking about from the beginning is that we've always sort of speculated that as events go on and games accumulate, fatigue accumulates and that translates into an increased risk of injury, and you will periodically see people calling for things to be shorter or done differently because of that injury risk. But no one's ever really looked directly, and so what we could do is look at injury incidents on games one, two and three of those regular season events where they're played on consecutive days, and the long and the short of it is that there's no difference in the injury rate between games one, two and three, so that theorized accumulated risk of injury over the course of those events just really doesn't seem to be there.
Speaker 4:One of the other questions that we were curious about is whether there's an influence of incorporating a rest day into those three games.
Speaker 4:So at a playoff game, for example, where you have a rest day between games one and three, so you're playing three games over four days, we wanted to know if the injury risk seems to change differently in the regular season from game one to three, where there's no rest day, or in the postseason from game one to three, where there is a rest day and the short take home there is that that change from game one to three. It looks exactly the same in the regular season and the postseason, so at least in terms of injury risk, this is a couple of really novel and sort of innovative outcomes to inform some of those perpetuated myths about, you know, people are going to get hurt more on day three. It just doesn't appear to look that way and that's just really like a tip of the iceberg example of the ways that you can leverage this sort of embedded injury data collection infrastructure to answer relevant questions about how you do things to try and influence the risk of injury for young soccer players.
Speaker 2:To add some further clarity and context around that, during the regular season we have no restriction on substitution right and so we can't tell you what the difference is on injury if you limit substitution versus when you have it unrestricted. And I guess you know your gut would say limited substitution may increase risk of multiple games in a day because there is less opportunity for break.
Speaker 2:But that's a guess well at the at the playoffs but at the playoffs, at the, the playoffs, we have more limited substitution, but then you have the rest day in between. But the important point is for years and years and years, the mantra was three games in three days, dramatic injury risk on day three. And we had said for a while yeah, but what about substitution rules? But it was one of those debates where you could just yell into the void because nobody had any, any data. Now there's data to it that says well, actually it doesn't under these circumstances, right, a rest day and limited substitution, unlimited substitution with no rest day. There doesn't seem to be a change. Now, that doesn't tell you anything about the quality of play or the speed of play, and I think your eyes would tell you that the quality and speed of play would decline as fatigue increases. But based on what data has been collected and it's tens of thousands of hours of player time, hundreds of thousands probably what you cannot say is this is increasing injury risk.
Speaker 2:Someone may argue well, the game is not as good. Well, okay, that may be a fair statement and there's probably some metrics we can use ultimately to look at that too. It's really interesting because when you look at it you say why is that relevant? Well one, if there was a significant change, then it would be incumbent upon all of us to change the environment so that players are not hurt because of something that is structurally set up. And if it is not so well, then you get into the typical discussion of how many games do people want to play when they travel and when they don't travel, and all the stuff that makes youth sport youth sport. But at least we know, based on this data, that we're not doing anything. And by the way, we means the whole youth soccer league club tournament system Three games in three days with unrestricted substitutions, is not going to create a significant injury risk.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think that's right. I left the substitution part out. So I appreciate that clarification, because we can't really speak to what would happen if you played three games in three days with limited substitutions, just because we don't have the data to answer it. What we've got is that when it is arranged the way that it is within the league currently in those regular season events, the injury risk doesn't seem to increase on days two and three. So I think this is just kind of like one example of if there isn't information available for this particular context, we potentially have ways to collaborate between my lab and the league within the center to answer them in ways that are. I mean, how much better is it to have this information than to just continue to speculate and make decisions based on I don't even know what. This at least allows us to be more data-driven or evidence-based in the ways that we approach it, rather than just, like you said, sort of shouting into the void and hoping we're doing the right thing without having any idea?
Speaker 2:Well and to your point. You said earlier, most of the data that's out there about in sports and injury and all this stuff is in adults, and adults and youth are not the same. But then we also can look at this between boys and girls, right, and see if there's differences in gender as well, and and you've said this to me, so I'll just parrot it back to you that, done properly, some of the data collection and research we're doing could constitute some of the biggest studies ever in youth sports, in all of these areas, because there hasn't been the ability to leverage a platform as big as ours is and as responsive. And there's some credit to the athletic trainers on site who do this for us in the injury thing, or the players or parents or coaches that are filling out surveys. It's one thing to have a lot of people. It's another thing to have a lot of people willing to take the time to share the information that allows some of these conclusions to be made.
Speaker 4:Yeah, without question. So I mean to the extent that people are interested. All of the minute details are in the manuscript that we've developed and are in the process of submitting for publication on the Center website. But it's important to recognize that this was over 200,000 player hours, which is very big in and of itself. It was about 24 events over the course of the 23-24 season. We're continuing to do it, we're replicating it again this year.
Speaker 4:But even just if capturing this data out of all of the national regular season and post-season events over a couple of years, that's quickly on the order of the amount of information that's bigger than any injury surveillance program I'm familiar with within the high school or adolescent athlete space. And if you can either continue that or broadened it into other sort of competitive areas, for example, if you were theoretically able to capture the same sort of information out of conference games, for example, you would very quickly eclipse what gets done even from an injury data collection standpoint on the collegiate side. I mean the opportunity to collect a volume of information here that allows you to confidently identify the risk factors for injuries and the procedures to reduce them. It's not like lip service to say it's unprecedented, it really is. That's not just me saying it, that's just the amount of information we're talking about.
Speaker 3:Let's wrap this by asking, based on what you've seen, if you had an athlete in the age bracket that brackets that we're talking about, come to you and say what in the age bracket that brackets that we're talking about, come to you and say what? What are one or two or three things that I can really do to mitigate my risk for injury and maximize my performance?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean these are going to be targets of information that we continue to to sort of release in chunks. And sleep was a big one here, I think the biggest levers that you can, that you can maneuver in order to influence injury risk in a young athlete. So load management is crucial, right, really big increases in load on the backdrop of, you know, lower chronic loads or relatively low fitness from an offseason for, for example, are a big risk for injury. Sleep is crucially important from both a recovery standpoint as well as seemingly direct impacts on injury risk. Stress reduction also seems to be crucially important.
Speaker 4:We're going to roll, we'll release some of this information that we on the center that we put out through Coach's Voice and at the symposium about how things like mood and stress seem to be really important. Independent predictors of injury. Clearly there's a role for things like nutrition and hydration. I mean those are probably the biggest pieces load management, sleep, stress management and nutrition. Those would be the ones that I would be pointing at as the levers that you can pull that are probably going to have the biggest impact on injury risk and will continue to deliver this information, I like to think, in a way that people will be able to take and use in an actionable way so that they can have a direct impact on the kids they work with.
Speaker 2:I'll just finish this saying I appreciate, drew, your leadership in this space and the ability for us to support this and do this, because when we talked and lots of grand ideas start with just spitballing and you know talking about, you know dreams and aspirations, but you know we talked about the need a few years ago for a group to do something better than it's out there right now in terms of educating people in this space and to do so in a way that's credible, that is actionable, that is understandable and that addresses the questions that are of most interest and maybe of most impact, because there's a lot of think tanks and other things out there that are constantly pontificating without a lot of data or are not in the weeds of really understanding youth sports, and it's really easy to sit at 20,000 feet and cast dispersions, and so the ability to use this information to help inform league decision-making like with the game scheduling is really helpful to inform individual decision-making on things like sleep and load, which will be another issue coming down.
Speaker 2:I think we're just scratching the surface here, that this thing can expand and encapsulate a lot of different topics and appreciate your vision and leadership and making it come to reality.
Speaker 4:Yeah Well, I, like I said it is, it is easily the most exciting thing that I'm doing and I get it. I mean, I tell people all the time, without exaggerating, that, like being a youth soccer coach is way more stressful than going to med school, like I appreciate how hard it is and trying to sort of now being a coach, trying to understand the available information and deliver it to families and kids. I just hope that what we're doing will make that job that much easier, give them a resource that they can leverage in order to feel confident about the things that they're giving to people, and I hope that what it doesn't end up being is that we're telling them what to care about. I'm hoping people reach out and tell us what it is that they're most interested in, so we can point ourselves to it and deliver it back to them.
Speaker 1:Great delivery and great questions. What a visit with Dr Drew Watson. We're not done with him because we still have Bracken's Brain Buster and we'll hit that after this message from Quick Goal.
Speaker 5:The ECNL is pleased to announce Quick Goal as the official goal provider and partner for ECNL girls and ECNL boys. A new partnership created to support the growth and development of the country's top players, clubs and coaches at all national events, including national playoffs and national finals. The quick goal coaches corner will provide hospitality and social space for ECNL girls, ecnl boys and collegiate coaches. Quick goal will also be the presenting sponsor of the national championship-winning ECNL girls and ECNL boys coaches of the year and the ECNL girls and ECNL boys goals of the year. Quick Goal looks forward to helping the ECNL continue to elevate the standards of youth soccer and provide more opportunities to players on and off the field in the coming years.
Speaker 3:We need to remind you that we're on YouTube so you can like and subscribe to this podcast there. We're always open to hear your questions that you might have. You can drop those in at info at theecnlcom. You can also, I think, comment where our podcast kind of lives and then follow us on social media. What we're trying to do is be real informative for you guys. I think Drew, obviously Drew's knowledge and the work he's doing is crucial to letting athletes young athletes know how to go through this process and things that can really have a major impact on them. So thanks, Drew, for that. All right, I am going to ask a hard question today and I don't know if you're going to like it, but I don't care. No, I'm kidding. Look at Christian. Christian always makes a face. He always makes that face and you're going to go first. Today, Christian, I was first Two weeks in a row. First today, Christian, I was first for making that face two weeks in a row. Stop making faces. I'm just saying, Christian, what would you tell your younger self?
Speaker 2:Well, you know what I think? What I would tell my younger self is relax, relax and trust yourself, trust the plan, trust the people around you more, don't get so stressed.
Speaker 3:Drew probably smirk about all of this, as he's thinking back on a long relationship stress is directly related to injury yeah, well, there you go, there you go, that's maybe what happened to your back and your calf and different stuff relax and say it's a long race.
Speaker 2:It's's a long race to run and there is a plan, and there is a God who will plan it out for you. That's what I would tell myself.
Speaker 3:All right, we're going to go to the voice, dean Linke. What would you tell your younger self, dean?
Speaker 1:every opportunity, because, as I look back and know that I traveled the world, I don't think I was at an age where I truly appreciated the fact that I was in Saudi Arabia or in Barcelona and took in everything that these great cultures can offer you. So maximize every opportunity is what I would tell my younger self. Nice.
Speaker 3:Okay, let's go to the youngest of the younger selves, and that is Reed Reed. You have a long way to go.
Speaker 2:Reed just took some very good advice. You know Reed's processing advice right now.
Speaker 6:Yeah, so I appreciate all of the input and will consider that To tell my younger self live in the moment and don't stress anything, don't take anything too seriously. Okay, appreciate that, all right.
Speaker 3:Drew, we're not going to make you go last. Live in the moment and don't stress anything, don't take anything too seriously. So, okay, appreciate that All right, drew, we're not going to make you go last. So, drew, what would you?
Speaker 4:tell your younger self, for the record, I distinctly remember telling Christian a few times to relax and having to immediately duck, as have I, as have I, but I wholeheartedly agree that that might be good information for his younger self. I think mine's probably similar. I think I would have told myself to be patient. I think when I was younger I felt like everything had to happen right away and I had a very sort of short-term vision of what I was trying to do. And I think the reality of it as you get older is that you recognize that good things sort of build over time. And so, having the confidence and just recognizing that nothing has to happen immediately, just be patient, continue to work toward what you think you want and be comfortable with the idea that you may change your mind about what it is that you want to do, and that's fine as well and maybe stick a little money in a savings account. That might have saved me some trouble.
Speaker 3:Invest in Apple. Invest in Apple that might've saved me some trouble.
Speaker 2:Put some money in a savings account. Invest in Apple. Invest in Apple.
Speaker 4:That's what I tell myself. Yeah, Nvidia immediately.
Speaker 6:All right, jacob, I would tell my younger self don't be afraid of what other people think of you. Don't worry about other people. You like what you like. Embrace your hobbies and the people who are going to care about you the people who are going to care about you, the people who want to be your friends, are going to like the same things you do are not going to care that you like them. So don't worry about what other people think about you. Just do you and everything's going to work out great.
Speaker 3:Okay, man, these are good answers. Mine would be stage advice, doug. Yes, see, now do you take back that ugly face you made? Well, maybe you got to think about how you lead into this by saying I'm going to ask a hard question. That's not exactly inviting, it's thought provoking. I guess it can be hard to think about what you would tell your younger self. Well, I would tell my younger self to work and have a work ethic, because, uh, when you work and you have a strong work ethic, good things happen for you. Work ethic to me is so. That's what I would tell my younger self Sleep more, sleep more, yes, sleep more, work hard sleep more.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Don't let Christian stress you out as much as sometimes he does. That was a more serious question. Sometimes we kid around, but that was a little bit more thought-provoking one. But again remind you guys to like and subscribe to this podcast. Submit your questions at info at theucnlcom and follow us on social media. Another great day, another great week on the podcast. Thanks Drew, Thanks Chris, Visiting from the in-laws, you know.
Speaker 2:With no computer that works, so I got an interesting few days ahead of me.
Speaker 3:That's right. Thanks to the voice, Dean Linke Haven't seen his face on this podcast in a little bit. This is a great pleasure.
Speaker 1:Thank you and good to see you, Dr Drew, as well.
Speaker 3:Good to see you, Dean Reed, Jacob, always doing the heavy lifting. Appreciate you guys. We'll see you in a couple of weeks no-transcript.