The Motion-IQ COD-Braking Report is finally here!
Today, we're introducing our new COD-Braking Report – developed with agility expert Rich Clarke. We’ve had a ton of requests for this over the last 6 months, and so it’s with great excitement that we can finally share it with you.
Why It Matters: Understanding how your athletes move during change of direction and braking can significantly enhance their in-game performance. However – most coaches don't know what the most important metrics are or how to use them.
This report changes that.
The Motion-IQ COD-Braking Report provides a detailed analysis of each phase of COD actions—approach, entry, turn/plant, and exit. It helps you:
- Understand the complex interplay of different movement phases
- Identify opportunities for improvement
- Develop targeted training strategies
- Become a COD-Braking and Agility expert
“For all of our field sport athletes, assessing and diagnosing HOW they decelerate and change directions has been a major emphasis for us. We’ve now got an easy, consistent method through the new Motion IQ COD-Braking Report which allows us to create profiles on the athletes beyond just linear speed. This will help the base of our assessments and longitudinal monitoring for all athletes!”
– Les Spellman
The Biggest Mistake We Made in the Linear Reports
“Coaches don’t care about the data – they just want to be told what to do.”
This is what I was told by a fellow coach and coach educator when I asked him about what he thought a sprint biomechanics report should include. Honestly, I pretty much ignored this feedback, and went about building out what I thought coaches were interested in: i.e. a high-quality, informative, and educational overview of the most-important biomechanical variables in sprinting.
Turns out my fellow coach and I are both correct.
Yes, coaches want to know more – they are lifelong learners who are genuinely interested in improving their skills. But they’re also busy with many other responsibilities. The job of a coach has a lot of moving parts, and sometimes “just tell me what to do” has to be enough, at least until they have time to learn more.
And that’s been our biggest mistake.
The beta version of the Motion-IQ Linear Report is heavy on information and education, but too light on application – i.e. the “just tell me what to do” bit!
So we’ve been working on an update. I’ll tell you more about that next week, but for now I’d like to let you know my frame of mind when we set out to design and build the initial beta version, and how this has changed somewhat. I think this debrief process is really important, and it might be of interest to you.
Whenever any company launches a product or service that is designed to improve sports performance, they have three options for its application:
- Descriptive
- Prescriptive
- Predictive
Many companies over-promise on what they can deliver and, as a marketing tactic, promote the ability to prescribe or even predict things. You’ll know by now that we do not do that. From the outset, we have been very open and honest about what Motion-IQ can and cannot do.
It can do some amazing things – but it cannot do the coaching for you.
The reality is almost no technologies go beyond describing something. Steps 2 & 3 – prescription and prediction – are up to the user. A good product can help you in this process, but it cannot do the work for you.
It cannot give you a score for your athlete’s technique and then prescribe a set of exercises designed to improve this score. This is not how the human body works. And it’s not how coaching works.
Our choice of the three options was wholly Option 1 – descriptive, and this was our biggest mistake.
The beta version of Motion-IQ describes your athletes’ sprinting biomechanics – it does not prescribe, and nor does it predict. Instead, we aim to help educate you on what this description means. This is why we provide all of the background reading material [and why I have begun this weekly email series].
However, we know that for most coaches, this is still pretty complex stuff. Heck, it’s pretty complex for us, and we’ve been deep in this for decades. So, if we want Motion-IQ to make a real difference in the performance community, we probably have to be a little more than just descriptive and educational.
This is what we’ve been working on ever since launching the beta version and receiving our first feedback from coaches. In fact, we’ve been working on it since well before launching the beta version – as we knew this is where we wanted to go with the product even back then. It is just super-complex, and we needed a lot of data in the system to make it viable.
This new update will bridge the gap for you between description and prescription. It cannot predict things – at least not fully. But it may help you predict – and that’s really all we can ask of any piece of tech.
In our next post, I’ll share with you exactly what this is. We’ve been trialing it with many of the professional teams we work with for almost 10 months now. It’s really powerful stuff, and I know you’ll dig it.
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