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Here’s a cool vizzy from @aosnacz looking at strength & power and their relationship with our motion capture throwing velocity. Athletes who throw 88+ are clustered on the right hand side of the chart, particularly in the upper right quadrant (high strength, high power).
Athletes that throw 80-87 (yellow) tend to cluster around the center of the chart which indicates they have moderate levels of strength & power. And, of course, our slower throwing population (blue) is clustered in the bottom left hand quadrant - low strength, low power.
While it may not be particularly surprising to find that bigger, stronger, faster, more powerful athletes tend to throw the ball harder, these types of vizzies allow us to tease out some additional info that maybe we hadn’t considered before.
For instance, in this chart we find a significantly larger number of hard throwing athletes in the low force-high power quadrant (lower right) compared to the high force-low power quadrant (top left).
At first glance, this would seem to suggest that power is the more important variable. However, an alternate explanation could be that we skew training towards power development rather than strength development, particularly as the athlete moves into high intent throwing...
...when we’d expect to see the athlete’s higher velo numbers. Knowing a little bit about how we program at Driveline, I doubt the latter rationale is likely explanation, but nonetheless, it is an alternate hypothesis worth considering.
Getting back to the vizzy itself; the next step for @aosnacz is to upgrade its functionality so that we can select an athlete from a drop down list and his dot(s) will appear highlighted in a unique color so we can easily identify where an athlete falls on this chart.
Our strength coaches will then be able to reference the chart during our athlete meetings where we sit down with the athlete to develop a training plan.
A quick vizzy like this can go a long way in getting athletes to buy in when the strength coach explains which physical qualities the athlete should prioritize in the weight room.
Anyways, there is a lot more in store from the Driveline HP department but I also wanted to give a shout out to the Driveline Analytics staff, @Alex_Caravan, @dan_aucoin13, @thurminator13, @ChristianH00k, and especially @aosnacz for making our HP & skill data come to life!
