12 Things You Didn't Know About Ryan Villopoto's 2013 Supercross Season

(Disclaimer: This information is the result of analysis of all lap times provided by the AMA archives and is not representation of views, opinions or direct information from Ryan Villopoto.)

My goal with this is to show you some things about motocross that you don't normally get. Some motocross websites have their small analytics section that describes the basic results of a race. Here I am trying to show what is possible to accomplish with simple analytics. With this you can then create more effective strategies, know yourself as a racer better, understand your competition and scout riders in a different way if your a team owner. This is just a hint of things to come and I will do this for other big name riders and begin comparing the field of racers against each other.

So without keeping you any longer, here you go..........

Heat Races

1. In Heat races, 75% of his fastest individual laps occur in the first 6 laps
2. In Heat races, his laps with the least difference in time between each lap (the heat races were he was most consistent in his lap times), were 1) St. Louis 2) Anaheim II 3) Oakland 4) Toronto 5) Anaheim I
3. In Heat races, his most consistent string of 2 laps occurs at laps 6 and 7
4. In Heat races, his overall lower average lap times occurred during lap 6

Main Events

1. In Main events, 75% of his fastest individual laps occurred in the first 6 laps
2. In Main events, 87.5% of his fastest individual laps occurred in the first 9 laps
3. In Main events, his laps with the least difference in time between each lap (the main events where he was most consistent in his lap times), were 1) Salt Lake 2) Atlanta 3) Arlington 4) Indianapolis 5) Minneapolis
4. In Main events, his overall lowest average lap times occurred on lap 6
5. In Main events, his most consistent average 5 laps occurs between 7 and 11

Practices

1. In practice he averages overall 9 laps per timed practice
2. In practice roughly 55% of his fastest practice times occur during the 7th lap or later
3. In practice he gets his fastest lap most frequently on lap 8 

Coaching in Motocross Part 2 – The Practical Science

The first post was a general statement that there is a problem in coaching in motocross and also some specific problems. These are things that perpetuate throughout the sport and have a tendency to hold our sport back. Advancement’s in science, understanding of a sport and increased competitiveness all drive the growth of a sport. The more we know about our great sport and how to more effectively train others in the sport, the further we move motocross into the main stream and out of its near limbo state. As large as it has become, it still hangs in the balance of the economy and the deep pockets of mom and dad. Sports like the NFL, MLB, NHL and MLS all continue on with increased or sustained popularity and revenue due to the increased competitive nature of the sport and the new level of interaction with the sport through technology.

Therefore our sport needs to continue to grow and I believe that it truly starts here with us as professionals of the sport and with you who are reading this in hopes of taking the sport to the next level. A major step in that evolution is our ability to coach in the sport.

As I said before there are these things called cognitive biases that vastly impact our coaching. If you take the time to read that Wikipedia list and the definitions, it should be an instant ah ha moment for you. This is just part of the things that need to be understood in coaching. Schools like University of Akron and East Tennessee State University have entire departments dedicated to PhD. studies in the areas of coaching and coaching science. There truly is that much to learn about . This ranges from the types of cueing to correct or teach an exercise, how you reinforce the persons behaviors and how well you understand the progression of that person based on their current age and level of abilities. Truly there is more than this, but I feel these are the three most fundamental pieces to focus on that will have immediate impact.

Cues

There are many different types of cues and they can be used in numerous ways to correct a particular part of the sport.  Some these cues can be visual, audible and physical/tactile cues, to start the list off. Visual cues can take place in ways like; your pit board, hand signals, color coding, visual demonstration of a task and showing a video. Audible cues are just that, things that can be heard. You can give a certain meaning to a word that reinforces some particular behavior or any numerous things. A great example is when having someone do plyometric jumps over hurdles. Your goal is to get them to create full extension with the body and sometimes I will tell them to imagine they are jumping to see over a fence. While this crosses many other boundaries in reinforcement etc… it does give you a simple example of how an audible cue can be used to create an action. Physical/tactile cues are a bit more challenging for coaching in motocross but can be done. This will typically be done when a rider is not on the track and requires some physical manipulation of the body. I help teach athletes to keep their foot firmly planted on the ground by tapping on the top of their foot while they are doing a stationary movement. I create this physical cue that causes a response in the brain to instantly react and send the message to the foot to accomplish my intended goal.

Reinforcement

This becomes very complex and is the real bread and butter of coaching. There are an established 13 principles of reinforcement. This could be an entire post and so I will highlight successive approximations, intermittent reinforcement principle and negative reinforcement principle. Successive approximation principle states that you teach someone to act in a certain way that they haven’t before by, rewarding successive steps that are pertinent to accomplishing the task. Intermittent reinforcement principle states that in order to get someone to continue to increase performance in a task you must slowly and intermittently reduce the frequency of rewards for proper accomplishment of the task. Last, the negative reinforcement principle states that you stop a mildly incorrect behavior immediately by having them complete the task correctly. As much as this may be a shock to many of you, NO YOU DO NOT GET SOMEONE TO STOP DOING AN INCORRECT BEHAVIOR BY GETTING MAD OR UPSET WITH THEM! If you’re talking about Ryan Villopoto not getting his elbow up in the corner or something that is a different story. But most of you won’t be teaching the top pro in the world, you will be establishing proper habits in a youth rider.

Progression

This topic is more complex because science has not studied motocross specifically for an established motor pattern progression through youth development stages. However, we can gain some clues from the general science of development of throwing. According to research from Langendorfer (1980,1982) there are 5 clear stages of throwing. The first is standing relatively still with little to no feet or trunk movement. Second is with rotation of the body, maybe a step forward and the arm crosses the body. Third stage is where they step the same leg forward as the throwing arm, little to no movement from hips during initial throw and some hip flexion and rotation during follow through. Fourth stage the child steps opposite foot forward with minimal hip and spine rotation and throws with follow through to wide base stance. Last is the final throwing pattern of a ball that you expect when someone knows how to throw a baseball properly, like a pitcher.

That was all just to describe the stages of development in throwing a ball that many of us have seen children go through. The point of this is to ask yourself, do you really think that you can just put a kid on a bike and expect him to get it all right? I didn’t even touch on the idea that you are suppose to roll a ball to kids first before you teach them to catch and throw progressively. This should open your mind to the fact that you need to pay close attention to where your rider is in their stages of development, especially if you are picking up someone who trained with another person who had no clue. They may need to regress in the complexity of their training before they can move forward.

All of these things listed above come together to create a more complete coach and training experience. You have to cue the person through different means to get their brain to understand how to execute the action. Once they do this correct you must reinforce that habit properly. Finally you must advance your rider along clear stages of progression in their riding. This will allow you to be the most effective coach possible. 

Coaching in Motocross Part 1 – The Problem

(This blog posting is intended only to bring to light the issues of coaching in motocross and to be a stepping stone for all coaches to help further their abilities and understanding as a coach. At no point is this intended to be malicious to those in the industry and is written with the understanding that those who are coaching in motocross do so with their best foot forward and to truly help others. My goal is simply to shed light on the scientific aspects of coaching that I feel haven’t been developed in our great sport because of the unique nature of motocross. Also there are many more aspects of this that could be elaborated on and will but, at a later point in time.)

The reality is that coaching in motocross is fairly primitive. By all other comparisons of coaching with more traditional sports, we could say that coaching as a whole in motocross is still somewhere back in the stone age. They tend to lack formal direction, only understand how to train the very basics and don’t understand how to progress the athlete after they have reached a certain level of abilities. In my opinion and my opinion only; the majority of effective coaching for motocross racers ends around the intermediate class. From the outside it looks like once they reach this level of proficiency as a racer, progress comes to a slowing halt and any movement forward in their abilities is a result of their own utilization of the Malcolm Gladwell concept of 10,000 hours of practice to become expertly skilled at a task. Overall rather slow progress that can be as unpredictable as throwing darts blindfolded.

If you’re a high school football player and get recruited to college a whole new world of training opens up. Some schools now have more advanced technology than some NFL teams thanks to research grants and sport science divisions that house a couple hundred students for the teams use however, the majority of them are a step below still. Returning to the point, in college that football player now gets exposed to more frequent training, more effective training and in turn you see many of these athlete’s grow through their senior year. Then they make it onto the pro’s and now they have world leading experts driving practice every day, monitoring their state of physical readiness, sport psychologists to help them overcome problems, nutritionists, every technology available and an entire team of analysts to support the decision of each thing done in training and game. This jump in quality of training and level of advancement is something not seen in our sport.

The majority of the coaches in our sport are former racers who may or may not have been successful and believe that their experience can help other young kids get better. While I support the notion that you could help others succeed by following this traditional method in motocross, most of these guys don’t realize that their ideas are tainted by the very thing they plan to use to help others, their experience. Every human being has a set of what are called cognitive biases. In fact Wikipedia’s site on cognitive biases lists what must be near 100 different types (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases). These are our thoughts and views of everything in life, shaped by our own experiences. To accompany this is one of my most hated sayings, “What someone else perceives is reality”. We've all heard this before from our parents, our boss and others. The truth is that your perception is typically misguided by your cognitive biases and what you many times believe to be right or the truth is only a small sliver of it or not even close to reality. What someone else perceives is not in fact reality many times. People in Salem Massachusetts used to believe that there were witches living among them that were vessels of the devil. They burnt those people at the stake because they perceived this to be true when in reality it wasn't. A grim and extreme example but, think about that when you’re coaching and what that means for yourself as a coach.

Frequently these things make you a less effective coach. Many times you will see the rider do something wrong in practice or during a race and you will give them feedback that doesn't accomplish anything. It lacks true analysis of the underpinning issue and a real way to solve it. The solution is usually, do this or that without clear instruction in the HOW department. Following this it is unknown by many how to get the brain to grasp and apply this concept, resulting in improper execution and a reoccurring vicious cycle of frustration. You tend to try and change something the rider is doing that previously was actually effective for them and their riding style. Frequently a coach will get to a point where he and the rider feel like they are going in circles around the same two or three things without a solution.  The true art and understanding of coaching is missing in many of these situations

To be continued……

Future of this blog

The future of this blog is to do some things for the sport of motocross that haven't been explored before or at least public knowledge that I am aware of. I will explore some new ideas of sport science and their application in motocross. These are some of the topic areas this blog will focus on

• Strength and Conditioning
• Data Analytics
• Creating a training load for racing
• New technology applications in the sport
• Sport Psychology
• Motocross coaching
• On the track training techniques
• Youth Development
• Physiological monitoring

Hopefully from these topics some new light will be shed on the sport and will allow you and others in the community to take this sport further than ever before.

Theory of Athletic Ability in Motocross

The reality is that most motocross racers are to some degree physically fit, but overall un-athletic and people mistakenly associate being fit with being a good athlete. These two do not inherently go together.  It also goes vice versa, you could be amazingly naturally skilled but have horrible fitness. This side though is more easily recognized by individuals. But with sports like motocross it is harder to discern a clear boundary for where the line in the sand is drawn. If you had the fitness of a sit at your desk accountant who worked out twice a week to make themselves feel better but you had the riding skill that Villopoto does, you could accomplish a lot in the sport.  However take someone like Ryan Villopoto off of the bike and put him in a soccer game, basketball game or any other number of sports and it may become more apparent how lacking he could be in certain physical aspects. Why does this happen?

The reality is that parents over specialize in motocross with their kids at such a young age that a vast majority of other movement patterns are not fully developed. These motor patterns are the important ground work for developing the greatest possible athletic potential. Think of them like a computer program; in order for a robot to execute an action like building a car you have to write a computer program. The advantage that programmer has is that he can simply manipulate the code a few times and it all comes together. Human beings have to go through hundreds of repeated trials and then additionally be taught by someone who knows the proper motor patterns.

Many people may argue that you need to get your kids to specialize early now in order to get good enough. On the contrary, research has found opposite. At the Seattle Sounders Sport Science seminar in 2012 an esteemed member of the Ajax Amsterdam youth development academy (the most prestigious youth soccer academy in the world) presented on this topic. Jan Willem Teuniessen is a PhD. candidate and the sport physiology director of their program. Based upon research and their experience they have found that developing their youth’s ability in multiple sports, makes them better overall athletes and better soccer players long run. As Jan said in his presentation, the former idea of early specialization like previously done in Europe, is wrong and the old American model of multiple sport athlete’s is correct. However, in America we’re pushing towards the old European model while they’re over the water saying NO….GO BACK!!!!

Most kids in motocross don’t do other sports and are fairly limited in their other activities outside of motocross. They have fun like any other kid but some of the same movement patterns that would be developed in a kid who played four or five sports when he was young, are not present in many of the kids who only ride. Granted they may be good racers, but it comes without question that these kids could be better. It is impossible to very hard to argue that kids who are very athletic (have good movement patterns and are active and fit) don't have greater potential on the bike than those who just ride. Their body can more efficiently deal with the stresses of riding and additionally, the movement patterns and skills they may learn from other sports and activities may grant them a greater length of capabilities. This can include the ability to withstand SOME injuries and also have a reaction that occurs without thinking for more unknown circumstances that may occur while riding. The more skilled they are at moving period, the more things become effortless and they gain the ability to divert attention to more focused skills that the sport requires.

The plain and simple lesson here is to make sure that your kids are as active as possible in other sporting activities other than just motocross. I understand the time and financial demands of the sport, regardless the best chance you give your kid is to develop the best well rounded athlete that they can be.