Case Study – Dr. Craig Duncan

Dr. Craig Duncan is a globally recognized authority in human performance science. His expertise has been fundamental to the success of top-tier clubs, guiding them to victories in prestigious international competitions and league championships. His strategies have also played a key role in national teams’ impressive runs in continental cups and world-level tournaments. His expertise transcends the realm of sports, bringing his high-performance strategies into the corporate sector. Learn more at https://drcraigduncan.com.

Doing the Basics of Sports Science Well

In Craig’s early days of guiding sports teams, each player used to record their training sessions, how hard or easy they thought each workout was, and other information in personal diaries that they’d sometimes share with their coaches. As technology progressed, Craig saw an opportunity to digitize this process, track more variables, and make player data more readily available.

“Athletes aren’t with us all the time, and there are many hours when they’re on their own,” Craig said. “It was important to find a way to track their readiness before they got to training. I needed something simple, and Francois was wonderful, so it was an easy choice to go with AthleteMonitoring back in 2011.”

While some teams become fixated on capturing hundreds of data points and doing ever more complex analysis, Craig decided that doing the basics of player tracking well would be more impactful.

“I always tell people that sports science is very simple,” he said. “I forecast the predicted outcome of each session and then gather data into AthleteMonitoring to understand if we met that desired outcome, including the response of each athlete. It’s about advising the coaching staff whether that session should be adjusted or not depending on the outcomes of the players. If we’re not monitoring the right variables, then we’re missing an important piece of the puzzle.”

As he has watched the AthleteMonitoring platform evolve over the past 14 years, Craig believes that the capability to build a complete electronic medical record (EMR) for each player is one of the most significant developments. Data is available to authorized personnel across the continuum of care and is protected by a HIPAA and GDPR-compliant platform that prevents unauthorized access to sensitive information.

“AthleteMonitoring has worked really hard on getting the medical side right,” Craig said. “I can’t tell you how many organizations I go into where their medical data is not governed very well. It’s on spreadsheets and all over the place. There are so many holes from a legal perspective because a physiotherapist can have player data on their computer and leave with it at the end of the year. Information is stored in all these different spaces, while it could all be absorbed into AthleteMonitoring.”

Supporting Global Sports Performance Management

Craig is at the forefront of a new wave in elite sports, where a seasoned professional can consult with multiple teams in various sports based in different locations around the world. Utilizing AthleteMonitoring from his home base in Australia gives him as much oversight into the daily training, game day performance, and recovery of athletes that he’d get if he had an in-person role.

“Working from Sydney, I’m very comfortable with my understanding of what’s going on wherever that team is,” Craig said. “I can wake up in the morning and see the AthleteMonitoring dashboards for each team we’re working with. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world if we’ve got all the data coming in, have a good philosophy, and there are well-trained people on the ground. Because I’m acting as a virtual high-performance manager, your organization is saving a lot of money.”

When working with national teams, Craig builds relationships with club teams and helps them see the value of him tracking their players’ fitness, health, and wellness.

“I like to monitor players on a daily basis from a national team perspective,” Craig said. “By having that data, you build up a real understanding of the athlete and can look at their training loads so that when they come into camp, you don’t get large spikes in the data. I recently worked with a wonderful coach who understood this concept. He wanted to know where the players across the world were at from a performance and wellness and a training perspective to help selection. A player could be a long way away from home, isolated, and not enjoying their club life, but for one minute a day they’re putting data into their home nation’s system, and they realize that there’s a relationship.”

As he consults with national and club teams across the globe, Craig puts similar best practices into place. He combines this with tailoring his approach to the needs and cultural expectations that each local environment presents.

“A wonderful thing about AthleteMonitoring is that I’ve been able to put it into most of the languages of the teams I’ve worked with,” he said. “When you’re going into Japan or the Middle East, that goes a long way to simplifying the data, and I can customize the system to what’s required in that specific place. It’s wonderful when you can start to see it take hold and people see how it’s contributing to the whole performance outcome.”

Pursuing a People-First Approach

In addition to gathering proven objective data from players, Craig utilizes AthleteMonitoring to capture self-reported information in weekly questionnaires that connect the dots between subjective experiences and performance.

“Sleep has always been a cornerstone for me, so we look at sleep volume and quality,” Craig said. “We also look at perceived muscle soreness, fatigue, and psychological state. It’s also important to leave a space for comments because if someone takes the time to add one, then there’s usually something there that I need to look at.”

Objective data can paint a large part of any athlete’s performance picture, and paying attention if their numbers trend up or down is key to making the right intervention. But Craig believes that taking a holistic view of the whole person is also a must.

“Athletes are humans as well, and there’s a lot going on,” Craig said. “Happy players play better, but they might have contract negotiations, issues at home, or a newborn – all these things that go into an athlete’s wellbeing are often overlooked. Performance is capacity minus noise, and if you’re building up the noise, then you won’t see a net gain in performance. AthleteMonitoring allows us to track the noise.”

Tracking athletes’ wellbeing alongside their training metrics gives Craig a starting point to create more informed touchpoints that enable him to get to know the people he is working with, so he can better meet their needs.

“People don’t care how much you know – they know how much you care,” he said. “I’m there to serve the athletes, coaches, and the organization, and once they know that, then they engage, and it makes a difference to performance. I have a philosophy about self-science, which is the study of you by you. Each player or corporate client is their own one-person business, and if I can help them understand themselves better with data, then they’ll know what they have to do to maximize their potential.”

Targeting Optimal Outcomes When It Counts

AthleteMonitoring enables a performance director, like Craig, to establish baseline ranges for every player’s objective outputs and wellness markers. If their scores are good, they’re marked green, if they are close to one end of the range or the other, they’re marked yellow, and if they’re outside the typical high or low value, they’re marked red. This can help Craig simplify player availability and readiness for the coaching staff, so they can make more informed selection decisions.

“We can have so many data points from training data, match data, wellness data, and sleep data,” he said. “At the end of the day, the final thing that you’d put in a report is whether we’re good to go or not. That’s what a coach wants to know: how many players have I got for the session today? I could have a player that’s red flagged all across, but just from that I’m not going to make a decision that they’re out. There needs to be a conversation with the coach, and then they can end up making that call.”

In addition to giving the coaching staff an overall, team-level view of the entire squad each day, continual monitoring enables Craig to keep tabs on each player and investigate any potential issues, so they can be quickly resolved.

“Even though it’s a team sport, it’s played by a group of individuals, so we need to look at the scores for each person. Having standardized ranges lets me know if a player is outside their norm. If there’s something in their wellness data, I can ask the physiotherapist to take a closer look and see what’s going on. You can take a small, acute snapshot of what’s happening and then use longitudinal data to see which way someone is trending. That’s very powerful.”

In working with national teams and high-level clubs, Craig has found that AthleteMonitoring helps get ready for individual games during the season. He also realized that using the system to track the readiness of each player and the squad as a whole can help effectively manage a team during a multi-week tournament.

“It’s very important in tournaments like World Cups or at the Olympics – where you’ve got multiple games – that you’ve got all this data before they come in, to keep athletes in their optimal performance zones,” Craig said. “When I was working with Australia in the 2015 Asian Cup, we played South Korea in the group stage and again in the final. The match data from the group game showed similar distances and high-speed distances ran, but in the final, we ran an extra 10 kilometers overall. We had fantastic coaching and medical staff who were able to keep the players in a balanced wellness state. Over the course of the tournament, we didn’t get fitter, but their fatigue was higher, whereas ours was managed.”

Over many years of using AthleteMonitoring with different high-performing teams, Craig has seen technologies come and go. He values the consistency that his vendor contacts provide.

“Usually when an organization grows, you lose your personal relationships,” Craig said. “That has never happened with AthleteMonitoring. Francois is a great person who believes in his system and is constantly working to make it better.”
Having used multiple AMS platforms, Craig has seen the impact of just about every option firsthand. He’s very clear on which one he recommends and why.

“If you’re going to buy an AMS, you can’t go past AthleteMonitoring because of the price and the fact that it gives you everything you need,” Craig said. “It’s a simple, thorough system that’s had years of continuous improvement and does a wonderful job.”

As he has expanded his performance consulting to the corporate world and other domains outside of sports, Craig has started to see the potential for tracking training, health, and wellness.

“Everyone wants to perform and maximize their potential, so why can’t we extrapolate what we’re doing with athletes?” he said. “In police departments, fire brigades, and the military, you want to know where people are at. AthleteMonitoring/FITSTATS allows you to do that because it’s versatile. I want to give every client the world’s best practices, and monitoring is an important part of the performance cycle.”