Professor Ian Jeffreys bringing 'Gamespeed' to Gaelic games

By John Harrington

An impressive list of speakers has been assembled for the 2024 Gaelic games Coaching Conference which will take place in Croke Park on Saturday, November 23.

One of them is world-renowned coach and educator, Professor Ian Jeffreys, who is President of the National Strength and Conditioning Association.

The Welshman is also part of the Gaelic games Sports Science Working Group’s Athletic Development subgroup which is headed up by Director of Sport and Physical Wellbeing at University of Galway, Des Ryan.

In this role he has helped develop a new Gaelic games Athletic Development Level One course for coaches working with players in the F3 Youth phase (13 to 17-year-olds) of the player pathway which will be launched at the upcoming Coaching Conference.

Jeffreys has developed the concept of ‘Gamespeed’, a form of speed and agility training that develops the movement skills an athlete requires for optimal performance in their specific sport.

Rather than developing speed and agility as a one-size-fits-all approach, the Gamespeed approach reverse-engineers the athletic development needs based on the demands of the sport.

Ahead of the November 23 Coaching Conference we spoke to Jeffreys about ‘Gamespeed’, how it can be applied in Gaelic games, and why he believes the Gaelic games Athletic Development course is ‘ground-breaking’.

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GAA.ie: Ian, can you give us an overview of your own life in sport, both as a player and a coach.

Ian Jeffreys: Rugby was my game for many, many years. I played professional rugby for 15 years. I was probably one of the first who really took to what is now called strength and conditioning.

We didn't know it by that name back then, it was just fitness and I believe I was one of the first players who would sprint and lift weights regularly. Strangely, that was something that very few people did consistently back then.

Fitness was very much based around simply building aerobic fitness, which today looks unbelievably naive. You look at rugby players today and how that game has changed and strength and conditioning has been one of the big drivers of that.

Being at the beginning of this development was a great advantage as we essentially had a clean slate with which to work. Based on my playing experiences and the impact strength and conditioning had on my career gave me a passion to enable others to benefit.

I was very, very fortunate to be able to integrate that interest into my work through setting up academies at colleges, through becoming a strength and conditioning coach, and then latterly through becoming a Professor in Strength and Conditioning, something I would never have thought was even possible back in those early days of the 1980s where I was just trying to find out how to get a little bit stronger, a little bit faster, a little bit more agile, to enable me to be a better player.

Interestingly, in my day there was no formal path for a strength and conditioning coach, unlike today when you can study for degrees Master’s degree etc in the subject.

Ironically, although I missed this process, I sometimes feel that my experiential pathway has given me a different perspective and I think one of my strengths is the ability to see the challenge of conditioning and athleticism, through multiple lenses. Through an athlete’s lens, through a coach's lens, and through a scientific lens.

GAA.ie: ‘Gamespeed’ is something you're very passionate about. For those who wouldn't know what ‘Gamespeed’ is, can you tell us what it is and why for you it's such a passion.

IJ: I used to play on the wing and speed was one of those qualities that you needed to have to play there but the only advice on improving that back in the early days were to utilise track and field methods. People would say go and speak to a track coach and I did a lot of that and I actually became a qualified track coach. Did it help my rugby? Yes, but the one thing I noticed was that it was incomplete.

The qualities that track brought me were really, really useful in certain aspects of the game, but less useful in others. You would play against players who maybe weren't as quick in a track sense, but they could move well on the rugby field. That triggered off ideas in my mind that when it comes to what we consider to be speed, our picture is incomplete.

After I finished playing, other ways of trying to improve speed came along. People were using a lot of speed ladders, mini hurdles and so on. When I was trying those out, I was seeing that this again wasn’t fully reflective of what's happening on the field.

So ‘gamespeed’ was an attempt to contextualize speed and agility with very much a focus on, “how can I move better in the context of the game to be able to deal with all the scenarios that I’m facing”. These are varied and most definitely not just an open field where you've got 50 meters to sprint, but also involve really tight situations where somebody's right in front of it and you have to be able to make space, either for yourself or for a teammate.

At the time, nobody was considering those movements as they didn't fit in to the definitions of speed and agility that the academic world was giving us. It was this disconnect between what the athlete needed, what the coach was giving, and what the academic world was measuring that led to the concept of ‘gamespeed’.

I used the term ‘gamespeed’ because the term speed had its connotations, the term agility had its connotations, and it was missing this contextual aspect. So, the first thing I ever do when I work with a sport is I watch the sport and I look at the movements that the athlete needs to be able to do, and then work back from that, rather than working forward from the definitions of speed and agility.

GAA.ie: In Gaelic games like any team sport there are different types of players in different types of position, so presumably that's a big consideration too?

IJ: Absolutely. When I look at the sport, I look at what the players need to do and then you what you factor into that is, 'what are the natural tendencies that the player has? What are their capacities?' Because it's not just individual, it's relative. So sometimes you'll be up against somebody who maybe has different capacities to you and you've got to figure out how am I going to use my skills to navigate this game? Adaptability is key.

So, one of the features of ‘gamespeed’ is to try to give players as many options as I possibly can. So even somebody who may lack what we would think of as lightning-fast track speed can still be effective on the field by effective positioning, effective initiation movements, learning feints etc. It's those things that can get lost in what some people use the term 'game-sense' or say that someone just knows the game.

Vague notions like that don't really help me as a coach. I try to get into what are they doing? Asking questions like What made someone Shane Williams such fantastic player in tight spaces? What did he do? What did he do differently? are key. And, interestingly, when you start to do that, you find some definite differences but there are also some commonalities, some capacities that you can develop that really help athletes. Our current speed agility mindset, doesn't allow us to do that because we don't even look at those at those areas. So that's really where ‘gamespeed’, to me, is different to what a lot of other people do.

Due to this contextual applicability, I often use ‘gamespeed’ as my introduction to strength and conditioning because players can see the relevance of it because it relates to what they do on the pitch. I have found much more buy in when I sell strength and conditioning through a ‘gamespeed’ lens than when I sell it through a strength lens.

That's not saying that strength isn't important. It is, but it's less obvious to athletes when they're doing squat patterns and lunge patterns than when they're changing direction and running past people. They can more easily see how the latter translates to performance.

GAA.ie: How do you look at Gaelic games through the lens of ‘gamespeed’, because there’s a lot going on in both Gaelic football and hurling?

IJ: There's an awful lot going on. Looking at the field, there is so much movement that has to happen. That ability to move effectively over the course of a game is important and there's undoubtedly an endurance element to. Efficiency becomes important. One of the dangers that we've got at the moment is we do a lot of quantitative GPS analysis; it’ll tell you how much you've done. It'll also give you the relative speeds, but it doesn't always capture those players who are very, very efficient.

They may not run the distances of some other players because they can read the game, they can move into space effectively, and they can be ready to receive the ball to make different plays and so on which may not show up in the big metrics. So how on earth did they get to the right place?

I played with a number of players in rugby who, from a physical perspective, you thought, 'they're not special'. But they had a knack of being in the right place at the right time. Rather than running two points of a triangle, they would run the one and be exactly where they needed to be. That's another element of ‘gamespeed’, bringing the perceptive and the cognitive elements into it. Rather than just the overall metrics of how far you've run or how fast you've run, you should ask yourself have you actually been effective?

That's some of the danger with GPS scores, we're just looking at the broad numbers, whereas I want to know what impact has this player had? How has the movement contributed to that impact. It's not necessarily a better pair of eyes, it's a different pair of eyes. It's uncanny how many sports I watch where coaches will look for tactical or technical reasons to explain performance, and I will just look at the movement. I'll look at things like a player's starting position, their first few steps, their posture when they changed direction. If we can improve that, we can help the coach with the tactical elements because the players are able to do their jobs better

GAA.ie: Nowadays children take part in less sporting play away from organised training sessions and matches than they did in the past. They're not playing out on the street or at the crossroads as much as previous generations did. That being the case, when you're coaching young players do you have to be mindful of working on the building blocks of good movement that bit more?

IJ: Absolutely. You can never presume that players will have these skills. Even players who are quite competent and playing at a relatively high level haven't necessarily developed all of these movement skills and that often reveals itself in little weaknesses, little holes in their development.

I think sometimes in in a formal coaching environment where players can be a little bit afraid of making mistakes, that freedom to try different approaches can often be lost. One of the strengths of the ‘gamespeed’ exercises is their spectrum. It moves from basic movement patterns right the way through to the game. But at each point it encourages the application of these movements.

So, we'll put a number of small drills where athletes will try to vary their speed, try to gain space by various direction change options. And it can be quite useful because there's the varied repetition that is a powerful stimulus to skill development. Then there's the encouragement of, okay, try it. What worked? Why didn't that work? What could you do next time?

Whereas, when it gets into the into the formal game, sometimes athletes are a little reluctant to do that for fear of coaches' responses or teammates responses in a game situation where someone might say, 'Oh, why did you do that for'. Structured play adds a little bit of freedom to try these different approaches which then can be applied into the game later on.

GAA.ie: A new Gaelic games Athletic Development Level One course for coaches working with players in the F3 Youth phase (13 to 17-year-olds) of the player pathway will be launched at the upcoming Gaelic games Coaching Conference. You were one of those who helped develop the course and will be speaking about it with Des Ryan at the Coaching Conference. Tell us a bit about that course and what people can expect from it.

IJ: Through his persuasive skills Des has been able to bring together some of the best people that span the spectrum form theory to practice. What he's developed in with the GAA, I think, is, absolutely ground-breaking and world-leading.

As far as we know, this is the first structured program across a sport that has been thought through and developed with that multi-lens of the best academic theory blended with practical experience. It has taken a lot of people's experience because you look at the Gaelic Games and you realize that there's going to be the need for force development, there's going to be the need for endurance development, and there's going to be the need for 'gamespeed' development. Each of those has a development structure that, importantly, can be applied at a range of levels.

So, any club coach, is able to say, 'right, how could I do that?', and there are going to be resources to back that up. An awful lot of work has gone into this. Firstly, to get the structure correct, and then, secondly, to build resources around it that allow application wherever somebody is coaching and wherever an athlete is practicing. There are going to be things that they can do, either on their own or at the club, that can help them build the athleticism that will hopefully allow them to get to the very top level, but will also facilitate a lifetime in sport.

We want a fitter, healthier population moving forward and the beauty of a lot of the things that are in this development structure is that they build those habits of exercise. Even if somebody doesn't make it to the county team or even to the club team, they'll have benefited in terms of health and wellness from their participation.

GAA.ie: The Gaelic games Sports Science working group has done a lot of good work in recent years to develop the application of sports science to Gaelic games in a holistic way. As someone who comes from outside of Gaelic games and is possibly looking at it with a fresh pair of eyes, what is your take on it?

IJ: What stands out for me very much is the collaborative, holistic approach that you talk about there. Quite often, especially in larger organizations, because of the size of them there hasn't been that link. I think what has been the real strength here is that this hasn't been a purely academic exercise. It hasn't been a purely practical exercise. It has blended the information

Sometimes the theory is very well researched and looks beautiful, but because it has been so thorough the options to apply it are limited and a lot of people look at it and say, 'Oh, we can't do that. That's going to be too much for us'.

It’s often grassroots coaches who have to apply this stuff so it’s about being able to make that information user-friendly and applicable.

I think that’s what this group has achieved is outstanding. Des (Ryan) will shoot me for singing his praises but he's been crucial to this, because he's been there and done it. His experience has been absolutely invaluable, as has the experience of so many people who've contributed to this, and it's a very powerful way of doing things.

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Tickets for the 2024 Gaelic games Coaching Conference on November 23 can be found - here - with prices as follows:

€65 per person (for a group of 5 delegates, club price) or €75 per person (individual). Includes lunch and refreshments and great day out in Croke Park!