Toby Edwards is currently a Strength & power scientist for Australian Track Sprint & BMX Race athletes as well as a Strength and conditioning coach and researcher interested in all things strength, speed, and power development. He had key involvements in podium performances at the 2022 World Championships and Commonwealth Games. He has experience providing strength and conditioning support to National, International, and Olympic athletes in Australia and the United States across several sports including Australian football, college basketball, college football, and track cycling.
In this episode Toby discusses:
- His sporting background as an athlete/S&C coach in Australian rules Football.
- His time in the US with Purdue University.
- Completing his PhD studies investigating speed and it’s influence in Junior AFL athlete success.
- His role at Cycling Australia and the upcoming World Championships and Olympic Games.
You can listen to the episode full here.
You can follow Toby’s work via his Twitter: @tobyedwards_phd and Instagram: @tobyedwards_phd .
Join us in Edinburgh, Scotland for the LTAD Workshop on February 25th & 26th, where Rob Anderson and Jared Deacon will be covering all things adolescent training including the development of strength, power, speed and agility. Get your tickets now here:https://bookwhen.com/ltadnetwork/e/ev-sbt0-20230225000000 .
To learn more about the LTAD Network check out www.ltadnetwork.com or follow on Instagram: @ltadnetwork or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ltadnetwork .
You can keep up to date with Athletic Evolution via our www.athleticevolution.co.uk , Instagram: @athleticevouk and Twitter: @athleticevouk .
Rob Anderson
Toby thanks for crossing the many timezone barrier between us here in Edinburgh and new in Adelaide. So thanks for thanks for coming on today.
Toby Edwards
Thank you, thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to it. So before we dive into your role in cycling and the other bits and bobs, you’ve done a way along the way in your research, take us back to a young Toby growing up in Perth, what would that look like for you?
Now, so I actually grew up four and a half hours north of Perth and a country town called Geraldton.Along the coast, like many Australian cities, our country cities are find a lot of sport predominantly, Australian football and basketball and others go through the kind of that 18 year old age and that’s when I moved to Perth, to I guess, try and try and become professional life, you know, like all of us. And then so kind of played like representative football in the West Australian Football League. And, you know, like a lot of us that are now working with strength coaches didn’t get drafted or didn’t make it to the professional leagues. And essentially, was at a point where I was I still love to work in work in sport in some some shape or form and, and kind of I was you know, interested in kind of after flying those those representative teams interested in kind of development and physical development and training and, and whatnot. So pursue that passion through to university I was I was a mature age student at University and when I say mature age, probably 21 or whatnot, so you know, not that old but I didn’t come straight out of straight out of school, high school and then I went through I guess the back end or backdoor into university in a sense that I had to do a University Prep Course to be admitted into a sports science degree because I didn’t sit there in Australia we have to sit this tertiary enabling, coerce or do subjects towards this so yeah, when when the backdoor is that six months of a uni prep course to get into my Bachelor of exercise and sports science and then kind of followed that through did an honours an honours year, which was embedded at the time I was working with in the waffle, as an assistant strength conditioning coach with South amount of football club which I guess my honours really we use, we use data we’re already collecting GPS data and match involvements and and performance metrics. So it worked well for me.
I had a strong desire to explore and experience the United States and their sporting environment and sporting culture. And the way for me into the United States and for me to support myself was to and rightly or wrongly get a PhD scholarship and and to support me to get over there and and so that opened my eyes to you know, exploring PhD avenues and questions and connecting with people and networking with people in the US to see if we could we could make that happen. I ended up very luckily enough being connected to a strength coach in the US that was working at Purdue University as their director of men’s basketball at a time his name is Josh bonnet off. And he was great, very open and kind of welcomed me and brought me over to, to Purdue to I guess start I guess his internship and some data collection. I spent a year there. It’s kind of things started aligning, I work more closely and closely with Josh essentially became his unofficial assistant strength conditioning coach. So you know,
I would stay back when when he was travelling with the freshmen and work with them. So I was there for a year, moved to Western Michigan University, working with their football programme and you In a similar capacity, it was really tough of an internship. But you know, you’re in the thick of it coaching and working with these coaches under a coach strength coach called grant guide, and call Mari and then move back to to Australia at University of Notre DOM to finish off my PhD. And then eventually now here with cycling Australia or cycling. So that’s my long winded background, my story.
Rob Anderson
So it give us an insight I guess, into the day to day so you’re cycling Australia across a couple of different disciplines in cycling. So what does that look like for you on a day to day basis?
Toby Edwards
So right now is my title, a very fancy title for a strength conditioning coach is strength and power scientist. And I’m predominantly working with our track sprint programme. Podium ready and podium, podium ready and podium categorised athletes throughout the Las categorises our Olympic athletes and then also BMX race athletes. However, we have a you know, tracks when I’m based in Adelaide track sprint programme is based in Adelaide. So all of the athletes live here, however, no BMX race athletes kind of all over the world, racing different competitions, and you know, most of them live live in the US. So that’s more of, I guess, an online kind of personal training or strength conditioning coach with regular meetings with their coach Sam Willoughby, who lives in San Diego, myself and the athlete is making sure that phase planning, everything’s running smoothly and aligned. So it’s day to day in Adelaide. I guess a typical day, we’d roll into the gym at 830. For some, I guess, self myofascial release stretching, what not athletes would run that themselves into our gym programme, which would go anywhere from kind of nine o’clock through to 1111 30 at times, big three, our gym sessions. With cutting our break in between, we kind of slam in some meetings and some food down your throat and then get back onto the track. And I guess my role there is just to assist our national sprint coach Matt Crampton with anything that he needs help with on the track and I guess for that for their track sessions.
Rob Anderson
I was when I was doing the kind of background research on this and looking at your LinkedIn I was expecting like so many other sports for so I think to be based at the Institute of Sport in Canberra. So it’s an interesting one that the HQ is in Adelaide did give us a bit of background detail on that. How’s that? How is that the situation?
Toby Edwards
Oh, to be fair on I’m not 100% Sure. They’ve been based here for years. There’s probably some some kind of deal with the South Australian government and all cycling to be able to be able to base us here. And then to be fair, the only residential programme here is the sprint programme. The track endurance programme comes and goes in camps when the weather’s nice so in the summer, and then a lot of the time there with pro road teams and road teams racing through Europe so logistically, they’re a little bit more complex and then so kind of sprinters are stuck here and cold Adelaide through the winter time but we made the most of it for sure. Yeah, no, no they’re jealous relative everything is always relative not Yeah,
Rob Anderson
So it’s interesting as well because obviously the two disciplines their track cycling and BMX track cycling has got you know, a pretty long and established history and like our Olympic level BMX pretty new is Do you see a defining difference in culture between the athletes of the two like is there a bit more free spirit and the BMX guys are they is what do you how do you see the differences between the two in terms of athletes are funny.
Toby Edwards
The track sprinters are definitely a lot more discipline. I mean, I’m not going to say that’s just that’s probably not the word. The BMX race is also very disciplined, but I guess they’re just used to a lot more structure around their training environment. And having a lot of support around them in terms of performance support, nutritionist, physiotherapist, doctors, masu strength coach coaches, you name it. There’s trucks printers have have access to and I guess that’s been that’s been their, I guess their culture and what when what they’re used to and I think it shows up within the type of people that they might be as well in terms of The the outside life is very, you know, you know I’m speaking on the majority here can be quite structured and, and they thrive on that. And then rightly or wrongly, I mean, the BMX race typically has been a little bit more row with kind of, they have their own coaches that are aligned with kind of the IRS or cycling kind of structure, and it’s very new. That kind of stroke gardeners just come in as kind of a head coach of action and acceleration who is like overseeing trucks bring BMX freestyle BMX race, and, and what’s happening is we’re trying to create somewhat more of a high performance system around BMX race, and, you know, provide as much performance support as we can, whilst these athletes are travelling around the world racing and training and without a residential or daily training environment. So yeah, you see somewhat different personalities, but I mean, they all have the same goal, and they all want to win. And they’re all you know, they will do as much as they can to improve their performance. So lots of similarities, but also, they’re very different.
Rob Anderson
Yeah, I guess, with any the nature of any sort of sport, where there’s the touring element of, you know, being in hotel rooms, or, you know, going from city to city, whether that’s basketball in the States, or, you know, even thinking a lot more those kind of free spirit sports, things like surfing and snowboarding, stuff like that. The challenge is trying to keep things, I guess, you’re trying to, like maintain a level of delivery on the road, when the facilities are changing, the location is changing, the access to things is changing, that could be a real challenge in it.
Toby Edwards
Yeah, definitely. But I think it’s also very important not to take that away from the sport. You know, it’s thrived in its own kind of history and tradition. And you’d never want to take that away from from the athletic from the sport itself, I think there’s just to be careful with of, I guess, a maybe a staged approach to providing these performance support levels. And, you know, somewhat more of a structure around them. You know, everyone has the best intentions. But yeah, I guess it’s definitely important not to, not to lose the tradition of the sport in doing so.
Rob Anderson
So, in your role of strength and power scientists is that is that just in the, I guess, day to day monitoring and adjustment of training programmes or planning or training programmes? Are you doing any research in your current role? Or is it primarily that integration to the coaching team
Toby Edwards
predominantly coaching on the floor, I prescribe programme monitor or the gym loads. For BMX race athletes and sprinters whilst kind of assisting our sprint coach on the track, however he sees fit and, and, you know, my background is not in cycling. I’m one year into this position. And previously, you know, didn’t didn’t know too much about the cycling world. So I’m learning a lot about track efforts and the prescription of track efforts and progressions regressions. And how do we achieve a really it’s it’s kind of a similar concept as to what adaptation i’ll be trying to seek and then and then what is the stimulus that we need to create this adaptation. And then what effort is going to best suit called Best allow us to provide this stimulus and so we do that in the gym. But then when we when we’re prescribing track efforts, or what I’m learning is when coaches are prescribing track efforts. It’s also very similar in a sense that you can manipulate gearing ratios, entry speeds, I guess distances to hit various cadences and talks to achieve or make a more powerful athlete. So I guess, yeah, I do a lot of like, working with the with the coach about talking about rationales and understanding why, why things are the way they are on track.
Rob Anderson
So it’s always difficult when people ask if we kind of set off here where people have done a PhD and things are getting published because people might see the year of publication is 2020. Well, but that could have been in process for three or four years. So sometimes casting your mind back to research requires, you know, blind the done stuff a few older things mentally. But take us back to your your PhD research. So you mentioned how initially maybe had gone on to plan the states and kind of reorienting that. So talk us about, you know, how did that opportunity come up? What was the kind of target population and the kind of initial questions when you’re thinking about the PhD research
Toby Edwards
I guess I’ll speak to the faces that was completed and highlight one of the issues with with the first one is in the past. So I came back from America obviously. Beats speed focus. In America, everyone loves speed athletes, very powerful and explosive, and a lot of the good speed and sprint coaches come out of America and being involved in that environment, I thought, comparing back to Australia is, you know, we don’t do a very good job of it. You know, we do have a lot more kind of aerobic endurance by sports and AFL soccer, rugby, etc. You know, all these fullbacks, we do have this, we do have the sprint, and everyone talks about being fast and whatnot. So I thought, Well, why let’s do some type of research or investigation into, into sprinting speed and, and performance back here in the US. And I mean, in Australia, sorry. And at the time, Jamie Martin, and his group had developed this force velocity, or horizontal or sprint force, force, the power profile, and done some really good work with that. And that was in it’s kind of in its infancy, or a few years, since I developed it, so it’s quite new at the time. So I picked kind of got up and ran with it in Australia. And then I, as I moved back from the US did, funnily enough, there was a position that had opened with South America football club in the same role I was at with the with the Junior, or the under 18, or the China US team, which is kind of the level where they would get drafted to the AFL from. So I just fell back into that into that role, which, you know, kind of really helped me with the data collection, and design and implementation of my PhD I guess, the biggest aims of the thesis and what I was trying to look at was just examined underlying force, velocity, power characteristics, through cross sectional analysis, and different levels of competition, through maturation status and age, chronological age, draft outcome. And then we will kind of we ran it ran a little mini six week intervention to title up. And it really going into the question, you know, in this in Australian football, we have a draft combine. And in this draft combine, we measure sprinting speed over 20 metres, and they run on the literature and you speak to saying that, Oh, there, we only accelerate for two to three seconds in a sport or in the game. So, you know, two or three seconds, 20 metres, we’re really only assesses someone’s, I guess, acceleration capacity. or whoever, if you looked at, looked at the sport and watch the game itself, yes, the sprint might only last two to three seconds, but they’re never really they never accelerating from zero. They’re always accelerating from some level of some pace job, Sprint, run, walking, even whatever you want to call it. So a lot of times they are reaching close to their maximum sprinting speed or their maximum velocity. So I thought it was important to capture not only just the acceleration phase, but you know, extend it to to a distance where they’re achieving their maximum velocity. And so that was my thoughts around designing my thesis and my PhD
Rob Anderson
there’s some really good points that I think you know, obviously a lot of people around the world won’t be familiar with, with AFL but I mean, even those who are who are so my dogs going, Hey, Rex, go home. Got it. We’re doing it is normally fully asleep by now. Yeah, for those who aren’t acquainted with AFL, the running loads in a game of a crazy high, like these guys cover some serious distance, but speed is still a determining factor, isn’t it? If you want to be first with the ball, both from an attacking and defending perspective, speed is a critical factor.
Toby Edwards
Yeah, great. I think we’ve I mean, with a lot of with a lot of sports. The big moments happen fast when someone does something far they sprint away. And I guess in AFL, someone gets the ball in a contest and is able to slow down a bit of a contest and deliver it inside 50 or run away from someone off off the back. Like, it’s exciting. And you know, you can break the lot, we call it break the lines, I guess, in football, where you just run and carry the ball through through the next line or positions and then deliver the ball a little longer. And it mean, it’s definitely important, and you hear you hear people talk about he’s not fast enough or whatnot. So I think it was I thought it was very important to investigate a little further.
Rob Anderson
So if I’m, you know, in layman’s terms, looking at kind of what you described, so we’re kind of looking at what role does some of these other factors have in speed in terms of maturation and competition level? And how does that speed maybe relate to the outcome of this player getting drafted or not drafted or the level of competition they’re playing it? Is that correct?
Toby Edwards
Correct. And we got two or two of the studies were focused on that. And one was essentially just a descriptive kind of descriptive study that looked at you know, we had we call them elite junior athletes or ones that were state representative. So West Australian state under 18 players and under 16 players, and we compared them to just under 18. And and under 16 players that played at the waffle level. So I guess you might call them subbly. And in essence, from from the force velocity power profile, the differences in you know, had to go back and check these check this, these results previously, differences in relative maximum power between the two groups, with obviously the elite under 18, producing greater relative maximum power, which was reflected through differences in relative horizontal force with no differences between their maximum velocity capacities or Baymax. So that essentially remained stable, their maximum speed capabilities were similar. However, our elite athletes will be late athletes had better I guess, acceleration qualities, or greater relative or relative theoretical maximum force, which showed up in them being I guess the effect sizes were greater at shorter distances, 510 metres, then they were at kind of 2030 35 metres. Essentially, that was, if I was to break down one of the studies that would be
Rob Anderson
Yeah, and I guess, yeah, as you said, it’s kind of putting some markers on things I can we’ve seen a lot of studies like this, like Dan Baker has done some good work. And in rugby league doing that kind of comparison, you know, what’s the strength of power levels of Junior subbly? etc. So it’s looking at similar kind of principle really, isn’t it? One of the differentiating factors?
Toby Edwards
Yeah, and I think, I guess, you know, when you’re, when you’re doing it, when you’re trying to write a thesis, you’re tell somewhat of a story. So I think it was important to just actually put the data out there and say, Look, here is a standard level for our elite, junior athletes or our sub elite junior athletes at different ages, you know, under 18, and under sixteenths before we then explored, okay, well, what how does maturation influenced this that I guess a younger level, we went from 12 1314 year olds, to capture the various stages of peacock velocity and maturation? Kind of before moving into look, are we able to actually improve this through somewhat of an intervention during training, and then kind of finished is depending on where you wanted to put it worked out, or whether it doesn’t actually matter in regards to draft outcome. And so that was the story story of the PhD if it were recorded, or what
Rob Anderson
did you find from that maturation perspective?
Toby Edwards
So I guess, there’s absolutely no paper under review at the moment. I guess I’ll the findings of that one. Essentially, we run this longitudinal so we ran an acute kind of just a descriptive study again, looking at the differences between chronological ages and biological ages. And it kind of got small differences between 13 and 14 year old groups for maximum velocity and sprint times greater than 5050 metres Obviously with the with the older the 14 year olds are able to reach higher velocities which which showed up in horizontal force plus the power profiles, the 14 year olds demonstrating or achieving greater absolute theoretical force and absolute max power. And this was mostly due to I believe, just increases in bodyweight which is which is which is still important to say that a heavier athlete can still achieve accelerate faster than a lighter athlete and greater momentum. So, I think is an important finding in itself. And then when we looked at biological age, we found very similar results. So, differences in absolute theoretical force or fo between pre peak height loss of the athletes and kind of that mid or circa peak height velocity athletes due to differences again in absolute p max and absolute theoretical force and not so much maximum velocity, essentially just your your body mass, these guys are larger, but they can still accelerate to the same time, which then lead into this longitudinal we look we call it a longitudinal development, or how does, how does sprint performance or somebody’s force velocity profile developed naturally, just over time, we got to kind of go a bit of criticism on this, and rightly so, for calling it longitudinal, when essentially we just measured them at one time point and then measured them in another time point and didn’t do anything in between. But I still think it was it was really cool and relevant to say whether, you know, if athletes progress from pre to Surco, or pre to post or circuit opposed to say, what’s actually happened with their profile. And I guess so when we, when we pulled them all together and just looked at them as a group and looked at how well the natural development of Sprint performance, that there was improvements in all sprint times and maximum velocity. And again, I guess different to what we found before was, we had improvements in horizontal maximum power output was achieved through improvements in theoretical velocity. So at the other end of the this force velocity relationship with non significant changes in theoretical maximum force or relative theoretical maximum force. And essentially, the pull this down to the increasing bodyweight and the strength levels did not increase, I guess, at the same time. And sometimes, we wonder, so when we looked at like, it’s like a small group of athletes, relative force at the start of the sprint was actually lower. Post or post it’s one year than it was when they were a little younger and a little lighter. As the essentially that of the findings of, of our, those two maturation studies, in brief.
Rob Anderson
So how did that play over over time? Obviously, you know, every sport kind of has has its bias towards speed, but obviously, you know, he’s talked to any athlete being faster is always better. So does that play out in the NFL Draft? Is that what you saw with the guys around those greatest speed characteristics? Were the guys it’s more successful or is it more complicated than that?
Toby Edwards
Yeah, so this study was the was the last one it kind of tied the thesis all together and from that testing period, where we looked at elite versus sub elite athletes at the under 18 level. We kind of just group them differently in terms of did you get drafted and Did you not get drafted and ran a t test and compared compared to variables? Well, essentially what we found was small, sorry, moderate differences in in maximum velocity capacities. Between drafted and non drafted athletes, which suggested that drafted players could produce more relative force at high velocities than their non drafted athletes. And that they had differences in an absolute force, an absolute maximum power or theoretical force, horizontal force again, just to be sure and horizontal power between the draft and a non drafted athletes, which again suggests that momentum is playing a factor here. But then what I’ve what I did draw from from this final study was that we didn’t find too many differences between early acceleration. And if the differences do lie in that maximum velocity phase, or they can reach a higher max velocity, and that was the differences were greater with those variables then came back to really questioning as to whether that 20 metre sprint at the Combine should just be extended to, you know, another 10 metres or another 20 metres and do a 40 metre sprint. To further assess an athlete’s ability or sprinting ability, you know, and I think we could get, you get a wealth of more information. And you can keep the traditional metrics in regards to your five minute time, your town, your 15, your 20 min of time or whatnot. But now we’re getting like, we can get flying 10s, we can get a 30 metre 40 metre, and you can look at different flying efforts with different entry spades and investigate that a little bit further. But look, there’s so many contractual factors that goes into whether an athlete gets drafted or not. And this is just one. So we notice some differences. Whether where they fit in a holistic view of drafting an athlete. You know, I think I think we’d have to explore a few more factors to definitely, definitively say that this is somewhat important.