When there is little available research to gain understanding of a particular issue — say thermoregulation impairment from a spinal cord injury — what do you do? 

In the case of para sport, it turns out, you do a lot.

It’s not until you start learning more about para sport that you begin to gain an appreciation for the added layers of complexity and extra challenges faced by para-athletes and the practitioners that support them. 

One of the major hurdles is the dearth of scientific literature, especially compared with extensive research in able-bodied sport. This is important because para-athletes don’t always respond to a given stimulus the way an able-bodied athlete would.   

A key reason for this lack of research is due to fewer athletes and very few homogeneous groups of athletes within a sport.

“It’s hard to publish research in para sport,” explains Melissa Lacroix, Exercise Physiologist at Canadian Sport Institute Ontario (CSIO) and physiologist for Canada’s Wheelchair Rugby Team.  “Within a given sport not everyone has the same impairment and much of what exists are case studies or ‘one-off’s’ that are hard to publish or apply to specific situations.”

For an Integrated Support Team (IST) in para sport, the result is doing the best with what you’ve got. But in Canada, it also means doing more.  No science?  We’ll do the science!

To address gaps in para sport, Own the Podium (OTP), in partnership with the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Sport Institute (COPSI) Network and Sport Scientist Canada, established the Paralympic Sport Professional Development Working Group approximately 2-years ago. The group, which includes Lacroix, creates opportunities for practitioners in para sport to learn more about specific physiological considerations for para-athletes.

Initially, the group created an education module with an applied perspective, but after conducting surveys they learned that there was a deep hunger amongst practitioners, coaches and administrators for more information and knowledge about the physiology that underpins how different impairments affect para-athletes.

This is where doing the science comes in. To help fill that need, the group wrote a review paper that was recently published in Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences titled, “Physiological Considerations to Support Podium Performance in Para-Athletes.”

The paper outlines the neurophysiology of the most common impairment groups and the practical considerations when supporting para-athletes, along with performance enhancing interventions.

One of the six authors of the paper is Erica Gavel, a retired Paralympian in Wheelchair Basketball, and PhD Candidate at Ontario Tech University.  With a unique perspective as both an athlete and researcher in para sport, Gavel says that a lot of learning has to happen for practitioners in para sport to make good, performance-based decisions.  “This paper gives the practitioner enough information for them to be able to dig deeper into a specific topic.”

Digging deeper is tough to do when there isn’t much out there to dig for, something Gavel acknowledges is a major challenge.  To further address these gaps, Lacroix says the working group helps practitioners share what they know.  “There is not a lot of data available, so we had to create more collaboration across Canada and lean on practitioners to share their knowledge and experience.”

For IST practitioners, access to data and information is improving thanks to slowly-increasing published research.  One such practitioner is Jess Kryski, IST Lead and Physiologist for Canada’s Para Nordic Team and physiologist at Canadian Sport Institute Calgary (CSIC), who welcomes more para-specific research.

“Often we are looking at research using able-bodied endurance athletes and then, with knowledge of various impairments, ensuring that we are implementing monitoring to achieve the training effect we are looking for with different training interventions,” explains Kryski. 

With advances in para sport research, Kryski and her team won’t have to rely on able-bodied science to make the best possible decisions about training and performance.  Lacroix says that the tools and baseline levels used in able-bodied research don’t always apply to para-athletes because their impairments change how their bodies respond to different interventions.

For now, Kryski says the most important thing is to stay current with the literature that is out there and how it may apply to the athletes she works with.  “Do the study participants have similar impairments? And are the interventions applicable to our sport, sport demands, and the type of training that is done for endurance sport?” she asks. 

The answers come in the form of new research, sharing of knowledge by practitioners across the country and an individual approach to each athlete’s needs. 

For example, in her role IST role as a Physiologist for Wheelchair Rugby, Lacroix focuses mostly on applied physiology, but she still aims to collect evidence and publish her research as much as possible.  This evidence can be shared and applied to other athletes with similar impairments, as long as the channels of collaboration are wide open.

In what was a truly national, cooperative effort between OTP, the COPSI Network, and the Network’s expert practitioners on ISTs across many para sports, the end result is the advancement of para sport research, and a foundation of sound science to make evidence-based decisions supporting Canada’s para-athletes in their pursuit of the podium. 

But there is still so much work to be done.

Jess Kryski, no doubt an expert in her field, still has a lot of questions.  “A really key area that I would like to see more research done in Para Nordic Skiing is on equipment and technique based on different impairments,” she says.  “There is so much done in this area for able-bodied skiers.”

Challenge issued.  Any takers?

Written by: Kristina Groves

Photos: Dave Holland / CSI Ontario

About the Canadian Sport Institute Calgary

The Canadian Sport Institute Calgary provides world-class training environments in Alberta. With the support of our partners, we deliver leading sport science and medicine, coach education and life services to help Canada's high-performance athletes achieve Olympic and Paralympic podium performances. www.csialberta.ca

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Media Contact:

Annie Gagnon, Director, Marketing & Communications

Canadian Sport Institute Calgary

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Annie Goncin, Manager, Athlete Services & Digital Media

Canadian Sport Institute Calgary

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The Agony of Injury

Athletes get hurt, a lot — especially in high-risk sports — and the long road back to the field of play can be uncertain, challenging, and soul-crushingly hard. Knees, brains, shoulders, hips, and yes, hearts, are broken, damaged, strained, pulled, and torn apart. Physics always wins.

But athletes heal, too. They mend those knees, brains, shoulders, hips, and hearts with awe-inspiring resolve. While they cannot get back a lost race, the tiny moment a knee is shredded, or the anguish that is lived in the aftermath of an injury, they can, and always do, look ahead to the challenge of healing.

So what, and who, is there to help them begin again, heal, and return to the sport they love?

Return to Health

Recovery and rehabilitation wouldn’t be possible without a coordinated and sustained effort by the athlete and a team of medical experts from the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Sport Institute (COPSI) Network. In most cases, the Integrated Support Team (IST) is called upon to fill this most critical role: sport medicine physicians, orthopedic surgeons, physiotherapists, athletic therapists, strength and conditioning coaches, and massage therapists.

The process they follow has a name: ‘Return to Health’, or ‘Return to Performance’, and it’s a relatively new perspective on athlete well-being that has emerged across Canada in a concerted effort to identify standards and strategies to address athlete injuries. It’s about healing the body, but also encompasses mental health and social factors, too — a bio-psycho-social approach.

A national symposium held in Calgary in 2019 brought together experts and practitioners from across the COPSI Network to begin formalizing a national strategy for return to health.

“It’s part of the evolution of sport, where a more holistic approach to athlete health is emerging,” explains Matt Jordan, Director, Sport Science at Canadian Sport Institute Calgary (CSI Calgary). “You can’t be successful on the international stage if you don’t have strategy around health.”

Jordan says the idea behind return to health is to provide athletes with a centralized hub for their rehabilitation, as well as the resources to stay there as long as is needed.

It is a work in progress and the COPSI Network has been putting pieces into place by relying on its own resources to support injured athletes across the country. There are several locations in the Network with formalized programs.

Knees and Brains

Last year, in the sport of ski cross, the national team sustained seven season-ending injuries. Most were knee injuries, and many involved surgery. Amazingly, of the seven athletes, five are back on snow and four recently made the Olympic Team for Beijing. Craig Hill, IST Lead - Ski Cross at Alpine Canada and Strength and Conditioning Coach at Canadian Sport Institute Pacific (CSI Pacific), in collaboration with Isabel Aldrich-Witt, Return to Performance Lead at CSI Calgary, were instrumental in their recoveries.

Once an athlete is injured, Hill and Aldrich-Witt pool their expertise with other IST members to provide the best care for the athletes. Once the initial emergency phase of injury management is completed, decisions regarding the course of treatment, like surgery, are made, and a recovery plan is set up. Then an athlete joins a program inside the COPSI Network and they’ll remain centralized there until rehab is complete. It can take anywhere from nine months to two years to recover from knee surgery.

“The goal is to get them back better than they were before the injury,” says Aldrich-Witt. She says all the athletes she’s worked with since the program began in 2019 have made it back.

As a specialist in knee injury rehabilitation, Aldrich-Witt brings a unique skillset to her practice, relying on an evidence-based exercise approach, as opposed to manual therapy. The focus at first is on swelling reduction and range of motion. Then comes strength development, where the athlete must achieve their pre-injury strength and power, determined annually with baseline testing. Dynamic work and return to snow are next.

With over 35 practitioners on the Ski Cross IST, Hill says that communication can be challenging at times. But they meet frequently to share critical details. “The team trusts each other,” he says. “While we don’t always have the same philosophy or agree, I know I can speak up and we can have a professional conversation.” The process is productive because they keep what’s best for the athlete at the forefront.

Seeing the athletes return to competition after a grueling injury and rehab process is extremely rewarding for IST members like Hill and Aldrich-Witt. “We don’t celebrate that enough,” says Hill. “Just getting back is a huge milestone for these athletes.”

In sports where crashes or collisions are frequent, it’s concussions that can be debilitating — and scary. The team at Institut national du sport du Québec (INS Québec) has established the Concussion Interdisciplinary Clinic to provide athletes with the best care possible. The clinic offers a multidisciplinary and integrated approach with a high level of specialization.

Thomas Romeas, Research and Innovation Lead at INS Québec, says that once a concussion is sustained, there is a systematic management and return to health plan put in place. “Our main goal is to protect the athlete and provide them with the best possible recovery, to accelerate return to performance and reduce the risk of a new concussion or injury.”

INS Québec Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Suzanne Leclerc, was instrumental in crafting the COPSI Network guidelines for concussion, a national collaborative effort. Romeas emphasizes that because concussions are multi-modal in nature, experts from different fields are needed to better understand treatment. “This will only be possible with all our national resources, shared knowledge and expertise,” he says. “And Canada has everything to lead the way in this area.”

Hearts Healed

For Dave Ellis, High Performance Director - Ski Cross at Alpine Canada, the benefits of the Return to Performance program are that it is formalized, centralized and close to home for many ski cross athletes. Because it operates outside of the Ski Cross program Ellis says he relies heavily on COPSI Network practitioners to ensure that his injured athletes get the care they need, including mental health.

The Return to Performance program is a huge value add to our Ski Cross program,” he says. “Everything is in-house and there’s a more concentrated and collaborative program around an athlete.” The same level of care is provided between members of the COPSI Network and it enables athletes to stay close to home during recovery.

The entire sport community is increasingly aware that the approach to athlete well-being is evolving to address all aspects of human health, including broken hearts. For Jordan, Director of Sport Science at CSI Calgary, what the COPSI Network provides is scalable, regional IST expertise in the return to performance. “At the end of the day, athletes need to know that if they’re hurt, they’re taken care of.”

Canadian Sport Institute Calgary: @csicalgary

Written by: Kristina Groves @kngrover

Photos by: Dave Holland @DaveHollandPics

February 2nd, 2022

About the COPSI Network
The Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Sport Institute Network (COPSI Network) provides world-leading training environments to elite athletes and coaches across Canada. The team of experts delivers sport science and medicine, coaching, research and innovation, education and Game Plan services to power podium performances and help Canada win more medals. The Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Sport Institute Network includes four Canadian Sport Institutes (Pacific, Calgary, Ontario and Québec) and three Canadian Sport Centres (Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Atlantic).

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Annie Gagnon, Director, Marketing & Communications

Canadian Sport Institute Calgary

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Noah Wheelock, General Manager, Operations & Communications

Canadian Sport Institute Pacific

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Jean Gosselin, Director, Communications & Marketing

Institut national du sport du Québec

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Laura Albright, Senior Advisor, Communications & Marketing

Canadian Sport Institute Ontario

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Canadian Sport Centre Saskatchewan

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Canadian Sport Centre Atlantic

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Canadian Sport Centre Manitoba

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 4th, 2022

CALGARY, ALBERTA – The Olympic flame in Beijing is officially lit, and athletes are READY to go!

215 athletes and 84 coaches from 15 sports make up Team Canada. And 55% of the Canadian athletes competing in Beijing are affiliated with the Canadian Sport Institute Calgary (CSI Calgary).

CSI Calgary is proud to be working with 119 affiliated athletes in alpine skiing, biathlon, bobsleigh, cross-country skiing, curling, figure skating, freestyle skiing, ice hockey, luge, skeleton, ski jumping, snowboard, and long track speed skating.

Defending Olympic champions Justin Kripps (2-man bobsleigh), John Morris (curling mixed-doubles), Brady Leman (ski cross), and Ted Jan-Bloemen (long track speed skating: 10,000m) all call Alberta and CSI Calgary home.

In addition to celebrated champions and veterans, the Alberta contingent includes the youngest member of Team Canada in 16-year-old Brooke D’Hondt, who will make her Olympic debut in the snowboard halfpipe event.

Other medallists returning from Pyeongchang include the women’s hockey team who will be looking to ‘change the colour of the medal’ they won in 2018. Tristan Walker and Justin Snit who helped Canada to a silver medal in the luge team event will lead a young team in their fight for another podium.

Each of these athletes head to Beijing with their CSI Calgary “Team” alongside them in spirit. Nine members of our staff are also in Beijing to provide last-minute preparation support. The expert team-behind-the-athletes include physicians, physiotherapists, massage therapists, mental performance consultants, strength-and-conditioning coaches, and sport physiologists.

Everyone’s attention will certainly be on the number of medals Canada will win over the next two weeks. But we would be remiss not to mention that approximately 70% of CSI Calgary affiliated athletes in Beijing have started or completed an undergraduate degree, proving they are truly all-around athletes.

CSI Calgary would like to thank our funding partners for enabling us to deliver our wide array of leading-edge services to athletes and coaches. We are grateful for their support: Sport Canada/Own the Podium, Canadian Olympic Committee, WinSport, Government of Alberta, Coaching Association of Canada, Canadian Paralympic Committee, and the University of Calgary.

The stage is set, the athletes are ready, and we will all be proudly cheering them on in the next two weeks. GO CANADA GO!

Photo: Andrew Lahodynskyj/Canadian Olympic Committee 

About the Canadian Sport Institute Calgary

The Canadian Sport Institute Calgary provides world-class training environments in Alberta. With the support of our partners, we deliver leading sport science and medicine, coach education and life services to help Canada's high-performance athletes achieve Olympic and Paralympic podium performances. www.csialberta.ca

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Media Contact:

Annie Gagnon, Director, Marketing & Communications

Canadian Sport Institute Calgary

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Annie Goncin, Manager, Athlete Services & Digital Media

Canadian Sport Institute Calgary

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Culture is a tricky thing. Definitions of the word abound, seemingly endless in their iterations, but in basic terms, as a noun, it is simply the way of life for a group of people.  It originates from all manners of human existence, emerging over generations in time and place until it becomes just the way things have always been. 

But culture is also a verb, meaning to grow or cultivate living material into a culture medium. In this way, we can enable the growth of various organisms under the right conditions. 

Put verb and noun together and you get the idea that we can culture culture — we can foster the development of a way of being for a group of people.

While defining culture (verb and noun) is relatively easy, creating, changing and living it is an entirely more difficult endeavour. Culturing a culture, in any place or organization, takes an extraordinary degree of sustained effort.

And to what end?  Well, in sport, cultivating the right culture — a culture of excellence — leads to one very desirable thing: consistent high performance.

“We understand that our organizational culture likely has a significant impact on performance,” says Cathy Tong, Director, High Performance — Long Track at Speed Skating Canada.  “If we can strive to create a high performance culture, we can realize many benefits.” 

It’s an obvious end point, but not an easy one to achieve. 

Decades of success precede today’s top long track speed skaters, so why, and how, do you take one of the country’s most successful teams and build a better culture? It turns out that even in a sport that has historically been one of Canada’s best there is room for change, growth, and improvement.

The approach is an understanding that you don’t have to keep things the same as they’ve always been, even if it has been successful.  It’s an understanding that there can be, and is, a better way.

When Bart Schouten, National Team Coach at Speed Skating Canada, came to Canada twelve years ago from the Netherlands, every training group was working in silos.  “It wasn’t just the skaters competing against each other, but the coaches, too,” he recalls.  A lot of medals were won in spite of that, but over time, gaps in culture surrounding the success came to light.

Turning the tide on the silo mentality has taken years, but things are different now.

“One thing that is truly different now is trust,” claims Todd McClements, National Team Coach at Speed Skating Canada, who works alongside Schouten coaching the Men’s Long Distance group. “You can’t get to this point unless you can trust each other.”

Schouten agrees. The trust, he says, has opened up a culture of cooperation, using everyone’s expertise optimally.  “It takes a group of people getting to know each other and learning about each other, people that actually really want to work together,” he explains.  “It’s a group that has learned over time that cooperation gets you the furthest.”

The Integrated Support Team (IST) is part of that group and their expertise, and openness to working together, as Schouten suggests, is a big part of what made a culture shift possible.  “It opens the door for the IST to play a bigger role,” says Schouten.

In past years, the IST was a strong and effective unit, but one of the gaps was a lack of consistent cross-pollination between disciplines.  It happened sometimes, but not always. The team recognized that they wanted to improve upon that and make it better.

Already years in the making, it was the post-2018 debrief that set the course for the culture that would emerge over the next quad.  Tong points to increased trust, transparency, clarity and an individualized approach within the team as key factors in creating the new culture.  

Bringing together athletes, coaches, and IST to define shared values was the starting point.  What grew from there is a truly interdisciplinary team of experts that operates in harmony, though not always perfectly so, with coaches, athletes and staff.

Weaving all the threads together is the High Performance Management Team (HPMT), a group established to monitor every signal, and address them all using an iterative and fluid process to find solutions by relying on IST expertise, context from coaches, and superb communication channels. 

The HPMT is made up of Tong, Dave Paskevich, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiolgy at the University of Calgary and Mental Performance Consultant at Speed Skating Canada, and Scott Maw, Canadian Sport Institute (CSI) Calgary Exercise Physiologist and IST Lead at Speed Skating Canada, who meet weekly to discuss every last detail of who, what, where, when, and why.  

“It’s about what are you hearing, seeing, picking up, like the satellite thing,” says Maw, who has been working with the long track team for over 15-years. “We’re sharing all the information and signals and making sure were getting it. Now there’s a process for dealing with issues. That wouldn't have happened before.”

At the heart of it all is ensuring that the athletes, all of them, are getting what they need by integrating the input and context from everyone to find the right solution.

“We’re not just ticking boxes,” says Maw. “If IST members don’t work together, share and problem solve, it’s not as powerful as it can be when they do that.  Everyone’s expertise from their own domain contributes to solutions.”

By all accounts the HPMT, IST, and greater CSI Calgary community have been instrumental in pushing the envelope when it comes to seeking and implementing the best and most effective tools for performance management, be it the latest technology for athlete monitoring or establishing an IST modus operandi that everyone believes in and commits to.

McClements’ enthusiasm for the culture he now lives is palpable. “The coaching staff is truly a team,” he says. “The trust we have for our IST is huge. All of the IST members, I trust these people and that allows me to work with them.”

The change in culture — performance focused, coach driven, and athlete empowered — has had a profound impact on the team’s way of being, and it goes much deeper than just the IST and coaches, it has seeped into the athletes’ bones too. 

“Ted lost his mind when Graeme broke his world record,” recalls McClements, referring to Graeme Fish’s 10,000m World Record at the 2020 World Single Distance Championships, which he overtook from teammate and 2018 Olympic Champion, Ted Jan Bloemen.  “He just hugged him.”

This, surely, will buoy the team as they head into Beijing 2022.  But lest you think they are sitting back with their feet up, high-fiving their fait accompli, rest assured that is not the case. Culturing culture is an ongoing adventure that never ends, and this team knows it. 

“It’s not perfect,” declares Maw.  “That’s why you’ve got to keep listening and adapting. What works this quad is probably not going to work the next quad, it’s a cyclical process. It’s all listening. There are still gaps, you just try to close ‘em.”

Canadian Sport Institute Calgary: @csicalgary

Written by: Kristina Groves @kngrover

Photos by: Dave Holland @DaveHollandPics

January 20th, 2022

About the Canadian Sport Institute Calgary

The Canadian Sport Institute Calgary provides world-class training environments in Alberta. With the support of our partners, we deliver leading sport science and medicine, coach education and life services to help Canada's high-performance athletes achieve Olympic and Paralympic podium performances. www.csialberta.ca

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Media Contacts:

Annie Gagnon, Director, Marketing & Communications

Canadian Sport Institute Calgary

c: 613.262.9644

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Annie Goncin, Manager, Athlete Services & Digital Media

Canadian Sport Institute Calgary

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