Strength and Conditioning Blog | BridgeAthletic

The Pursuit of Information with Mike Curtis

Written by BridgeAthletic | Oct 21, 2020 6:40:18 PM

In this week's episode of Powering Performance, we are joined by Mike Curtis, Head Strength and Conditioning coach for The University of Virginia Men's Basketball. Tune in to learn about how Mike uses data to drive decision making and how he gets the athletes involved in the process. 

Ways to listen: 

Spotify

iTunes

Web

Check out these three highlights:

1. Mike shares how data drives decision making and how he gets the players involved in the process to spark conversations around why they are doing certain training. 

"A lot of it is driven by the athletes. One of the things that I don't want to do is constantly pull them into a room and just kind of overwhelm them with data. So what I've found is that the more you educate them on the front end as to what we're doing, the more frequently they come to me and ask those questions."


2. Mike is currently pursuing his PhD while continuing to work with a high performance team. He explains how he is able to take what he is learning and apply it to the work he's doing with the players. 

"If you take on the responsibility of incorporating data into what you do, you have to be able to draw some inferences from that and be able to separate the signal from the noise because there is a lot of noise out there. If you can find that that signal, it helps you to be more efficient in what you're doing as a coach, and that's been my pursuit."

 

3. Mike provides some advice to other strength coaches to approach everything with humility because there is always more to be learned and the importance of being less competitive with other Strength and Conditioning coaches.

"If you don't know how to relate to the athletes that you're dealing with, which requires some type of humility, then you'll never be able to maximize who you are as a strength conditioning coach or performance professional."

 

Connect with Mike Curtis

mac5s@virginia.edu

 

Thanks to Mike Curtis for joining us!