Sports Science Fuels The Eagles' Quest For Improvement by DAVE SPADARO

Brent Celek knew something wasn’t quite right with his body. As a seventh-year veteran in the NFL in 2013, he was productive, durable and a valued member of the Eagles’ roster. But, he knew that his body just didn’t feel right.

Every day was more and more of a struggle for Celek to prepare himself and function at a high level on the football field.

“I just felt really tight in certain parts of my body. Sore. Not right," Celek says now. "I played through it, but I wasn’t right.”

Right about that time, new Eagles head coach Chip Kelly introduced the players to the field of sports science. Everyone, from the owner to the front office to the players, was excited to understand more about how this practice could help the team.

But sports science was not new. Athletes have been seeking an edge since the dawn of competition. There are essays about the role of proper nutrition dating back to the second century. But it was not really until the 1950s and ‘60s that serious work began to evolve in the field centering on a systematic approach to training.

After that, individual sports were the fastest adaptors to the ideas about proper nutrition and training. The field landed on an international stage in 1980 with the success of the Australian Olympic Swimming Team. In 1981, The Australian Institute of Sports was opened and included sports nutrition, performance analysis, physiology, recovery, and even skill acquisition among other things. In the 1984 Olympics, Australia won 24 medals.

But while that performance was enough to catch the world’s attention, selling NFL players on the benefits of sports science was not so easy. How could these fields of practice apply to a team sport? It has only recently started to be widely adopted and elements more broadly practiced by team sports trainers and coaches.

But in 2013, Celek was looking for answers.

He quickly embraced the program.

“I needed something like that. My body was starting to break down. My lower back, my hips, everything was hurting and I didn’t have any real solution,” Celek says. “I didn’t know what to do. I got with Shaun Huls."

Huls, the Eagles’ director of high performance on a sports science team that includes head athletic trainer Chris Peduzzi and the strength and conditioning staff, and his team set about diagnosing the problem.

“They put me on a program which included a series of exercises for me to do. I think it’s helped my career immensely," says Celek. "I haven’t had great posture my whole life and working with our group allowed me to identify the problem and correct it, to put my body in the right posture so that I don’t have fatigue and wear and tear on certain joints. For me, it’s hips, low back and shoulders. Those are my deficiencies. It’s on a person-by-person basis and for me the key was getting my body into the right position so that I can keep my joints healthy.

“When I stretch certain muscles, my legs and my back, it releases my hips. They’ve got a thousand different exercises you can do. You have to figure out what applies to you and I try to do it as much as I can and stay on top of it. I’m running faster now than I was years ago, I would say.”

Before the sports science program was introduced to the Eagles’ locker room, Celek would have turned to a supplement to feel better.

“But there was no getting to the root of the problem to get better," Celek says. "I’d take some anti-inflammatories to help it, but now I’m not taking anything. I’m really trying to take care of my body more and more.”

That example is – at its most basic – what the sports science program hopes to provide to players: a means to better understand and respond to their bodies so that they can perform and recover optimally.

Players are given opportunities to have their data analyzed, everything from hydration levels to fueling recommendations, bio-mechanical evaluations and more. The sports science team works with the coaching staff and the players to provide an individualized, corrective program designed to increase player efficiency and recovery.

“When you look at what a player undergoes, the load that they have from practice and training and the psychological load as far as memorizing the playbook – stress is stress," Huls says. "That’s why people who have mental stress can experience physical pain as a side effect. The physical load of practice, strength training and the psychological load of memorizing the playbook and making split-second decisions under stress all carry a cost. Quantifying that stress helps to identify how much rest, sleep and fueling strategies can be most effectively used to repeat their efforts on subsequent practices. It’s really balancing the energy output versus energy input.”

The program is about behavior change, notes Huls. “And the only way to get behavior change is to evaluate the player and then to have feedback loops so that others know what the player is going through. We take the feedback we get from players and develop a program based on that feedback. It goes back to asking good questions and giving good answers to each player.”

It isn’t fair to say that the success of a player is a result of sports science. Players work very hard and they combine that with natural talent. That gets them into the NFL and provides them with a chance to have success.

“We are here to help the players understand how they can use the information and resources we have to feel better, to feel stronger. We think we can help them,” Huls says.

But there is no magic answer, no blanket advice that Huls or his team offers players. If a player increases his sleep from six to eight hours each night, he isn’t automatically going to be an All-Pro. (Nine hours is the optimum amount of sleep each night.) But there are those who perform better with six house of sleep, notes Huls. From a hydration standpoint, it’s recommended that athletes – this pertains to the general public as well – drink water that equals half their body weight in fluid ounces daily and then add 16-32 ounces of water for each hour of physical activity.

Everyone gets something different from the program.

“What I get most from the program is a way to recover from a workout or a game and then to accelerate the recovery,” says safety Malcolm Jenkins, who earned his first trip to the Pro Bowl in the 2015 season. “I used to do what everyone else did – cold tubs when you’re sore, for example. We have a lot more to do to recover and it helps. I’ve learned about nutrition and the benefits there. The sleep aspect is huge. I used to average about six to seven hours a night and I’m to probably seven to eight hours and it’s definitely made a difference for me.”

Wide receiver Chris Givens played for four seasons in St. Louis and Baltimore before signing with the Eagles as an unrestricted free agent this offseason. He had heard of the Eagles’ Sports Science program and he was open to advice on how it could improve his performance. So he presented something he had noticed throughout his career - his left leg always seemed stronger than his right leg. That’s just the way it was. He never thought much about it, but now he was wondering and decided to see what Huls and his team had to say.

What he found out surprised him: It wasn’t just that his right gluteal muscles were weaker, but that they were not firing as effectively as the muscles in his left gluteal. Huls and his staff immediately put Givens on a program to strengthen the muscles in his right leg and Givens noticed the difference.

In a big, big way.

“Since I started working with Shaun in April, I’m light-years ahead of where I’ve ever been on the field,” Givens says. “I had always just figured one leg was stronger than the other. I never knew it could be broken down the way it has been and I’m moving so much better on the field. It’s a huge difference. We did a lot of exercises for each leg, we did things that activated my glutes, we did things to strengthen my adductor muscles. I don’t know the names of the exercises but, I know that once my glutes were firing correctly, everything fell into line for me.”

Everything that the Eagles’ Sports Science program offered to players was new to Givens.

“I think everything that Shaun and his staff do is great," Givens says. "I love it. I’ve always been big on nutrition and sleep, but what we’re doing here is eye-opening. It’s perfect. It’s in-house, so I can come in here every day and specifically work on an area and improve. No doubt, this has helped me become a better football player.”

This is what Huls, Peduzzi and the rest of the team want to hear.

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