Insights from an Embedded PhD: #7 - Aaron Balloch

Écrit par Mathieu Lacome

My Background

My name is Aaron Balloch and I completed my PhD at the end of 2019 entitled ‘Development, assessment and application of a novel algorithm to automatically detect change of direction movement and quantify its associated mechanical load in elite Australian Football’. My project was a collaboration between a professional Australian Football team (Fremantle Dockers) and Edith Cowan University in Perth. Prior to obtaining the scholarship to undertake this PhD I completed my undergraduate and honours degrees in Exercise & Sports Science at Deakin University in Melbourne.

PhD Expectations

After finishing my honours degree, I globetrotted around Europe for almost 6 months before ultimately returning to Australia, unsure of the direction I wanted to take my career. I had thought about doing a PhD and had also considered other clinical options as further study. Ultimately, my passion for sport had me chasing opportunities to combine the practical elements of living sports science day to day with the academic experience of a PhD that I believed would help me to become a better practitioner. I was lucky enough to be offered a scholarship where I was to be embedded full-time in a professional Australian Football environment whilst undertaking my PhD. The location of this scholarship was on the other side of the country to a place I’d never been before, and knew nobody, so I really had no idea what to expect. But I had no hesitation and was extremely excited to begin a very challenging adventure.

PhD Topic

There was no pre-determined topic attached to my scholarship, so I was given the opportunity to learn and settle into the practical aspects of my role whilst reading broadly, mostly around the technologies I was now using day-to-day (GPS, inertial sensors, HR, force plates etc..). I must admit, I knew very little about inertial sensors coming into the role (my honours degree was very much physiology focused) but one of my supervisors (Dr. Jason Weber) - the High Performance or Sports Science Manager at the football club had started extracting the raw accelerometer data out of the commercial microtechnology units and was gaining some valuable practical measures from this data that wasn’t necessarily available in the commercial software.

On a similar note, I had been tasked with conducting some basic internal validity and reliability testing on some of the inertial sensor driven outputs from this commercial software. When coupling these results with a large body of existing team-sport literature, there was quite a clear absence (and arguably still is) around the capacity and application of this technology to better represent the mechanical and metabolic requirements of in-game/training multi-directional movement demands.

GPS derived metrics are inherently linear and at the time, a vast majority of the commercially available inertial sensor derived metrics were based solely on accelerometry, where the sensitivity of multi-directional movement would be either washed out by the predominance of vertically oriented ground-reaction force present in overland running, or not specific enough to provide detailed, meaningful information that could adequately represent the mechanical demands of on-field change of direction movement and allow practitioners to evaluate and track these movement elements effectively.

PhD Context

My PhD was co-funded between the Fremantle Dockers Football Club and Edith Cowan University. I was embedded full-time at the football club and was essentially working as a pseudo sports scientist as part of the role. I was tasked with preparing the GPS units and heart rate straps for training, monitoring the incoming data in real-time and feeding back information of relevance, then running reports that were sent out to coaches and sports science / medical staff immediately after training.

Positive and Negative aspects of an Embedded PhD

My personal experience was overwhelmingly positive but I’m sure this is not the case for everyone, and I can see how things could go pear-shaped in the wrong environment. The opportunity to live ‘real-world’ sports science day to day cannot be underestimated and provides real perspective around where research can be highly impactful. On top of this, being embedded in such an environment gives you a deep understanding of how a high-performance unit operates (e.g., sports science, S&C, physiotherapy, medical) and allows you to develop those soft skills needed to work effectively with athletes, coaches, and other practitioners. I was certainly living outside of my comfort zone during the early parts of my tenure but came out of it far more competent and confident due to the experience I was able to gain from being exposed to a wide range of sub-disciplines and relevant technologies.    

In my mind there aren’t too many negative aspects. Perhaps there can be a little bit of disconnect between practical and academic supervisors and the unique research challenges or requirements associated with progressing the project within each of these environments. It can also be easy to get side-tracked doing extra tasks or projects that aren’t associated with your PhD. These might be highly interesting and beneficial to your development but can also chew up valuable time, so it really is a balancing act.

Key Success Factors

Persistence

I’m sure everybody with a PhD would preach the importance of persistence so it is certainly nothing new but, in my mind, it is the single most important attribute a candidate needs. Every PhD journey has plenty of ups and downs but ultimately perseverance is what will get you to the finish line. This persistence or drive to keep moving forward and overcome challenges is much easier to find if you are passionate about your topic and you have great supervisors to guide you so (if you get a choice) choose wisely!

Embrace every aspect of being a PhD student

As much as it seems like it at the time, being a PhD student isn’t just reading and writing. Although some practitioners may advise against this, when I commenced my role, I made myself available for every possible opportunity or task within the sports science department to embed myself in the system as best as possible. I still had time to read and write to ensure my project scope and candidature proposal was moving along but I would continue this work in the evenings. Whilst I understand not everyone has the flexibility or capacity to be able to do this, it helped me settle in and find my feet at the club really quickly which laid the foundation moving forward. Luckily, my supervisor at the football club was very aware of the requirements of a PhD and allowed me to find my own balance of time allocation.

            The social aspect of a PhD is also important, nobody understands what you are going through better than your peers. This may be more difficult when embedded within elite sport as opposed to being based at a university but spending some time at the university to meet other students and socialising with these people outside of study will make your PhD experience far more enjoyable.

Teach

Time allowing, I strongly recommend seeking the experience of teaching classes in the undergraduate course at your university. It gives you a little bit of insight into what an academic role might look like (if that’s a path that interests you), allows you to expand your network and normally pays quite well too! Invaluable if you like the idea of moving into academia.

Learn a programming language

This is something I wish I took on board earlier in my candidature. Whilst doing a PhD is extremely challenging and time-consuming, there are opportunities to learn new skills along the way that will not only help you complete your project but also make you more employable when you do cross that finish line (or even beforehand). I started to learn R programming language towards the end of my candidature and have since prioritised this skillset more and more in my current role. Earlier the better! A great language for statistical analysis and data visualisation which will help enormously when it comes time to publish.

Key Traps to Avoid

Intervention Studies

My philosophy around intervention studies is ‘don’t take the risk’. When embedded in a high-performance setting on a day-to-day basis there are other ways to learn and gain experience around the effectiveness of varying interventions without risking your entire PhD project. This is obviously very environment specific and may be viable in a unique set of circumstances, but certainly in professional sport, the players and coaching staff hold a lot of power (as they should) and when performance success is lacking, a research study may get pushed down the priority list very very quickly. I had heard some horror stories in this space prior to commencing my PhD so it was certainly something front of mind when designing my project.

Reliance on collaborators

I was passionate about my PhD topic, and it tied in extremely well with my day-to-day role at the football club, but I didn’t really have the background knowledge in engineering/mathematics and thus entered a collaboration with some academic Engineers at the university. Upon reflection, this was quite a frustrating process where my progress was halted by poor communication and competing demands. If I had my time again, I would probably try and take on much of that task myself (try to learn very quickly) or be more selective when collaborating.

Next Steps for you

I was lucky enough to obtain a full-time role at the Western Australian Institute of Sport just as my PhD tenure was coming to an end. I remain in that role working as a Technical Performance Specialist across both Swimming and Athletics programs. Within my role I am very lucky to still be able to live the day-to-day sports science practices on pool deck and at the track (although very different to my role at Fremantle) and now supervise embedded PhD students within these programs.

I am also continuing to develop some of the work around multi-directional movement detection that I completed during my PhD to optimise the accuracy and reliability of this tool, further demonstrate its value, and provide a platform for practitioners to access this information using their own data.   

List of Publications during the course of PhD:

1.     Balloch AS, Meghji M, Newton RU, Hart NH, Weber JA, Ahmad I, Habibi D. Assessment of a novel algorithm to determine change-of-direction angles while running using inertial sensors. The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research. 34 (1), 134-144.

2.     Meghji M, Balloch A, Habibi D, Ahmad I, Hart NH, Newton RU, Weber JA. An algorithm for the automatic detection and quantification of athletes’ change of direction incidents using IMU sensor data. IEEE Sensors Journal. 19 (12), 4518-4527.

3.     Balloch AS. Evaluation of Kinetic and Kinematic Variables During a Countermovement Jump to Assess Neuromuscular Status in Team-Sport Athletes. Australian Journal of Australian Strength & Conditioning. 26 (1), 49-56.

If you liked this blog post - or at least learnt something - and would like to collaborate, please drop me an email using the contact form. I’m trying to collect as many interviews as I can!

Mathieu Lacome
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Insights from an Embedded PhD: #6 - Robert Stanley