Combining the best of both worlds: A conversation with Carla van den Berg on research and coaching
Dear aspiring researchers and coaches in kinesiology,
In today's blog post, I’m thrilled to introduce you to Carla van den Berg. With an academic and research background in Kinesiology, Carla's journey has taken her from playing varsity rugby and working as a student athletic therapist, to working in research and knowledge translation, to coaching, and now to pursuing her PhD, focusing on the menstrual cycle in female athletes.
Carla is also someone who I consider to be my peer mentor. After I completed my bachelor’s in Kinesiology in 2018, I wasn’t sure what my next steps were in my career. Should I find a job, do a course based master’s or thesis based master’s? So I took a gap year to try and find the answer.
I was fortunate to have Carla guide me through my gap year by sharing her own stories and connecting me with people in her network. I gained immense clarity and wisdom from her help. While Carla did a thesis based masters’, she helped me realize that a course-based master’s was right for me.
As I progressed through my kinesiology career, I started to realize that there are very few people who are able to blend both research and field experience eloquently in the world of strength and conditioning.
That is the reason why this blog post holds such a special place in my heart. I’m honored to be interviewing my peer mentor, Carla, who played a massive role in kick-starting my career in strength and conditioning. Today, I get to share with you some of the nuggets of wisdom that Carla has instilled in me over the years.
Join us as we dive into Carla's dedication to injury prevention, her drive to build long-term connections with athletes, and her unique perspective on the application of research in the sports world.
Hey Carla! Could you tell us a bit about yourself?
I’ve loved sports since I was a little kid, and I feel extremely fortunate that I’ve been able to live out this passion through my academic and professional career paths. This started with my undergraduate degree in Human Kinetics at St. Francis Xavier (StFX) University in Nova Scotia, where I also played varsity rugby and worked as a student athletic therapist with women’s soccer.
After graduating, I moved to Calgary to do a thesis-based master’s in kinesiology at the University of Calgary. I also obtained my CSEP-CEP designation. Following that, I continued working in various jobs related to research, coaching, strength and conditioning, and knowledge translation.
Now I'm doing my PhD in the Doyle-Baker lab at the University of Calgary. My research is looking at the menstrual cycle in female athletes. I’m also working as a sport scientist in women’s soccer and an S&C coach in youth soccer. I’m super passionate about working in female sport, so I’m really happy in my current roles.
How did your personal experience with sport injury influence your passion to do research in injury prevention ?
I tore my ACL playing soccer (classic!) right before I moved to Calgary to do my MSc degree. It’s interesting because when I was initially looking into MSc programs (pre-injury), I remember not being interested in topics related to sport injuries. As my degree went on, my project started considering sport injury variables alongside the health and fitness measures I was already looking at in youth.
This new topic area helped explain why I may have been at risk of tearing my ACL - I think a lot of it came down to not training properly when I played sports growing up. I would show up to my games and just play. Our warm-ups were just dynamic exercises. I didn't do any strength training. I’d never been taught how to lift properly when I was younger. I had amazing coaches growing up, but looking back I don’t think any of them had received much education about injuries and strength training that they were able to apply with us.
These personal experiences made me want to increase awareness with coaches and teachers as well as with the athletes I coach.
What made you decide to switch from being a knowledge broker and someone who was in research to becoming a strength and conditioning coach?
In my Knowledge Broker role with the Sport Injury Prevention Research Center, my purpose was to get as many people as possible to start using neuromuscular training warm-up programs (i.e. incorporating aerobic, balance, strength, and agility exercises into their warm-up routines before their PE classes, training sessions, games, etc). There is strong research that shows that these warm-up programs are effective at preventing injuries in sport.
I really enjoyed that role for a few years and I am fortunate that I still get to do this part-time. I got to travel around the province to deliver workshops to coaches, teachers, and anyone who was involved in physical activity and sport. The workshops were about how to implement neuromuscular training warm-ups with the athletes they coached, the students they had in their classes, or the clients that came into their clinics.
I loved working with people, but after a while I felt that I wanted to be in a role where I’d be able to build long-term connections. With most people attending the workshops, I'd see them once and that was it. So I think part of the reason why I wanted to pursue coaching is because I wanted to work in an environment where I could build relationships over time. I think you can have a lot more of an impact when you’re able to take the time to build relationships with people, especially with youth.
That was the other thing - I really wanted to work with youth. I previously had plans to go back to school for education before realizing that it wasn't for me. Coaching was something that made sense and was a little bit more aligned with what I was interested in around sport and exercise.
Overall, I think I transitioned into coaching more to be able to have a direct impact and be on the ground running; doing this stuff that I was already teaching the people coming to my workshops. But I also wanted the opportunity to do that and implement it with teams that I had relationships with and was involved with.
How has your background in research helped you as a strength and conditioning coach?
It’s made me an extremely critical thinker. So much of academia is learning how to correctly read and interpret research studies; “Should I take this information and start implementing it? Or is it a poorly constructed study and I’m unable to trust the results?” I was trained in a lab that really values that critical appraisal process when you're reading a journal article, which I think is an incredibly valuable skill set that not a lot of people have.
As a coach, there's always a "why" behind everything that I program. This critical lens also makes me observe and question what other people are doing. Not in a negative way to critique them, but as a way of learning. I’ll ask them questions like, “Why did we program this drill before this drill” or “Why are we doing this on this day?” I think that helps me learn processes a little bit better.
That being said, it's also a bit frustrating for me too because sometimes I want to be able to turn that off and be like, “I know this is right and I'm gonna do it because today we're tight for time.” Sometimes you have to just pull from what you know based on the constraints that you have. But then I always have to stop myself and think through everything….
Also, working in epidemiology (population level studies) helped me look at things from a different perspective because you really recognize what you're doing on a larger scale. Having that bigger picture also gives you the motivation to continue to implement best practices.
How can experienced coaches use research as a foundation while tailoring it to the specific needs of their athletes?
The thing to remember is that the research is not going to be 100% applicable to every single person that you're working with. It's typically representative of an overall trend. So I think as a coach, especially if you're a really experienced coach and you have a background in physiology, S&C, etc, you'll be able to use the research as your base foundation and then tailor and tweak what you need to to make it applicable to the population that you're working with.
Going back to injury prevention programs as an example: Let’s say you work with a team that has experienced a fair number of ankle injuries last season. Through the research, you’ve learned that the 11+ program (an evidence-informed injury prevention program) is effective at reducing injuries in soccer players. You decide to use the program with your team, but to tailor it to your players, you decide to add in a couple more single-leg balance, calf strengthening, and banded ankle exercises.
I think it's about having experienced coaches who have been educated in understanding the research. Sometimes you will get very specific studies, which is great if you happen to be coaching that specific population. But we're not always that lucky. So you will have to adapt in an informed way.
I like this question because my MSc, Research Coordinator, and Knowledge Broker experiences were very related to population-level research (epidemiology). Whereas now with my PhD, I’m zoning in and being a lot more specific to the individual. We’re aiming to model hormonal profiles across athlete populations, but you still need to understand the individual. So I'm trying to transition towards that. I’m still learning about how to be more detail-oriented and apply what I am learning from research to elite level athletes.
How do you know if a research study is good or bad? Are there any key tips or red flags to look for?
There is a great twitter post that summarizes this. In short, I think a lot of it honestly has to do with understanding the methodology and statistical tests that they used, which is a pretty challenging thing to do. I am in my fourth year of grad school and have worked in research for the last 10 years, but I'm still taking classes on stuff like this. So it's kind of hard to break it down and give an answer in a few sentences. To start, I would recommend:
1) Thoroughly read the methods section: Pay attention to how they recruited and selected their participants. Do the methods that they chose to follow make sense to the world that you're working in?
2) How many people were in the study? Typically in biomechanics and exercise physiology studies, we tend to see ~30 people. In epidemiology studies, we get into the hundreds and thousands of participants. Studies should report their power and sample size calculations.
3) Look at the year the study was published. For example, menstrual cycle research in sport is a rapidly growing field, so I tend to not pay too much attention to studies that are more than ~10-15 years old, unless they are seminal papers.
4) Check out systematic reviews. These are a great way to summarize existing high-level evidence. If done well, the authors have done the critical appraisal process for you for a handful of studies.
5) What journal is it published in? While there is some great research published in open access journals, the review process is sometimes not as stringent as other peer-reviewed journals because authors pay to have their research published in these. You can also look up the impact factor of the journal, which essentially is an indication of how important that journal is in its field. My typical rule of thumb is IF’s of 3 or higher are decent (but that being said I have also had research published in journals with IF’s lower than 2!)
Where can people connect with you?
People can connect with me via Twitter: https://twitter.com/CarlavdB_
Let’s wrap up this interview!
Big thank you to Carla for taking time out of her busy schedule to do this interview. It has been a privilege learning from Carla van den Berg, a dedicated researcher and coach who has transitioned from research to coaching, focusing on injury prevention and working with female athletes.
This interview was the resource that I wish I had in my undergrad. I had zero experience in research and no idea how to critically interpret articles.
Understanding how to apply research into being a strength coach was something that I didn’t value until the end of my undergrad. It wasn’t until my master’s that I started to really grasp the importance of being critical with analyzing papers and knowing how to apply research to being a practitioner.
I’m very grateful to have a peer mentor like Carla to show me the value of how to apply research into being a coach early in my career. I hope that this interview with Carla has given you a head start with knowing how to combine both research and field experience into your career.
As we continue to learn from the journeys of experts like Carla, we can undoubtedly contribute to improving the health and performance of athletes in our field.
Sincerely,
Your Kines Mentor,
