High Performance Practitioner Interview: Professor Stuart Cormack
The next of our High Performance Practitioner interviews sees Chris Barnes sit down with Professor Stuart Cormack, senior lecturer at Australian Catholic University’s school of exercise science.
Having worked for over 14 years as a fitness coach in the AFL and for the Australian Institute of Sport, Stuart now focuses on applied sports science research, with a particular focus on monitoring training load and fatigue in elite athletes and its impact on performance.
Chris and Stuart’s discussion covered several topics related to both general industry themes and Stuart’s research, including:
- Overview of ACU’s structure and purpose (00:00)
- Stuart’s professional experience and how he got into the world of sports and exercise science (02:30)
- How different was Stuart’s experience compared to the narrow academic experiences some students get today? (07:00)
- Are there lessons from AIS that Stuart still draws upon today? (08:45)
- Are training practitioners and sports scientists being pigeonholed in professional clubs today? (09:50)
- Are sports tracking devices essential today and how have they evolved over the years? (11:00)
- Stuart’s current interest in the relationship between load and fatigue (15:00)
- The challenges involved in collecting data for fatigue v load research (17:00)
- How far away are we from making day-to-day, athlete-specific decisions, and how important is sports analytics in helping to make those decisions? (18:30)
Interested in seeing more HPP interviews? You can find them all on the Catapult YouTube channel.