Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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UNDER THE DOME Elisa Angeles is in her sixth year at Notre Dame, and she handles the strength and conditioning programs for the women's swimming and diving, women's cross country and women's soccer teams. She recently discussed some of the department's methods of getting ahead of the curve in a devel- oping field with Blue & Gold Illustrated. Blue & Gold Illustrated: How much has tracking sleep time become involved with your work? Angeles: "It's always been an important part. We're in a unique situation where academics are pretty highly regarded. With just the shift as a whole with society, you're up all night on your phone or watching TV or doing homework. "Anything we can do to hammer home the mes- sage of you need to get to bed and take care of your body. This is just as important if not more than the workout you're doing with us. We need to make sure that's happening." Blue & Gold Illustrated: What have you discov- ered from this emphasis? Angeles: "The women's swim team has definitely made that a priority, and they had a great year with some amazing swims. They downloaded an app that was kind of on their own. They could track it themselves without having to send anything to me. "Correlating it with different testing measures within performance — am I running slower? Am I jumping higher? How much stronger am I get- ting if we went through the same workout and I slept six hours and you slept eight hours, and over the course of our training period I got 10 percent stronger and you got three percent stronger. Just connecting the dots." Blue & Gold Illustrated: When did you begin to stress this area and similar ones with the athletes? A n ge l e s : " I t 's a l w ay s b e e n a focus. The past two years, maybe three years, we're m o re awa re o f different ways to measure. We al- ways talk about it. You need to go to sleep. " Yo u n e e d to s t a y h y d r a t e d and eat well and push the basics. That's really what it comes down to. Now we have hard numbers that will reflect the things that you're doing." Blue & Gold Illustrated: What is the weightlifting tendo-unit you use to track athletes' performance? Angeles: "It's locked right into the [equipment] rack. There are two cameras on it and there is an iPad; it's a touch screen. It's a table that is mounted to it. It will pop up whatever exercise it is. "When you end the set you can replay your set to use as a coaching tool as well and say you need to keep your chest up you see yourself." Blue & Gold Illustrated: How long have you used that? Angeles: "It just came out so we're just starting to understand it ourselves. Each of us have used it a little bit with our teams. … There's always a learn- ing curve of touching the wrong button. It takes a session or two to get things moving smoothly. But it's a new toy. I want to play with it." — Andrew Owens Five Questions With … ELISA ANGELES, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF STRENGTH AND CONDITIONING Angeles has brought new technology to the condi- tioning of the women's s w i m m i n g a n d d i v i n g , women's cross country and women's soccer teams. PHOTO COURTESY NOTRE DAME MEDIA RELATIONS