Does research meet practice?
I write this blog from a unique perspective - I am both an academic & a practitioner, but I am not a researcher.
If you’ve ever read a research paper and thought, “This is interesting, but it would never work in the real world,” you’re not alone. Admittedly I reject a large amount of what I read simply because I am a practitioner… Many practitioners—whether they’re S&C coaches, or healthcare / rehabilitation providers—feel that academics often miss the mark on practical application.
But it’s not always because they aim to be! The problem usually comes down to incentives, environment, and priorities.
1. The Incentive Problem
Academic careers run on publications, grants, and citations. That’s the currency of the field. It doesn’t matter if your study makes a coach’s job easier or solves a logistical headache in a clinic—what matters is whether your peers find it “novel” enough to cite.
This pushes research toward problems that are interesting to other researchers, not necessarily to the people working on the ground.
2. Echo Chambers
Many academics spend most of their professional lives surrounded by… other academics. When your daily conversations are with people who speak the same theoretical language, you can lose touch with how messy, urgent, and constraint-filled practitioner-life actually is.
That’s why some research findings feel like they were designed for a petri-dish, not for a sports team, a busy rehab clinic or a personal training studio.
3. Let’s move an Iceberg shall we?
Research is slow. I did it in grad school. Bleh, never again. From designing a study to getting it peer-reviewed and published can take years. By the time a finding hits the journals, the industry it’s meant to inform might have already shifted, adopted new tech, or moved on to the next problem. Trust me, I commend those who have this level of patience and stick-with-it-ness and it is needed! Not all of us are meant for warp speed. And practitioners should be more focused on what the body of evidence pints towards - so BIG PROPS to those who summarize 100’s of articles.
4. Organized Data vs. Messy Reality
To get reliable results, scientists try to eliminate as many variables as possible. That’s great for proving how variables are related or how they influence one another—but the real world of sport, performance, training & rehab is full of confounding factors, unpredictable behavior, poor adherance and imperfect conditions. The result? Findings that are technically correct but hard to implement without ideal circumstances. The best practitioners, in my opinion, know how to apply the basic sciences well like biomechanics and physiology.
5. Different Priorities, Different Lenses
Practitioners often need solutions that work right now, even if they’re not perfect. Academics are trained to care about why something works, even if it takes a lot longer to figure out.
Both perspectives have value—but when one side dominates, the gap widens.
Bridging the Gap
Not all academics are out of touch. Some coach athletes, consult with businesses, or work alongside front-line professionals. The best breakthroughs often come when researchers bring the evidence and practitioners bring the context—and they build solutions together. This is FUN!
Bottom line:
Academics aren’t inherently disconnected from reality—the system they work in often pulls them away from it. If you’re a practitioner, please don’t write off research entirely. Instead, learn to spot the studies that are truly applicable and collaborate with researchers who understand your world and create experiments high in feasibility.
That’s where theory meets practice—and where real progress (and the magic) happens.
