[This is a guest blog by John Evans. John is a recent Exercise Science graduate of Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania and in his second stint as an Athletic Development Intern at Athletic Lab]
heart-rate-soccer

Monitoring player heart rates during a fitness session.

If you have ever spent a considerable amount of time studying training theory, you have likely seen a variety of fancy graphs with loading schemes. Early on in my athletic career, I would look at these graphs and find myself inquiring about how they were created. How were they measuring training load? Were they using an equation I had never seen? Was it a point system? Were they drawn to scale?

In other words, how were they quantifying training load? What can be more confusing is considering how one training stimulus equates to another. How do three sets of four reps of power cleans at 85% compare to five sets of 40 meters of sprint volume? How does one stimulus affect the other? What happens if an athlete misses a day? What if they have an upcoming game and want to be sure they are fresh? How do those variables affect the graphs I am staring at in a textbook?

This is where the player monitoring system comes in. It doesn’t necessarily answer all of the questions stated above, but it does tell you about the athlete’s fatigue and fitness state. Athletic Lab’s Dr. Mike Young has developed similar monitoring systems for other teams such as the Vancouver Whitecaps of the MLS.

Instead of creating a hypothetical graph with a great deal of guess work, the player monitoring system assigns values to each athlete’s state of fatigue and creates a pictorial view of how that athlete is responding to training. This takes the focus off of an ideal training plan and shifts it towards responding to how the athletes are handling the load they are being given. It takes variables into account such as sleep, energy, focus, mood, and in our case, concrete power outputs.

This has several benefits. For one, it is individual. Each athlete is being monitored based on his or her level of fatigue. Secondly, it allows coaches to create an ideal training plan and adapt that plan depending on how each athlete is adapting. Thirdly, coaches are able to view training more holistically. As a coach, you may work with athletes for 60-120 minutes three to four days per week, but the athlete has another 22-23 hours of time outside of training that the coach can’t control. That being said, the player monitoring system helps gauge how the athlete is recovering when they aren’t training.

The metrics that we collect at Athletic Lab include:

  • Daily survey scores
  • Sleep scores
  • Peak power outputs through the use of the kBox3 kMeter
  • Training impulse scores
  • Polar team system heart rate data
Power output reading from the kMeter.

Power output reading from the kMeter.

These metrics are quantified on a 1-5 scale, analyzed in excel, and then used to create a daily loading score. The player readiness score is created by using the daily loading score across five days with the most recent score being weighted the highest. This score is then given to the coaches at Athletic Lab for implementation in training sessions.

Additionally, this allows our internship group to learn how to collect and analyze meaningful data, utilize sports technology appropriately, and communicate with other staff members about the athletes? levels of fatigue.

These are just a few of the benefits of the player monitoring system and Athletic Lab is utilizing this system to ensure that athletes are receiving the highest quality of coaching. The system being implemented is a part of the sports technology up fit taking place at Athletic Lab this summer.