Sports Science

Athlete monitoring is the scientific and systematic process of assessing and monitoring player health and performance.
Athlete Monitoring can be separated into three primary areas:
1) Establishing Baselines and Benchmarks: Consists of conducting a battery of assessments that evaluate general physical qualities such as strength, speed, power, conditioning, mobility, and body composition. These assessments are used to establish baselines in a player’s physical qualities that can be used, if necessary, in rehab and return-to-play scenarios and benchmark a player’s physical qualities compared to their peers to determine their individual strengths and weaknesses
2) Assessing Training Efficacy: Certain assessments are conducted regularly at a specified cadence to determine if training programs are effectively achieving the desired effect.
3) Monitoring Fatigue and Adaptations: Certain tests or technologies are used to frequently monitor the changing physical status of a player and assess the dose-response relationship of training, practice, and games.

Athlete Monitoring

Guiding Principles

1) Occam’s Razor: “Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.”
- If information can be delivered just as effectively with less
complication, always choose the simpler method.
- Understandable white-box approach is always preferred over a
black-box.
2) Goodhart’s Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
- Often, measures collected within an athlete monitoring program are
selected to serve as proxies of general physical qualities that
influence performance. Therefore, it is essential to keep in mind
that improving on-field performance and physical qualities are the
true target of training and practice. If the measures become the
primary target, they may no longer effectively reflect changes in
these qualities since the athlete may simply become better at
performing the test.
- “Don’t train the test.”
3) Less is More: “Strive to get the most from the least.”
- Information overload (data paralysis) negatively affects decision-
making.
- Avoid redundancy in metrics as much as possible.
- Reduce shared information to what is most meaningful and
impactful for the targeted audience.

1) Problem: A professional baseball organization wants to identify players'
fatigue levels practically and validly throughout a season.
2) Test identification: One definition of fatigue can be an inability to
produce or maintain normal levels of force production. Force Plates are
identified as a valid measure of force production, and the
countermovement jump is selected as a practical method of measuring
dynamic force production ability.
3) Protocol development: A standardized protocol is developed to reduce
the effects of confounding variables on the measurements.
4) Data collection: Countermovement jumps are performed regularly
during weight training sessions over the season.
5) Analysis: Systems and Processes are put in place for monitoring trends in
key performance measures. Trends are analyzed to determine meaningful
changes in certain metrics that may indicate deviations from normal
performances.

Example of an Applied Sports Science Process

6) Interpretation: Analysis of trends in jump measures reveals a particular player is not only losing the ability to produce high forces and project themselves vertically (jump height), despite no change in their recorded body weight, but they are also taking a longer time to produce force (increased ground contact time), which may be an indication of fatigue.
7) Communication: Concerning trends in the player’s jump measures are shared verbally and visually through reports with necessary staff who help identify that the player is reporting having the feeling of ‘heavy legs’ after multiple weeks of very high workloads. Actionable steps are taken to help reduce workload and improve recovery in order to enhance the players’ health and performance during the season.
8) Research & Development: Insights gained are used to further improve
the process by identifying what metrics from the test are most related to
fatigue and how they can be most effectively monitored. Research is
conducted to determine the relationships between changes in these
metrics and on-field performance/player availability. The research results are used to further develop and improve the athlete monitoring process.