Monitoring Fatigue During the Season

After a 3 - 4 month flogging it's finally time to get some actual game time with practice matches being scheduled to start in the next week or two for most clubs.

There's nothing like that first 5 minutes of the first practice match, especially if it involves a big tackle, to really take the wind out of your sails in a pinch!

With practice games comes 1 solidarity weekly goal, with that goal being game day Saturday. During the off and pre-season you can train continually regardless of fatigue build up (to a degree) with the end goal being how you perform in the months after you started training (during games).

This means that you can train any day you like and you can induce pretty much as much fatigue as you like because you can always throw a rest day or 2 in the mix. If you're a little tired going into the first team training session of the week then it's not the end of the world.

Come the in-season though and this all needs to change because you need to "peak" each and every Saturday for the next 20 - 25 weeks.

This will require personal fatigue monitoring each and every day.

All AFL, VFL and some of the upper amateur teams use some form of athlete monitoring to individualise player training loads so as not to prescribe too much for those not fully recovered, or too little for those who had less game time and thus less fatigue to recover from. If you have access to GPS data for training then this can work even better but 99% of us don't.

The advantage of using a personal fatigue monitoring is that by keeping track of various internal and external factors, you can correlate these with periods of tiredness and less then stellar performances on game day.

This means you can avoid insanity - doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

So each day as soon as you wake up you'll monitor the following:

Sleep - Duration of Sleep + Quality of Sleep. You could also track if you dream or not which is the point of your sleep where the best regeneration occurs and you don't have to remember what you actually dreamed of, just if you did or not.

Mental Stress - had a blow up with the missus? Someone stole your seat on the bus? Anxious? Big exam coming up? All these things can have an affect on your stress levels and thus performance output.

Soreness - lingering soreness from the weekend? New soreness from training? Nagging back pain that comes and goes?

Fatigue - hopefully you know what you're peak fitness feels like when you're at your at your absolute freshest.

Motivation - to train and to play. Are you keen as mustard to play today or happy that game day is still a few days away?

Mood - compare this to your normal mood/personality.

Apart from hours of sleep, rate each of these 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 with 1 being the best so with 6 sections to assess the highest score you can get is 30 which means you get the week off!!

Resting Heart Rate - take this each morning in bed as soon as you wake up. Take a 10 second reading and multiply it by 6.

Protein - 1 serve equals something about the size of the palm of your hand.

Veggies - 1 serve equals 1 cup

Fruit - 1 serve equals 1 piece or a palm size

Cheat Food/Drink - refers to all processed foods that come in a box and all drinks that isn't water or a low sugar sports drink.

Beers/Ciggies - put in how many you had on each day...BE HONEST!

Again what you're looking for is the correlation between your high scores, poor performance and (hopefully not), injury.

This way you can avoid the pitfalls next time around and at a minimum it will make you very aware of things like getting to bed earlier.

I'll be starting mine Monday morning.

Here's what it looks like in table form (click on to get the full table):

UPDATE - Even at the elite level, if you can have your best players play most, if not all games, then you'll have a successful season. At local/amateur level this is even more crucial because we don't have 30 senior made players on every list so games lost with injury can destroy your once optimistic finals aspirations. I'm actually in the process of putting together a pretty detailed but (hopefully) easy to use athlete monitoring program for local/amateur teams to use that won't require a professional strength and conditioning coach to use. Let me know if you're team might be interested in this!