Player Monitoring...Why?

Player Monitoring is everywhere these days in elite sport and is slowly creeping it's way into lower levels of sport too.

A few days ago I posted an article on Facebook that detailed the company who does Port Adelaide Football Club's player wellness stuff which discusses what they aim to do and how they aim to do it.

Wellness survey's have been used in Soccer and Rugby for years now. It's not new but it is new to the "mainstream" for a lack of better term.

I have been using the HRV4Training app for about a year now which works great for me.

In the NBA the Golden State Warriors hired an Australian dude to run their strength and conditioning and he introduced them to wellness surveys, heart rate variability and GPS trackers. They are the first NBA team to do this and if someone tests badly on game day then take the game off.

Elite teams train and play with a lot more volume and intensity then we do and that's why they need fatigue monitoring.

So why do we need it then?

Us weekend warriors have as many outside stressors then they do "inside" stressors. We have jobs that require our attention, we have financial commitments we have, and sometimes struggle, to meet. We have kids that don't sleep. We have people pulling us every which way. Our fatigue is different but still very real.

Mental and physical fatigue, acute and chronic, can have a hazardous effects on the body and it's ability display high performance output.

We can't just skip work or leave our kids alone with knives in the kitchen. We have to do those things so what we may need to alter is our training.

So you can be fatigued from your kids teething and when struggling to pay the mortgage and train as hard you can, placing even more stress on an already stressed body.

You can then try and rock up on  a Saturday and play the best game you ever have...except you won't...because you can't.

Unless you ARE 100% then can't give 100%.

Relatively you might feel like you're giving 100% but that can be deceiving.

You can run that 100m sprint at the end of your 3km time trial to finish strong but try comparing this pace to a 100m sprint performed when you are 100% fresh and non-fatigued.

It won't even be close.

And you know what? We might never be 100% for all the reasons listed above but we can try and get as close as we can, for as many Saturdays as we can.

The Aussie Rules Training Player Monitoring System is designed to get you as close to 100% every Saturday as we can.

I'll be back in a couple of days with more on this and the possible release of this system!