fully loaded
HockeyOne League commentators and pundits have criticised the impact of national team player resting on game spectacle due to load management. Let’s dig right into this practice and see what makes it all tick.
I was triggered into writing this post after listening to the loquacious Simon Orchard bemoan the absence of load managed international players from key Hockey One league games in Australia. As he rightly observed, in a game needing to grow its support base the enforced lack of appearances by these high profile players can take the gloss off games. That said, smart, practical load management of player training and game participation is essential to their physical, emotional and social wellbeing over time.
I appreciate that 10-20 years ago top flight players eagerly fronted at club, state and international games without fail. However, sports science has come a long way since so that not only is player welfare improved, injury recovery and longevity in the game are evolving to ensure coaches, stakeholder and spectators alike get to enjoy the talents of top players for longer.
The task of the sports scientist in aiding the organisation - franchise to maximise player peformance is not as straightforward and binary as commentators and pundits would have you believe. Let's start at the beginning. As a coach of say a HockeyOne franchise you have responsibility for an extended squad of 20 or so individuals. The key word here being individuals; they are not clones hatched in a lab to hit prescribed athletic outcomes although that does seem to be the ultimate aim. Instead you have 20 distinct athletes with varying athletic performance ceilings, motor skills, motivation, emotional availability, psychological resilience and medical contraindicative pre-conditions including but not confined to injury history.
Your sports science team will baseline key measures around maximal aerobic speed, anaerobic speed reserve, 1 Repeat Maximums (RM) in the target strength exercises among a host of other standardised physical and mental test instruments intended to provide an depth view of individual capability and readiness. The same science team will setup and manage individual response to prescriptive, periodised training programs and game efforts via advanced GPS-HR systems like the SPT . It is important to be reminded that individuals in a squad do not all respond similarly to the same stressors such as training programs, peer interactions and coach communications. This variation in response is an often overooked x factor that has to be managed by the sports science ( including psych) and coaching staff to improve outcomes.
Decision-making is heavily depdendent upon the breadth, depth and fidelity of the data collected via testing and monitoring with efforts made for external validation and benchmarking.
Too often put aside in the pursuit of winning at all costs, athlete health has to be foremost in mind for the sports science and coaching staff. Load management has injury prevention as a high priority. We are not talking injury alone here but also have to be wary of incurring avoidable illnesses wrought by compromised immune systems overburdened with ceaseless catabloic processes that overly disrupt athlete homeostasis.
As detailed in the study by West et.al ( 2020) load management is premised on a comprehensive risk analysis and intervention framework. They go on to provide a helpful schematic of the 5 Overarching Levels at which Training Load can inform Athlete Preparation and Management shown here.
Load management, training prescriptions and periodised masterplans are in a state of constant flux with the performance data being collected and analysed regularly and adjustments made.
Individual athlete responses to stimuli at any level of the Training Load Schema are likely to range widely so both the external and internal dose responses should be measured.
The bottom line is no one hat fits all in prescribing exercise at any level so it is little wonder franchise and or national body sports scientists tread a conservative path with player resting strategies. They are not deliberately robbing spectators of entertainment as their own prime performance measures usually hinge on player performance AND welfare. These professionals in concert with coaching staff and the player have to balance the data from training, physiological testing, games and regularly administered surveys within a rich and fluctuating context. These teams do not operate in a hermetically sealed bubble their operating environment is pulled back and forth by often competing time and resource demands. As depicted by West at. al decision-making is not as straightforward as those of us outside the team would like.
West and co-authors explain
Considering the athlete’s career stage as one example, a youth player going through a developmental stage may require a more conservative loading strategy (especially during growth spurts), when compared with afirst team player at the peak of his/her career.
All this considered, at this stage there has beeen no definitive study published on the extent and nature of links if, staistically any, between the buckets of performance data collected by the battery of tests and sensors from players and either injury or performance outcomes. Certainly, if a player working through a busy training-playing schedule is injured you can be rest assured the sports science and physical therapy team will cop it in the neck and subsequently dig in with a more risk averse approach to player availability.
Now, this insight might be music to Simon Orchard's ears from the West et al study
Ultimately, athletes play sport to perform, not avoid injury, so re-calibrating their focus from “predicting” injury and towards maximising performance may help sport scientists’ improve player and coach buy-in.
Further, and the SHOOTOUT- De-BRIEF team will love this from Impellizzeri et. l, (2020)
Our message to practitioners is to stop seeking overly simplistic solutions to complex problems and instead embrace the risks and uncertainty inherent in the training process and injury prevention.
At VOITTO Exercise & Sports Science Services (VEASSS) we will be soon investing in a complete SPT load monitoring set for clients and work on some singe case study research to improve the body of knowledge of load management.
REFERENCES
Impellizzeri, Franco M., Paolo Menaspà, Aaron J. Coutts, Judd Kalkhoven, and Miranda J. Menaspà. 2020. “Training Load and Its Role in Injury Prevention, Part I: Back to the Future.” Journal of Athletic Training 55 (9): 885–92.
West, Stephen W., Jo Clubb, Lorena Torres-Ronda, Daniel Howells, Edward Leng, Jason D. Vescovi, Sean Carmody, Michael Posthumus, Torstein Dalen-Lorentsen, and Johann Windt. 2021. “More than a Metric: How Training Load Is Used in Elite Sport for Athlete Management.” International Journal of Sports Medicine 42 (4): 300–306.
