How to Monitor Athlete Readiness
Welcome to the latest issue of The Football Scientist.
In this week's issue, I'm going to provide discussions and recommendations on how you can utilize athlete readiness data to inform training programme decisions.
I hope you enjoy!
What is athlete readiness?
The assessment of athlete readiness is common across the majority of sports, both team and individual based.
It can be defined in a number of different ways. Put simply, it is an assessment of how ready an athlete is for a forthcoming session or block of sessions. This may refer to training or competitive type sessions.
Following individual exercise sessions, the two main after effects are fitness and fatigue. The individual sessions then make up the chronic training load for an athlete. Each athlete will respond to load in different ways. This is where athlete readiness testing can be very useful.
There is sometimes a misconception between athlete readiness data and general training load data. As we know, training load can be split into external load (i.e. what the athlete does) and internal load (i.e. how they respond).
Readiness relates more to how ready an athlete is to undertake the desired session. Of course external and internal load contributes to that, but separate tests must be used to establish readiness.
Methods of Readiness Assessment
There are a number of different ways you can assess athlete readiness. Broadly speaking, they can be categorized into the following:
- Wellness questionnaires (e.g. wellbeing survey)
- Heart rate indices (e.g. heart rate variability)
- Salivary markers (e.g. testosterone:cortisol ratio)
- Blood Markers (e.g. creatine kinase)
- Neuromuscular fatigue (e.g. countermovement jump)
With the vast amount of methods and data available, it can be difficult to focus on specific variables that are going to impact performance decisions.
All of the methods have their positives and negatives. For example, wellness data can be very useful as it's quick to administer and is inexpensive. However, it relies on full buy in from the athlete or else they can be guilty of providing inaccurate information.
With regards to all the measures, it's important you have an individual profile of each athlete and establish a true baseline for comparison. Using squad averages or generic cut off values unfortunately doesn't work with readiness testing due to individual variability.
The use of creatine kinase (CK) as a readiness measure is a good example of this notion. We used to collect CK after Premier League matches from players who played the majority or all of the previous match. When we did some in-house variability assessment of individual day-to-day measurement, some of the players variability CV% was through the roof!
As with most aspects of athlete monitoring, the more data you collect, the easier it is to establish 'normal' values for individuals. A recent paper (see link) from Sabrina Skorski's group used a mathematical algorithm to identify individual thresholds for CK in a large sample of professional German soccer players. As expected, this approach outperformed the group based analysis.
At a basic level, calculating the individual athletes CV% for a measure, then determining whether the change in scores are greater or within the data 'noise' can be used.
Practical Applications
One of the key points with readiness testing is that no single measure can tell you everything you want to know about an athlete.
Commercial companies that claim to have the silver bullet that tells you with 100% accuracy about the readiness of your athletes is trying to get your business!
My advice would be to select 3-4 key readiness variables that measure a number of different physiological and psychological aspects and monitor them consistently over time.
For example, use of wellness surveys (subjective measure) combined with morning HRV and drop jump reactive strength index (objective measures) is a good combination that will tell you a lot about an athletes readiness to perform.
If only one of those variables are below the individuals norm, it's likely not a cause for concern.
However, if two or more variables are coming up as red flags, then it's going to be worth exploring further.
The data should be used as a conversation starter with appropriate staff and the athlete. Do not wield your data like you have all the power!
Removing an athlete from a session is a last resort. The preferred option would be session modification.
This may be reduced sets/reps, stepping out of the final training drill or restricted match minutes.
Remember, the coach has the final say!
Thank you for reading, see you next week.
Whenever you're ready, check out how I can help you further:
Football Fitness Mentorship Community: Are you a football fitness practitioner looking to accelerate your career? Join an exclusive online mentorship community of football fitness practitioners and access resources, educational content, 1:1 support and a worldwide network. The community is aimed at football fitness practitioners - whether you are a student with future aspirations to work in football, an early career practitioner still finding their way or experienced practitioners looking to progress their career further. Check it out here.