Get Your Team Working More Efficiently
Have you ever thought, as you stand on the sideline of the Friday night football match, “What the hell is my team doing out there? Why is it so hard to catch the ball?”
Let me tell you, you are not alone.
Every weekend all over the world millions of people are thinking the same thing. As coaches, strength and conditioners, physiotherapists, doctors and sports scientists, we try our best week in and week out to ensure not only the individuals can play, though that the team as a whole plays cohesively.
How do we do that? A whole lot of analysis and pushing these athletes to their limits.
Is GPS technology the answer
After over a decade of GPS technology being made available to high performance sporting teams in Australia, head coaches are finally starting to take notice of its benefits. Whilst it may not get everyone in your team to work together as a unit, as a coach you have control over how much and what they do. Reports, analysis and breakdowns on distances covered and gained, heart rates and workloads within training and game contexts allow sports scientists to make informed decisions surrounding these work to rest ratios. With this data coaches can ensure athletes are completing recommended outputs based on position. Making certain all athletes support their team while out on the field.
Dedication
Most people think high performance athletes have it easy. They may play a couple of games at most a week through a season, get paid big and have a couple of months a year. Sounds alright I suppose. What most don’t see is the hours and hours of work they put in during their off season. The hours they put in during their school years, with the hope of one day being the best. The early mornings and late night physiotherapy sessions they put in just to be ready for each game. Their bodies are put through a lot and they do it all because they are dedicated to success.
Now it takes a team of dedicated athletes to win a game, which is not always the case. Over time athletes become lazy, do not participate in training drills, resulting in mistakes being made out on the field. Athletes need to be dedicated to hitting PB’s in their strength sessions, dedicated to reach max speeds in games, dedicated to kicking the ball in the “sweet spot” time and time again, Why you ask? Because that is what makes a team of dedicated athletes..
Training needs to resemble game intensity.. Sometimes
If athletes are going to play for 80 minutes week in and week out at 100%, they will at some point need to train this way. If they don’t train this way, that will be unprepared for the worst case scenarios out on the field. The great thing about GPS technology, is it has allowed us to monitor game intensities and replicate them during training sessions. It is during these sessions where teamwork is just as important as it is during game scenarios. Knowing athletes can rely on their teammates for support.
At the end of the day an athlete can do everything right, train hard, eat well and be 100% dedicated to the cause of winning. But sometimes you just have an off day where everything seems to just go wrong. However it is times like this when the hard work, dedication, data and teamwork all come together to create the answer to a seemingly impossible equation.
