Injury reduction is one of the main goals for teams that use GPS technology to track performance.
Besides being a tool to measure performance and evolve talents, OLIVER was designed to prevent injuries that could come in the future by accumulating loads, thus providing the player and team with key information to plan training and achieve the best physical adaptation to the game.
Injuries appear more frequently in contact sports, being a fear for any athlete as it endangers weeks of their season and up to months or years depending on the injury severity.
There are factors to be worked so that the athlete is careful and aware of their performance, in order to avoid touching limit and submit to injury:
Controlling loads is essential to prevent injuries and improve workouts planning according to each player. Physical trainers can adjust their sessions, detect strengths and weaknesses, suggesting rest or specific jobs.
The OLIVER´s device, “OLI '', is responsible for collecting each session information; football, athletic and health metrics. This allows a performance analysis of every player and the whole team as well.
Measuring loads with OLIVER to prevent injuries:
OLIVER’s web platform has a Dashboard and Player View sections to analyze metrics after every match or training. When users dive a little deep in, they will be able to identify the external and internal loads of every session in order to get more info about athlete status.
- External loads allow us to see the relationship between Chronic load (previous) and Acute load (current) of each player. This relationship is used to know the load the player is bearing and the incidence of this on the injury risk Indicators of muscle and neuromuscular fatigue are also measured. A high external load is related to an increased risk of injury by over-training, so corrective actions should be taken on the athlete’s training load.
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Internal loads in OLIVER are calculated using RPE (Rated Perceived Exertion) values provided by players. Once the downloading of session data has been completed by the coach; the player must enter their app to load the RPE of that session, or in any case the coach can upload it manually. Using this value and the duration of the session the s-RPE* is obtained.
*( s-RPE is the multiplication of the RPE by the duration of the session.)
In fact, Jose Maria Pinilla, Coach, who uses OLIVER in his team states: "It allows me to know which players are under-trained or need more load".
In addition, Rafa García Cortez, Academy Director of the Real Madrid Foundation, adds that OLIVER provides a lot of information to make decisions: “This is fundamental to the work of coaches and physical trainers in the team, as it allows to know when a player is about to be exposed to an injury”.
