Is There a Tug of War Between Injury Risk and Performance?

The majority of the recent literature in load monitoring focuses on the association between training load measures and injury risk. However, injury risk is not the only outcome measure we are interested in… performance matters too! However, the understanding of the training-performance relationship in team sports is currently not as…

Notes From: Southampton FC Sports Science Undergraduate Summit

Southampton Football Club hosted their inaugural Sports Science Undergraduate Summit last week at their Staplewood Campus. Hosted by Jonathan Woodhouse (Academy Data Scientist) alongside the entire sports science department, the primary aim of the day was to provide current University undergraduates with an insight into the practicalities of delivering applied…

FA Survey on Monitoring Training Load

Calling all Coaches, Fitness/S&C Coaches and Sport Scientists who work in a professional football club in England… please complete a survey (only 20 questions) using the link below as part of important research between the FA and Teesside University:   Link to The FA and Teesside University’s Survey on Training Load …

The Debate on the Acute:Chronic Workload Ratio

I think it is an exciting time in training load research and applied practice. There is evidence-based analysis of training load taking place in the professional sporting environment as well as being published in the literature. In this post I will be focusing on the calculation of the acute:chronic workload…

Acute:Chronic Workloads and Rehabilitation: A Case Study

Last month I was invited to write a guest blog on Plinths and Platforms about load monitoring and rehabilitation.  It included an overview of Banister’s Fitness-Fatigue concept, the acute:chronic workload ratio and how it can be incorporated into the Return to Play (RTP) decision.  You can find that post HERE but…

Acute:Chronic Workloads and Rehabilitation

Recently I was asked by my colleague Sam Blanchard to write a guest post for his blog: Plinths and Platforms. Sam is also based in Western New York and is the Head of Rehabilitation for our affiliated American Hockey League (AHL) team, the Rochester Americans.   He had been reading some…

Notes From: Monitoring #TrainingLoad16 at Aspire Academy

I wasn’t going to write a blog post on this week’s Training Load Monitoring conference held at Aspire because all the presentations will apparently be made available online, plus all the papers presented will be published in a special edition of IJSPP next year (which by the way is such a…

Are We Overlooking Confounding Variables in Applied Sport Science?

This post expands on the points made in what I believe is a must read review for all Sport Scientists and in fact any practitioner conducting tests in sport and exercise. As scientists we try to control for confounding variables in our testing environments, such as hour of the day,…

Expert Speaker Series: Darren Burgess on Load Monitoring as an Injury Prevention Tool

As part of the Performance and Injury: Prevention and Management module led by Dr David Opar on ACU’s Masters in High Performance Sport, we have been spoilt to hear from a number of world class speakers. Over the next few blog posts I will be sharing a summary on the following presentations…

Interview: Dr Craig Duncan

For our latest Sports Discovery interview I am delighted to be able to share the thoughts of the 2014 ESSA (Exercise and Sport Science Australia) Sport Scientist of Year, Dr Craig Duncan. Our discussion includes recovery, sleep, monitoring, accreditation, managing stress and advice for aspiring Sport Scientists. Firstly, a bit…