The Relevance of Potential Indicators of External Load for Movement Evaluation in Elite Football Training

Abstract

Football is an intermittent (Bangsbo, 1994; Shephard, 1999; Reilly, 2005) and non-linear team sport. Coaches and practitioners must, therefore, prepare players to complete relatively large volumes of multidirectional activity that are short in duration due to frequent changes. One key aspect of ensuring the appropriateness of any training strategy is to develop and implement an effective training load monitoring strategy. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) incorporated into Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) devices appear to be the technology that has been most widely adopted to determine activity (Akenhead & Nassis, 2016). The commonly used GPS technologies are regularly accompanied with tri-axial accelerometer within the MEMS hardware. It may be hypothesised that the progression of multiplanar MEMS accelerometer technologies may allow the frequent change of directions and velocities to be more accurately measured and, therefore, evaluate elite football training more effectively. There is, however, currently a lack of applied research, which has attempted to establish the utility of MEMS accelerometers to appropriately capture the movement requirements associated with elite football training. The overall aim of the research contained within the present thesis was, therefore, to investigate the relevance of indicators of external load for the evaluation of the movement requirements in elite football.