Player monitoring during COVID-19

24 MARCH 2020

No one knows how long the corona crisis will have an influence on the lives of millions of people around the world. And even though everyone is faced with this uncertainty, these times are especially stressful for athletes. Athletes are used to working with strict schedules to be able to peak at a specific time during the season. Now that all competitions are shut down and postponed, they are suddenly faced with uncertainty. Instead of a specific goal, they are now left with a vague goal: being ready for peak performance when the corona crisis has come to an end.

GET INSIGHTS INTO THE PROGRESS OF THE PLAYERS

For most team sports players this means that they are now performing an individual training schedule to maintain their fitness levels. However, to be able to adjust this individual program to the needs of each individual player, it is important to get insights into the progress of the players. Therefore, in this blog, we will discuss how you can monitor the progress of your players during the corona crisis.

TRY NOW: JOHAN RPE APP

And to all teams using the JOHAN GPS trackers, we offer the use of the JOHAN RPE App. Let us know if you want to take advantage of this handy mobile tool to monitor the progress of your players while they train at home or at another location! For other JOHAN followers, we also do a special TRY OUT offer to bridge the Corona crisis with your team. Curious about this try-out with your team? Contact us via info@johan-sports.com

THE DISADVANTAGES OF INDIVIDUAL TRAINING

Individual training sessions have a lot of disadvantages compared to the usual group training sessions. One of the most straightforward differences is the lack of sport-specificity. An individual training program focuses on maintaining the general fitness levels of the players (endurance or muscle strength), whereas group training consists mostly of sport-specific exercises (position games and game formats). Another important disadvantage of the current individual programs is that the coach does not see his players as much as usual. Hence, for a coach, it is harder to know whether adjustments need to be made to the training program of specific players.

ADJUST THE TRAINING PROGRAM TO THE INDIVIDUAL NEEDS OF YOUR PLAYERS

One of the solutions to this problem would be to call, e-mail or Whatsapp all players every day to see how they are doing. Based on the information the coach gets from these contacts, the training program can be adjusted to the individual’s needs. Even though these calls provide the coach with all the information needed, it is a very time-consuming process. The JOHAN RPE App is able to make this process easier. After every session, the player will receive a notification on his/her mobile phone to fill in an exertion score: a score from 1-10 on how hard the session was. Based on the information the coach gets from these scores (e.g. a player always filling in that the sessions are ‘easy’), a coach can decide to change the program (e.g. add extra repetitions of an exercise). Furthermore, based on outliers in the data (e.g. players filling in a very high or low score), the coach can decide to contact these players to see how the players are doing and react accordingly. Thus by using the JOHAN Team Performance App, a coach gets insights into the progress of the players and on which players need to be contacted to see how they are doing.

FILL IN RECOVERY SCORES

Next to these exertion scores, the players are also able to fill in recovery scores. For this, the players will receive a notification on their mobile phone, and can then fill in recovery scores (from 1 to 10) on the following five domains: fatigue, sleep quality, muscle soreness, mood, and stress. Based on the answers to these five questions, the coach gets even more information on how players are coping with the training program. This information can serve as an extra source of information to change the training program of specific players.

CONCLUSION

To make sure that players remain their fitness levels during the corona crisis it is of utmost importance to monitor the progress of your players. The JOHAN Team Performance App provides an easy-to-use solution for this. Based on the exertion and recovery scores, that the players fill in on their mobile phone, the coach can adjust the training program to the individual needs of the players. Thus, make sure that you can adjust the individual programs to the needs of the players by using the JOHAN Team Performance App. Try our FREE RPE app during COVID-19 temporarily!