How You Can Train Athletes With Minimal Technology

15 Aug How You Can Train Athletes With Minimal Technology

Sport science technology is like owning a sexy car: it won’t last if you don’t have a good mechanic.

While most clubs utilize technology in an effective manner – to monitor player loads, elicit a specific conditioning effect, customize to the individual, and tweak fitness programming year-round, some clubs have it for the sake of having it. 

In fact, it looks much more appealing to a youth soccer parent if a team has heart rate monitors and GPS trackers splashed across their Instagram feed.

Taking the conversation back to the car analogy, too often I see clubs quick to buy technology and look at data, without encouraging their players to see a strength coach and apply it.

It’s like having all of the embellishing car features, without a person to maintain and fix it over time so it keeps running.

Athletes are the same: fancy technology won’t do much unless we are applying it and adjusting training regimens to keep them healthy and strong.

I don’t care if a player had 12 decelerations, played 29 minutes, and reached maximal speed twice in a match. If you aren’t sending them to a strength coach to take advantage of this window of opportunity to get strong in-season, do some eccentrics that week, or do resisted sprints, you’re doing your players a huge disservice.

Sport science technology and strength and conditioning must have an intimate relationship.

But I’d be remiss not to mention, you don’t need much technology to immensely impact your players. To that end, some clubs don’t have the money or resources to get GPS units, so they have to be creative with their players.

And this is totally okay. After all, players want connection.

They want problem solving.

They want actionable solutions.

They want human-to-human interaction.

I wrote this as a guest blog for the lads at Football Fitness Federation, and the response was tremendous: How To Train Athletes With Minimal Technology.

Thank you for reading.

For more team consulting, load monitoring, and strength and conditioning programming, Work With Me Online.