How Wearable Technology Elevates Elite Football Performance
Take a closer look at the hardware that wearable sports technology is made up of and examples of how it can be used to fuel high performance in sport.
What is Wearable Technology?
In elite sports, wearable technology refers to advanced sensor-based devices worn by athletes to gather precise performance data. Unlike consumer devices like smartwatches, elite wearable trackers are designed for comprehensive data capture, featuring high-end components like GPS trackers, accelerometers, gyroscopes, barometers, and heart rate monitors. These tools provide insights that help optimize athlete performance, manage workloads, and reduce injury risks.
In this article, we’ll delve into the hardware of wearable technology and the metrics that can be produced, illustrating how they’re applied in high-performance environments.
Examples of how Wearable Technology is used in Football and Rugby
Football (Soccer)
In football, wearable technology, mainly captured through a vest-worn GPS tracker, is used to capture a range of physical performance metrics, from more basic measurements such as heart rate and total distance run, to more advanced metrics like high metabolic load distance, dynamic stress load, explosive distance and more. These metrics are crucial in measuring athlete performance levels and building training programs that are targeted towards an individual’s high-performance output.
Rugby Union
Rugby players utilise the same wearable GPS trackers as footballers and have the ability to measure much of the same data, but the metrics that coaches, analysts and sports scientists perceive as most important could vary due to the contact nature of the sport and the differences of in-game demands, which are heavy in body contact and high-speed collisions.
Metrics generated from the inertial measurement units such as horizontal impact and force of impact might be more useful to measure the physical demands of rugby, alongside the similar running based metrics captured for football, as in reality, they are both team sports sports that require a high amount of intermittent running and are played on a similar sized field.
Heart Rate Monitors: Tracking Cardiovascular Fitness and Recovery Insights
Heart rate monitors use sensors to calculate and display a user's heart rate in real-time or post-session - making them a crucial reference point for measuring the cardiovascular response of athletes to the external physical demands placed on them.
Having a pinpoint way of accurately measuring an athlete's heart rate response to training allows coaches to work strategically on improving their cardiovascular fitness and ensuring they are working in the correct training zone for the session prescribed. For example, in pre-season, coaches might want players to be exposed to high heart rate zones often as they work on developing their fitness, while during the season, athletes will typically build towards a high cardiovascular load in the middle of the week, followed by lighter sessions tailored towards recovery in the couple of days leading up to and following the match.
Heart rate monitors can also give useful insights into an athlete's fatigue and recovery status and how they are adapting to the training program. Protocols such as submaximal standardised tests that are repeated at various stages throughout the season can give coaches useful insights into what condition their players are in, and whether they might be gaining or losing cardiovascular fitness at various stages of the season. In addition, more advanced metrics like heart rate variability can give insights into how fatigued or fresh an athlete is which can be then used to determine how hard to push the players on a given day.
Inertial Measurement Unites and Motion Analysis
Biomechanical sensors are components that make up the hardware of wearable technology. The accelerometer will measure acceleration in all vectors, the gyroscope will measure angular velocity, the barometer will measure altitude, and then the magnetometer will measure changes in the earth's magnetic field and direction in a similar way to that of a compass. All of these sensors function together to calculate metrics that are useful for practitioners working in sports.
WIMU’s Pro’s unique architecture brings together a hub of inertial sensors that provides incredibly accurate data. With four 3D accelerometers and three 3D gyroscopes each set at different thresholds to ensure precise capturing of every data point, regardless of the intensity of exercise.
All of these biomechanical sensors work together to develop metrics which can be used to measure the movements of players, with a key example metric being ‘player load’, which is essentially the aggregate summary of all the forces of the four dynamic accelerometers measured by WIMU throughout a training session, drill, or match.
The Benefits of Wearable Technology for Elite Football and Rugby
Football (Soccer)
Current FIFA World Cup holders, the Spanish National Team, use the WIMU Pro system to track live data to monitor their player vitals in real-time, in order to make informed, data-driven decisions as the action takes place on the training ground or live during a match.
Vitoria Guimaraes of the Portuguese Superliga have a strong focus on using the metrics provided by WIMU Pro to best prepare their athletes for the rigours of elite-level football - this strategy helps them identify when their players can exert themselves more, or if they need periods of rest and recovery.
Chicago Fire of Major League Soccer, use WIMU Pro human performance data to manage training loads and structure training sessions based on the metrics provided to them from the hardware.
Rugby Union
Rugby Union is also another major global sport where the application of human performance data is crucial. In the sport of Rugby Union, player conditioning is just as crucial as it is in football, but there is also the risk of injuries due to the impact of high-impact collisions between players.
Hartpury University is one of England’s premier nurseries for Rugby Union player development and they use WIMU Pro to measure the output of their players in order to structure their training sessions according to their physical profile. The SPRO function allows Hartpury to create custom workflows that are tailored specifically to the needs of rugby union.
Mitigating Injury Risk Management Through Wearable Technology
Preventing avoidable injuries can be the difference between a team or athlete achieving their goals. Managing the risk of injuries by providing data that can assist with training design, minimise fatigue, and prevent overtraining and injury recurrence, all whilst maintaining and maximising performance. The most comprehensive level of data that can be collected from a wearable technology ecosystem comes from WIMU Pro.
SVIVO is part of the WIMU ecosystem, providing live tracking software that predefines and then measures the volume and intensity of targeted WIMU metrics through the adoption of the alarm and target features.
In this video, our industry experts from Hudl show you how to adapt this workflow with SVIVO, to ensure your athletes remain in peak condition and ready for action.
Rehabilitation and Return to Play
Injuries are an unfortunate but inevitable part of sport. As valuable assets to their team, it is important that athletes return to their pre-injury state in a robust and efficient manner. In the example of a hamstring injury, which is common in elite level sports that require explosive movement, it takes a specific, data-driven strategy to ensure return to play.
Take a closer look at how you can manage the return-to-play process for their athletes using WIMU Pro in this webinar “Maximizing Athlete Performance: Return to Play”.
Our expert WIMU consultants will demonstrate how the WIMU Cloud can be used to benchmark pre-injury levels of performance, and then guide the player's rehabilitation workload and progression during their recovery.
We also investigate how WIMU’s reports and data can be used to support conversations and decision-making, between various stakeholders, on how an athlete's return to action can be optimized.
Talent ID & Youth Player Development
Before making a financial investment on signing a player from another club, or a time investment on nurturing and developing an academy player from within your own organization, best practice is to ensure you are targeting a player that has the attributes necessary to your team’s specific needs. This important decision-making process can be facilitated through the use of physical performance data generated from wearable technology, such as WIMU Pro.
Will Sparkes, PhD and Hudl Solutions Consultant gives this example: “If you’re part of a team that likes to play with overlapping fullbacks, you’ll likely want to recruit a fullback who has a high work rate and capacity to repeat high speed and sprint efforts for the duration of the game. This is so that they can support all phases of the game effectively, in both attack, defence, as well as transition. So when you're profiling a player in the recruitment process, this data can help decision makers determine whether that player can fit into your game model.”
To see a professional example of how wearable technology and human performance data combine to identify and develop youth talent, check out this case study we filmed with La Liga team CD Leganes, which displays the WIMU Pro ecosystem in action.
Combining Video Analysis with Physical Performance Data
Tens of thousands of data points get picked up per second using wearable technology, but the question has to be asked, how is the best way to present this data so that it is meaningful in the context of the sport?
At Hudl, we have developed a method of visualizing these many human performance data points, making it possible to combine athlete monitoring and advanced video analysis. This advanced workflow provides a critical bridge between sport science and performance analysis to provide comprehensive insights that empower coaching staffs’ decision-making.
By integrating WIMU and Hudl Sportscode, Hudl users can streamline operational processes and clubs can empower sports scientists and analysts to collaborate more closely.
“Despite the clear benefits of WIMU as a standalone wearable athlete monitoring system, being able to now seamlessly combine the physical data with video and event data, whether that be from a third-party provider or a team’s custom dataset, opens up the possibility of answering complex performance questions that the analysis of only physical data, video, or event data in isolation can’t answer,” said Hudl Solutions Consultant Will Sparkes, PhD.
Case Study: Wearable Technology and Performance Analysis Integration
Previously, human performance data and video analysis were siloed apart. Now using the brand new integration between WIMU and Hudl Sportscode, human performance data generated by wearable technology can be visualized by video analysis software.
This streamlined workflow brings the roles of Performance Analyst and Data Scientist closer together, allowing decision makers the ability to show visual examples of their physical performance data, to hone in on whether players are exerting themselves correctly on match day and then how to use that data to make adjustments on the training pitch if necessary.
View our case study with Lion City Sailors FC to see what this workflow looks like in action and how it is helping them win important games.
Hudl for Performance Analysis and Wearable Integration
As you can see, wearable technology is now an essential part of performance analysis for teams playing at an elite-level. This has made the inclusion of wearable sports technology a non-negotiable for teams wanting to compete at their highest level.
At Hudl, we provide a fully-integrated suite of products that link seamlessly with our wearable technology - WIMU Pro. Take a closer look at WIMU Pro.