Three hundred and twenty-four. Four hundred and ninety. Six hundred and twenty-six. Sports scientist Tom Robinson has been bellowing numbers at Jesse Marsch all week with Leeds United, but what does it all mean?
Robinson is the man with his finger on the pulse in training, almost literally. While he stands by the side of the pitch monitoring a tablet, Marsch is running the main session and sporadically checking in with his colleague for the magic number.
The entire session is governed by this one unit of measurement Robinson is keeping a close eye on. Each day on the grass has it’s target and if the coaching staff can avoid taking the players beyond it, they will.
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“We use live GPS monitoring in training,” said Robinson. “That’s quite common practice in sports science and professional football these days.
“The number I’m reading out is one called high metabolic load distance. It’s a unit of measurement STATSports (which describes itself as a world-leading provider of GPS player tracking and analysis equipment) created that measures how much the players are accelerating and decelerating and covering distance at high running speeds.
“It’s quite a good indicator of how difficult the session is and what sort of demand we’re placing on the players’ bodies. Jesse’s worked with this sort of high metabolic load distance metric throughout his career, so he’s got a really good understanding of the training loads he wants to impart on the players.”
Last Friday, Leeds played behind closed doors, had a recovery day while travelling to Spain on Saturday and then got stuck into two heavy days of training across Sunday and Monday. Spectators heard far bigger numbers from Robinson on those days than in the last two as the squad slowly builds into what’s likely to be a very intense match with Elche.
The vests you will often see the players wearing in training pictures are tracking their distance covered. While heart-rate monitors will also provide valuable data on how each player’s body is responding to training on the fly.
Marsch may have experience with how to use the data, but it’s not entirely his call to set the target each day. Robinson said: “It’s a multi-disciplinary approach, so between us and the medical department and the coaching staff, we have a regular meeting and the structure of the week is set.
“The structure of the days is set as a group based on what players need, the proximity of the next match and previous injury.”
Ultimately, it’s all designed to keep the players healthy, trained optimally and, crucially, as far from injury as possible.
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