Adopted by elite sport organizations, Olympic committees and research teams worldwide, AthleteMonitoring streamlines data collection, analysis and management. It can be used to optimize performance, reduce injury risk, detect talent, monitor athlete development, and improve communication at all levels, with best practice tools, IOC-aligned approaches and evidence-based methods.

Monitor fatigue, sleep, non-sport stressors, mood, menstrual cycle and more to mitigate injury risk and maximize performance readiness. Plan, monitor and optimize internal and external loads.

Integrate data from athlete trackers, monitor acute:chronic load ratio, monotony, enjoyment, RPE, GPS and more to reduce risk and maximize performance. Athletes self-report on their wellness, training, injuries and fitness using their smartphones or tablets.

Staff import data from wearable devices. Choose evidence-based methods to interpret data and then display it in real-time on individual and team dashboards. Use built-in alerts and daily reports to track progress, identify potential risks and quantify the readiness of athletes and teams.

Instantly adjust programs, workloads and coaching strategies in accordance with evidence-based recommendations or your methodology of choice. BUILD SUCCESS Centralize all your data on one single platform, improve communication, and bring all stakeholders together to build healthy athletes and long lasting successes.

Be the next! REQUEST A FREE DEMO. Athlete Data Management Made Easy. Wellness Monitor fatigue, sleep, non-sport stressors, mood, menstrual cycle and more to mitigate injury risk and maximize performance readiness. Workload Plan, monitor and optimize internal and external loads. A Simple System. A Complete Toolbox.

Some key points to take into consideration are Educate and Inform Educate on why you are implementing athlete monitoring. Having data to back up your instincts can enable better conversations with your athletes, that not only improve the individual athlete, but the whole team.

Explaining that can make a huge difference. Start with the Basics It is tempting to start into monitoring with great enthusiasm and energy and decide to conquer all and monitor everything. Start simple and add complexity as you go.

Consistently gathering data in a small way is better than gathering lots of data that you never have to time to look at. Buy-in staff and athletes It is important to get buy-in from athletes and staff to ensure success of any monitoring that you decide to implement.

Education is important and staff and athletes need to feel like they are part of the process. When you are collecting wellness and training data, the trust levels between coach and athlete in relation to honesty and use of the data are critical for success.

Athletes need to be shown how the data is being used and more importantly how it benefits them. If the athlete takes the time to complete subjective wellness and training information, they can become disillusioned if something they deemed important was ignored or used against them.

Likewise, all staff and management should be on the one page about the use of monitoring to ensure consistent messaging about its value.

Be consistent Create good habits and develop consistent routines. Start with the basics and what you can manage effectively. It is important to set a minimum standard at the start for your athletes.

And it is important in the initial phases to monitor and manage this to help everyone get on board. It takes some time to form a habit — often longer than the 21 days quoted by many — and it is easy to forget to fill in your daily questionnaire initially.

Give Feedback It is critical to give feedback to your athlete. Most athletes like to feel that they are being listened to and that the effort they are putting into inputting information is actually looked at and used by coaches and staff to provide actionable feedback.

This could be as simple as a conversation to find out more about a stress issue. If athletes realize that the information they input is used to invoke change they will buy into it more easily. Monitoring an athlete helps us to learn about their patterns of behavior and habits.

The benefits of monitoring athletes are:. Monitoring can be low-tech or high-tech, or a combination of analog techniques and technologies. As long as the science is valid and reliable, and the process is sustainable, coaches should feel encouraged to use whatever method serves them best.

Generally, a good monitoring program uses multiple approaches to reduce the chances of a problem growing out of control. Most of the decisions on how to monitor come from budgeting and logistical challenges, along with experience and expertise with the information collected.

Is monitoring athletes a doomed proposition or is it a golden parachute for coaches? The science is clear that monitoring can help reduce injuries and improve outcomes, but because the research is conflicting and not overwhelming, most coaches are not losing sleep over not monitoring.

A good mindset to have with monitoring is more information that is relevant and valid will help solve the problem of errors in training, but the chaos of life will always throw a monkey wrench into the mix.

Most coaches want to know if monitoring will reduce injuries and illness, and improve training to raise the ceiling in conditioning and power.

I see so many coaches collecting one data set narrow net and using crude approaches large holes. This will happen from time to time. However, it is not acceptable to do nothing to help an athlete with regard to monitoring, as avoiding monitoring responsibilities altogether is unprofessional and unethical today.

Perhaps 10 or 20 years ago, just asking an athlete how they feel was common, but today you need to do more. Most of what monitoring does is help young coaches remove negligence and foolishness from a training program, and allow experienced coaches to make more precise decisions.

Perhaps a better way to say this is that monitoring makes great programs better, bad programs less dangerous, and average programs above average. Monitoring and even training load measurement have lost a lot of momentum lately, due to the overpromising of sports technology companies and the rush to hire sport scientists at the professional level.

The hype and extreme marketing from companies and the cult mentality and political pressure from fellow performance professionals are both to blame. Coaches are not burned out from doing too much monitoring or sport science—they are exhausted from the never-ending barrage of promises and the rate of research coming out.

I am thrilled that Science for Sport has a Performance Digest, as a slew of scientific publications are released every month. Technology evolves so fast and the combination of the two creates so much change, the average coach gets overwhelmed and gives up or does just enough to feel like they are doing something.

For example, I have gone from deep technology and science exploration to an organic approach and back to measurement. Even worse, how many coaches give up after a half-hearted first attempt? With the right resources, such as an athlete management system and experience, you can grow your program over time, but only tackle what feels good and is not such a burden that you dread the process.

When deciding on ways to monitor athletes technically, you have internal and external means. Most of the monitoring we see is passive or physiological monitoring like HRV to assess internal readiness, but monitoring can also be observation of the training load.

Monitoring is a great term to assess internal responses to training, and managing is a better term for the workouts themselves. Modeling is the new standard, as the connection to a great plan is constantly refined by the inputs of loading and the recovery information from monitoring.

With the available science and coaching education, trial and error should only be for small details in training, not an entire training program. Coaches sometimes place monitoring data into two categories, specifically subjective data reported by the athlete and objective data collected by the staff.

Subjective and objective data are not oppositional—they work tighter if viewed correctly. Testing is not monitoring, but technically if the information can show trends in fatigue or similar, you can consider it part of a monitoring program. Usually, frequency is the differentiation between monitoring and repeated testing, with monitoring closer to daily and testing more connected to monthly.

Since change in adaptation is slow, testing is appropriate for training, but monitoring health and fatigue needs to have a rhythm that allows for daily decision-making. GPS—more appropriately called athlete tracking , thanks to new technology beyond satellite monitoring—is often discussed as part of monitoring.

While, technically, training load is more on the management end of tracking , it still is good to use as a way to see fatigue or change. Vertical jump testing is a great example of collecting information on fatigue, but doing it every day is monotonous and it is unlikely that athletes will actually improve leg power from testing, like weight training provides.

All of these approaches are only as good as the data is valid and reliable. A change in firmware or a different protocol will taint the data and make it difficult to get trustworthy information. However, coaches need to invest in an internal investigation of their own program first, and not focus on making decisions without thinking because a number shows up and does the work for them.

It usually takes multiple seasons to construct a solid plan to really use the information in a way that is near seamless.

Some screening and testing may be immediate, but other data points take a while to really leverage. Now comes the meat and potatoes of the article, as I share some of the pros and cons of monitoring in the real world.

Here are the six personas that coaches should consider before constructing a monitoring program.