I joined the Inform Performance Podcast to discuss the importance of starting with a performance problem in research, how this applies in club environments, and insights into the physical demands of women's football.
Check out the episode below! 🎧👇
podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/i...
Thank you to all the WSL-A teams and practitioners involved in the project! 🤝 And to the support team
11/11
3️⃣Inform manipulation of drill constraints to achieve desired intensity, to balance TEC-tac & physical development goals
⬇️🚨
🏆This study provides power-law relationship reference values to evaluate tactical-technical drill intensity in academy environments
10/11
💡 How do you know if a drill is ‘high intensity’?
1️⃣Understand the peak match demands first. E.g. what is the greatest overall distance covered by a player in any minute period (m/min)?
2️⃣Compare duration matched drill intensity to peak match intensity
⬇️
9/11
⚽️Practical Applications⚽️
📈Use variability values to identify meaningful changes in volume & intensity between matches ➡️ inform training programming
(cont. ⬇️)
8/11
(Cont.)
academy practitioners can be confident using the peak reference values from this study to evaluate tactical-technical drill intensities
➡️Between-match variability greatest for Sprint Distance
7/11
📣 Key findings 📣
➡️ Outfield players experience similar physical match demands in WSL Academy, regardless of their position
➡️ Little variability between teams for peak physical performance variables so (cont.) ⬇️
6/11
The next step was understanding
2️⃣ What are the physical match characteristics?
*study on WSL A teams only
📈An important level to ensure players are exposed to appropriate running speeds to support preparing players to successfully progress to elite senior (WSL) football
5/11
1️⃣ What are the current physical training characteristics in elite female football?
✅ Published in these studies:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
4/11
1️⃣How can we optimise physical preparation for match play?
2️⃣How can we optimise progression between competitive levels
The first steps to solving these problems was understanding: ⬇️
3/11
To our knowledge this is the first study to report sources of variability in elite academy female football (multi-club).
As part of the FA Demands of the Game Project we identified 🔑 performance problems we needed to address:
2/11
🚨 New Paper 🚨
✅ Open Access ✅
Pleased to get the 3rd study from my PhD published, investigating the match characteristics of elite female academy soccer ⚽️ 🏃♀️⬇️
🤝11 WSL-A teams 🏃♀️257 players ⚽️171 matches
Thread 🧵⬇️
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
