Spotlighting the individual team sport athlete
Imagine you are a young, talented footballer, feeling exhausted from poor sleep and sore muscles. Still, you are asked to train hard because your coach adjusts the training load based on the team’s recovery average. For you, that turns out badly, because you get injured. This example shows that averages tell us little about individuals. Every player responds differently, and this is the core of my research. In my dissertation, my project team and I developed a daily monitoring approach using short questionnaires and wearable sensors, such as heart rate and GPS. This allowed us to gain insight into how psychological factors (like self-efficacy or mood) and physiological factors (like recovery or heart rate) evolve and interact within individual players. With new analytical methods, we showed that these interactions are unique for each athlete, and that sudden fluctuations can sometimes signal an increased risk of injury. We also discovered that players constantly shift between different “states,” such as well-recovered, fatigued, or injury-prone, and that these states are complex and change dynamically over time. The insights from this research have been translated into a practical app that is already being used by clubs. Coaches and staff can now see at a glance how a player is really doing and adapt training accordingly. This helps to better guide their athletes and to potentially prevent injuries and optimize performance. The key message tells us that it’s not about averages, but about the unique dynamics of every individual athlete.