MyScience.ie

An interesting story came through last week, which demonstrated the wide-reaching benefits of science and technology in the world of sport.

Quizzed at an Arsenal F.C. stakeholder’s meeting, Chief Executive Ivan Gazidis revealed how the efforts of the club’s medical team to prevent and contain injuries to Arsenal players has this season seen them introduce GPS technology to the training ground.

Specifically, the movements of each individual player are tracked by GPS satellites to help medical staff track two key indicators of potential injury – the player’s work-rate in training, and the ‘load’ on a player’s feet, which literally means the amount of time a player’s foot is actually in contact with the ground while he is running.

As Gazidis himself explains, “You can see if a player is coming up to a risk of injury in a subsequent game…if their work-rate comes down in training, and their ‘load’ increases. This can help you to predict when players are in a dangerous situation”.

The ability of technology like this to flag symptoms of fatigue and muscle injury shows the extent to which sport has embraced science and technology in recent years. It will be interesting to see how successful the GPS experiment will be – to fully reap the rewards, Arsenal will have to build up records of individual players to accurately gauge how at risk they are of injury.

Fewer players on the injury list will certainly increase the chance of silverware – something the Arsenal fans crave after five trophy-less years!

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