West Stephen W, Williams Sean, Kemp Simon P T, Cross Matthew J, Stokes Keith A
Department for Health, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK.
Rugby Football Union, Twickenham TW2 7BA, UK.
Sports (Basel). 2019 Apr 27;7(5):98. doi: 10.3390/sports7050098.
In an effort to combat growing demands on players, athlete monitoring has become a central component of professional sport. Despite the introduction of new technologies for athlete monitoring, little is understood about the practices employed in professional rugby clubs. A questionnaire was circulated amongst conditioning staff across the 12 Premiership rugby clubs to capture the methods used, relative importance, perceived effectiveness and barriers to the use of multiple different athlete monitoring measurements. Previous injury, Global Positioning System (GPS) metrics, collision counts and age were deemed the most important risk factors for managing future injury risk. A wide range of GPS metrics are collected across clubs with high-speed running (12/12 clubs), distance in speed zones (12/12 clubs) and total distance (11/12 clubs) the most commonly used. Of the metrics collected, high-speed running was deemed the most important for managing future injury risk (5/12 clubs); however, there was considerable variation between clubs as to the exact definition of high-speed running, with both absolute and relative measures utilised. While the use of such monitoring tools is undertaken to improve athlete welfare by minimising injury risk, this study demonstrates the significant heterogeneity of systems and methods used by clubs for GPS capture. This study therefore questions whether more needs to be done to align practices within the sport to improve athlete welfare.
为了应对对运动员不断增长的要求，运动员监测已成为职业体育的核心组成部分。尽管引入了用于运动员监测的新技术，但对于职业橄榄球俱乐部所采用的做法却知之甚少。向12家英超橄榄球俱乐部的体能训练人员发放了一份调查问卷，以了解他们使用多种不同运动员监测指标的方法、相对重要性、感知到的有效性以及使用障碍。既往伤病、全球定位系统（GPS）指标、碰撞次数和年龄被认为是管理未来伤病风险的最重要风险因素。各俱乐部收集了广泛的GPS指标，其中高速奔跑（12家俱乐部均有收集）、速度区间内的距离（12家俱乐部均有收集）和总距离（11家俱乐部有收集）是最常用的指标。在收集到的指标中，高速奔跑被认为对管理未来伤病风险最为重要（5家俱乐部）；然而，各俱乐部对高速奔跑的确切定义存在很大差异，既有绝对测量方法，也有相对测量方法。虽然使用此类监测工具旨在通过将伤病风险降至最低来提高运动员的福利，但本研究表明，各俱乐部用于GPS数据采集的系统和方法存在显著异质性。因此，本研究质疑是否需要采取更多措施来统一该运动项目中的做法，以提高运动员的福利。
