Creating a Complete Monitoring Dashboard

The Big Takeaway

• Following the blueprint of one subjective measure, one (or more) objective measures, and one (or more) key lift progress measure is a great starting point for implementing athlete monitoring 

A Case for Monitoring Readiness

It seems that the at-times vague concept of "sports science" has taken the performance and physical preparation world by storm in recent years. Every major club across almost every professional sport invests money and resources into objectively measuring their athletes' performance. One of the major reasons teams and private facilities invest money in these emerging technologies is to better understand how their athletes are showing up each day.

When looking at monitoring we can break it down into two major categories:

• Readiness Monitoring 
• Load Adaptation Monitoring 

Similar (or the same) movements might live in both categories but the intention behind why you’re doing them and what you’re getting out of the data is different. With that in mind, both are important things to include within your athlete monitoring dashboard. 

Readiness Monitoring

Readiness can be defined as "the state of being physically and psychologically prepared to perform at an optimal level" and comprises physical and psychological factors (1). These factors can be assessed and monitored over time and are sensitive to changes in the athlete's state. This sensitivity allows the tests to be an effective tool to gauge the individual response to training, life stress, and other factors inside and outside the coach's control. Tracking readiness trends over time empowers coaches to make changes to the training day, week, or even practice schedule based on how recovered the athlete is. It helps avoid overtraining and under-recovery and allows coaches to make informed decisions about the total workload. All of these have the potential to improve performance further and reduce the risk of injury.

Load Adaptation Monitoring

Humans are complex, and while the average response across a group of athletes to a training phase may be positive, each athlete adapts at a slightly different rate (1). For this reason, it’s important to monitor how well they’re adapting to the load placed on them. Whether tracking 10-meter sprint times or progress in a key lift for that phase, load adaptation monitoring allows you to see if they’re making progress. This helps answer one of the most important questions for you as a coach: "Is my program working?" It allows you to double down on what works and quickly change what isn’t to ensure your athletes are progressing as they should.

Whether you work for a program with a virtually unlimited budget or you're a one-coach operation, you can take advantage of athlete monitoring by starting with a simple formula.

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The Blueprint to Tracking Readiness

A simple recipe for creating a complete readiness dashboard looks like:

• 1 Subjective Measurement
  • Common Example: Questionnaire

• 1 or More Objective Physical Measurements
  • Common Example: CMJ (1 outcome measurement + 1 or more strategy metrics)some text
    • Height (Output)
    • Duration (Strategy)
    • Countermovement Depth (Strategy)

• 1 or More Key Lifts
  • Common Example: Back Squat Estimated 1RM

• Optional: Wearable Data
  • Common Example: Heart Rate Variability

Subjective Measurements

“How are you feeling today?”

“How did you sleep last night?”

“Did you eat anything before coming in today?”

These often make up the first questions a coach asks their athletes when they come into the facility, and for good reason. We know the power that stress has on the human body and its ability to negatively affect recovery.

This stress could come from:

• Lack of sleep
• Personal relationships
• Training and practice
• Underfueling
• Alcohol consumption
• School

While having conversations with our athletes when they come in for the day is a great starting point and a foundation for building strong relationships with them, it leaves a lot to be desired from a monitoring standpoint. Yes, you’re gaining important qualitative information, but you're limited in your ability to track these responses over time, making it challenging to find trends in how your athletes are feeling and what they may be correlated with.

Wellness questionnaires have long been shown to be an effective way to track this information over time (2). After explaining the value of the data to the athletes and allowing for a short acclimation period, they can provide you with actionable information. These questionnaires can be as high-tech as a training app that sends them reminders to complete or as low-tech as a piece of paper that is then entered into an Excel spreadsheet.

Regardless of which strategy you choose, here are a few sample questions you could include with a 5 or 10-point scale for them to record their responses on (1 being the worst - 10 being the best):

• How would you rate your sleep?
• How would you rate your psychological health?
• How would you rate your readiness to train?
• How would you rate your current hydration level?
• How would you rate your current soreness?

Objective Measurements

While subjective measures are important, they only tell us one side of the story and don’t always correlate with objective physical capabilities (2). Therefore, it is useful to have one or more ways of objectively measuring how physically ready your athletes are. These tests should be relevant to the athlete's sport and capabilities, as well as sensitive to fatigue levels. Relevance to the athlete improves motivation and buy-in, ensuring that changes in performance are due to fatigue or positive adaptation, not changes in technical skill. Sensitivity, in this case, means that the test will show changes in performance depending on how the athlete is feeling on that day. Let’s look at the CMJ (countermovement jump) as an example.

Research has been unclear on the sensitivity of using jump height as a readiness metric (3). Some studies have shown that it is sensitive to fatigue levels, while others have shown that it isn't (3). Some research reports that the average jump height is better than the best jump height (3). This is because athletes can change their strategy based on how they’re feeling that day. If an athlete is fatigued from a game or a hard week of training, they can spend more time on the ground, taking longer to jump, while still producing a jump height within their normal range. If you were only looking at jump height, which is an outcome measure of the test (i.e., what the athlete did), you would miss this change in readiness. Pairing jump height with another measure like contraction time or countermovement depth gives you an idea of their strategy (i.e., how they did it) and is more sensitive to changes in fatigue levels. Without access to these strategy metrics, you can easily monitor changes in movement by filming the athlete during the test (easily done with Output’s video overlay feature). While many coaches still use the CMJ, others opt to perform the 10-5 RSI (reactive strength index) test. By forcing the athlete to rapidly produce high levels of force multiple times, it is a hard test to "game" and can pick up on changes in how the athlete is feeling that day.

Common examples of objective readiness tests include:

• CMJ
• 10-5 Hop Test 
• 10-meter Sprint 
• Handgrip Dynamometer 

Tracking Progress in Key Lifts

Monitoring how our athletes show up each day is important, but it’s also crucial for us as coaches to understand how they’re responding to training over time. At the end of the day, we want to ensure the programs we’re implementing are leading to positive adaptations. This is where load adaptation monitoring comes into play.

Depending on the phase of training you're in and the primary goal of that phase, you could choose to monitor:

• Key lifts (Squat, RDL, Bench Press, Snatch)
• Jump and plyometric variations
• Sprints
• Range of motion

Let’s use strength as an example. If we are in a strength phase and the primary goal is to increase the athlete's posterior chain strength, we can look at performance over time in a movement like the Romanian Deadlift (RDL).

This could be done through:

• Having athletes perform “plus sets” (max reps at a specific weight)
• Tracking RPE at different loads over time 
• Tracking 1RM or Estimated 1RM 
• Tracking improvements in barbell velocity over time 
• Weekly 3-5RM top sets

Using something like estimated 1RMs based on barbell velocity is a great "low fatigue cost" option. This means it won’t require the athlete to perform any extra repetitions or work closer to failure than the program calls for. This option allows you as a coach to track the athlete's progress in a lift that matters without making any changes to your program. After tracking the trend in performance over time, you can then make informed decisions based on how each athlete is responding to training.

Creating Custom Dashboards with Output

Take your athlete monitoring to new levels with Output’s new feature: Customizable Dashboards. Within the Output hub, you can quickly view all the metrics that matter to you and your staff in one place. It also provides a great visual representation that is easy for athletes and key stakeholders to understand.

• Simply go to the Dashboards section of the Output Hub
• Select “Create New” in the top right corner
• Start adding widgets with the metrics you want to track. 
• Select an athlete’s profile to view their data.

Having quality data at your fingertips empowers you to make programmatic decisions based on how your athletes are responding to training. Maybe they’re overstressed psychologically, which is negatively impacting their physical performance. Or perhaps everything is going according to plan, and they could potentially handle higher training loads. The Custom Dashboard feature allows you to see these trends as they appear in real-time.

Wrap Up

Monitoring readiness and adaptation to load is important. It is one of the best tools we have at our disposal as coaches to individualize training regardless of the environment you work in. 

Following this monitoring blueprint is a great starting point for gathering relevant data on your athletes:

• 1 Subjective Assessment 
• 1 (or more) Objective Physical Assessments 
• 1 (or more) Key Lifts
• (Optional) Integrating Wearable Data  

There are many options you have at your disposal to get the job done and Output Custom Dashboards provide a time-efficient and visually appealing way of monitoring your athletes. 

Want to see the new dashboards in action? Book a demo today and discover how you can take your athlete monitoring to the next level!

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References

1. French, D., & Haff, G. G. (Eds.). (2021). NSCA's essentials of sport science. Human Kinetics.
2. Saw, A. E., et al. (2016). "Association Between Subjective and Objective Measures of Athlete Well-Being: A Review of the Literature." British Journal of Sports Medicine, 50(5), 281–291. 
3. Claudino, J. G., Cronin, J., Mezêncio, B., McMaster, D. T., McGuigan, M., Tricoli, V., Amadio, A. C., & Serrão, J. C. (2017). The countermovement jump to monitor neuromuscular status: A meta-analysis. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 20(4), 397-402.