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| with Djibril Cisse (Pre-season camp in Austria, July 2010) |
As most of you know, training load (TL) assessment is vital to injury prevention strategy development. There are various tools of TL assessment, with the Rate of Perceived Exertion being one of the most popular.
In one of our papers (Brito, Hertzog, Nassis 2015), accepted for publication last week, we analysed the TL of highly trained football players daily throughout the entire season. The fatigue index was assessed once per week for the same period.
Our main finding was that training load was affected by a number of factors like previous and next match result and location. In addition, although TL fluctuated throughout the year the fatigue index remains relatively stable. Given the limitations of our methodology, we speculate that highly-trained players choose their pace during training in order to avoid excess fatigue throughout the season.
Practical implications
1) RPE-based training load assessment may not be as accurate as we think, and
2) highly-trained players have the ability to modify their pace in order to avoid excessive fatigue. Although this speculation remains to be proved with more robust experimental designs, our data suggest we should consider modifying our strategies on fatigue & injury prevention.
The abstract of this study can be reached at
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