Fit for 90 is a growing player-monitoring system being delivered to elite soccer teams. The basis of the program is to quantify each athlete’s daily readiness on a 100-point scale in order to provide coaches with the information to optimize performance and development across the entire team. Highly reliant on player feedback, the subjective nature of Fit for 90 has proven to be effective across all levels of competition, with users ranging from the UVA Men’s Soccer Team, to Sporting KC of the MLS, and even the U.S. Women’s National Team.
Creator Dr. John Cone spent his entire life in soccer before founding Fit for 90 in 2013. He first broke into the MLS as an assistant coach for Kansas City in the mid 2000’s, a position he would leave to pursue his Ph.D in kinesiology. Once his studies were complete, Cone returned to the MLS as Director of Sports Science for the Portland Timbers, where he first began to develop the idea of a subjective player-monitoring system.
“Fit for 90 started by delivering sports science consulting to professional, collegiate, and elite youth teams, and one of the things important for our teams’ success was to have information that allowed us to address the individual within the team environment. Additionally, while coaches were getting a lot of back-end information on training loads to validate their training sessions, they weren’t getting anything on the front-end regarding the player’s readiness to train. In Portland we had used a paper-based system with players filling out questionnaires so we could better understand their readiness. Logistically this was a challenge, and we knew that no good system existed.”
After developing and then showing initial and rudimentary software monitoring system to a colleague who is the fitness coach for the USWNT, and receiving positive initial feedback, the system was redeveloped and delivered to the USWNT for their build-up to the FIFA Women’s World Cup. The program works by having player’s assess their fatigue, soreness, mood, stress, and sleep quality levels on a seven-point scale and aggregating that information into a readiness score.
The system additionally quantifies specific site muscle soreness and hydration, and other components affecting training readiness. The proactive data is then analyzed and displayed so the coach can optimize the training session to the greatest benefit of their team, and each individual in the team. Post-practice, players report subjective training loads to give the coach information on the player’s perception of training demand. All of this information is geared towards achieving a balance between player stress and readiness, which Dr. Cone says, “is really the core of optimizing performance and development and managing injury risk in all athletes.”
“A unique aspect of the system is that everything is subjective. Advantages of subjective monitoring is that coaches can easily deploy and understand the information and its application to their environment, and analyses is far less time consuming than what is required in using other data such as heart rate and GPS. Additionally, the information delivered complements the information these systems deliver – this is one reason why we have a large number of teams using Fit for 90 in addition to these systems.”
Scientific research supports Cone’s use of subjective monitoring. Earlier this month a study published in the British Journal of Sports Science and Medicine further emphasized the superiority of subjective monitoring over objective methods, with a clear statement in its title: “subjective self-reported measures trump commonly used objective measures.”
The overall goal of Fit for 90 is to provide coaches with greater insights allowing for better management of player’s on and off the field. Already used by the USWNT in their World Cup winning campaign, the program is poised to make a lasting mark in the world of soccer.