An athlete’s functional state – the integration of the athlete’s cumulative responses to all external and internal stimuli – affects his potential to achieve maximum performance in both training and competition. For national soccer team coaches, the question is not “what is the athlete’s functional state” but “how bad is it?” The national team skipper receives his players after the club season has ground them down. Eight months of practices, travel, weekly (or more) games and multiple overlapping tournaments will take a heavy toll on even the most well-conditioned and mentally resilient athlete. Compounding his challenges, they come to him from different club teams in different leagues on different continents. Before that they came up through different lower-level leagues, universities, academy systems and youth programs. The coach only has a few weeks to turn 23 individuals into One Nation, One Team.
Quantifying readiness with Omegawave
Omegawave provides specific, objective data about the athlete’s functional state, and therefore his readiness for training or competition. This data replaces intuition, trial-and-error and templates in determining how training sessions affect athletes, both acutely and over the course of a training block or season. Athletes in a poor state of readiness will develop limited adaptations from the session and will be susceptible to decreased work capacity, injury and over-training.
Omegawave assesses the readiness of five different physiological systems, and produces a profile of the athlete’s overall readiness. Direct current potentials of the brain, heart rate variability and 12-lead ECG are some of the variables that Omegawave processes. Omegawave users receive processed data as well as recommendations on how to apply that data to the athletes’ training. The readiness output is computed by cloud-based algorithms that have been refined and validated on Omegawave’s pool of over 10,000 athletes during the last 14 years. Users can also share the raw physiological data with their sports medicine and training staff for independent analysis.
Omegawave and the World Cup: Preparation
The World Cup presents unique – almost extreme – usage scenarios that highlight how Omegawave benefits athletes and coaches. Omegawave’s Performance Specialist Jesse Talikka lists the short rests between games, the amount of travel and Brazil’s climate as some of the stressors that players are facing for the first time at the World Cup. He points out that there are no not-as-important games at the World Cup. Every game could mean the difference between advancing and going home early. This eliminates the option of keeping star players rested for the big game by keeping them on the bench for a less important game. All of this adds up to high levels of physical and mental stress, which manifest themselves in athletes’ readiness before it has its effect on the pitch.
The earlier a national team starts using Omegawave, the better they can track, monitor and adapt each athlete’s functional state. If the athletes’ clubs use Omegawave throughout the season and share the data with the national team coaches, the coach can quickly close the gap between what he needs to know and what he has to assume.
“The national teams do not have the luxury of a longer preparation phase, where they can develop the physical abilities as well as technical and tactical parts. Teams will have to focus on technical parts more, but if you start seeing red flags in the camp, you need to help the player with whichever limitation he has so that he can cope in the tournament,” says Talikka. “It’s the most important thing in preparation to have all the players prepared enough but with as small as possible price of adaptation, and for that finding the right window of trainability is extremely important. This means optimizing the individual training loads at the training camp from volume to intensity to recovery as well as training the right things at the right time.”
World Cup Execution and Management
Once the tournament starts, athlete management shifts from preparation and peaking to damage control. Learning and understanding the tactics necessary to counter and defeat the next opponent becomes the focus of team sessions. Classroom film sessions and tactical training are a key component of both preparation and recovery, but even these physically passive activities require peak mental acuity to achieve the session’s purpose.
“During the tournament you can’t affect the loads from games, so the biggest question becomes what to do between them. This is mostly about finding the right recovery methods for the individuals’ physiological states, to ensure maximum recovery before the next match,” says Talikka. “Some players might need active recovery, some passive. Some require relaxation and some stimulation. Different recovery modalities need to be applied based on individual needs. And then there’s the major role of nutrition. It all comes down to the actual physiological state of the individuals. Finding these differences require a comprehensive view of the athletes physiological condition, which can’t be attained without the information that Omegawave provides.”
At least 19 professional soccer clubs, 5 national Olympic committees, dozens of national sports federations and United States Special Forces use Omegawave to monitor and manage athlete training and recovery. Between the heat of Manaus, 5 Round of 16 games going into extra time and the pace that we have seen from teams like Argentina and the Netherlands, the World Cup is entering the “war of attrition” stage. The last XI standing will reach the podium as much from preparation as well as execution, and there is little doubt the coaches will have used every piece of data they could get along the way.