Case Study: Implementing a wellness program
Guest Author: Cairbre Ó Cairealláin
We have been using Metrifit with the Tipperary Senior Hurling Team over the past two seasons, and it has proved to be an instrumental tool in the preparation of our team. While the range of available functions within Metrifit is broad, we focus primarily on two modules; Body and Mind Module, which allows us to track player wellness, and the Session RPE Module which helps us to monitor and manage player training load. In this post, I’ll go into some detail on how we use the Body and Mind Module, and what we get out of it, with some tips on how to implement wellness tracking in a team setting.
Body and Mind Module
The first step for us in introducing the Body and Mind Module to the team was to discuss the value of the information that it will provide the management team. If a player is going to open up his phone every single morning and thoughtfully and honestly respond to the daily questionnaire, they should know why they are doing it, and how it will help them and the team. Making the players part of the process is key to getting the buy-in required. When you are collecting wellness data, it’s important that players don’t perceive it as a big brother surveillance system that will be used against them. The quality of the data that comes in will determine the quality of the decisions made based on that data.
The second key ingredient for making the Body and Mind Module work was demonstrating to the players that the coaching team were checking in every day, and acting on red flags when they present. For example, a player mentions in the questionnaire that morning that they were up all night with a stomach bug, they turn up to training that evening and say nothing, and struggle through the session. If you missed that and fail to mention it, that player could quickly lose trust in the process, and rightly so. One of the great things about Metrifit is the intuitive layout of the app, for both players and coaches. For players, the sliding scale makes it easy to fill out, and on the other end, the traffic light system makes it quick and easy to interpret the scores, with red flags coming to the top so it’s the first thing you see. The ability for players to add comments give us an even greater insight.
How it benefits the player
Self-awareness is central to an athlete’s physical and mental development, and the Body and Mind Module essentially shines a light of awareness on the player’s well-being in that moment. Self-awareness requires self-examination, a quality that is increasingly absent in today’s society, where we are easily distracted from the moment we wake up, to the moment we fall back to sleep. We can easily go through the day on autopilot, sucked into our mobile phones, computers, and TV’s, without a sense of mindful awareness. And why is self-awareness important in the context of sport? We are all subject to chronic stress, whether this is performance-related, work-related, relationships with others, or our relationship with ourselves. And because we are so busy with life responsibilities, chronic stress can go undetected, but continues to build underneath the surface. The Body and Mind Module addresses the most common lifestyle stressors:- sleep duration, sleep quality, nutrition quality, emotional stress, and joint/muscular stress.
The human body is incredibly resilient, and it will always find a way to adapt, but if you continue along the path of chronic stress, it always catches up. Eventually the body breaks down, and you don’t know why. The end result might be an acute physical injury, chronic pain, an illness, or emotional symptoms. One way or another, your body will make you sit up and take notice. The goal of checking in with yourself daily is to listen to your body and to give yourself an opportunity to address whatever comes up early. If we neglect player wellness, player performance will suffer. In eight simple questions, it also reinforces the important lifestyle factors that require care and attention for optimal performance on the pitch.
How it benefits coaches
The dressing room of a GAA inter county team on training days is different to a professional sports team’s. The full-time soccer player, for example, will arrive in the morning, hours before the first pitch session of the day. Whereas GAA players are coming in after work, and might have an hour to prepare for the session. Some players will be getting treatment from the physio, others will be doing their individual prep and prehab work, the manager and coaches will be running through the up-coming session. It can be difficult in that time to catch up with every player on the panel, but the Body and Mind Module allows us, in a sense, to have 40 conversations. Long before we hit the dressing room that evening, we know what to expect, and when we get there we can follow up with players who have raised an issue in the questionnaire that morning.
Getting the balance right
Getting the balance right between freshness and fatigue, is in my opinion, one of the most important roles of your Sports Scientist. The team needs to train hard during preparation periods, then at the right time, to taper off for optimal performance. An imbalance on either end of the scale will have the same end-result. If a team is undercooked, they won’t last the 70 minutes. If they are overcooked, they won’t last the 70 minutes. All the data coming in on Session-RPE loads, GPS data, and Wellness markers, allows the Sport Scientist to make informed decisions and recommendations towards getting this balance right. Monitoring external markers of load with GPS tracking is great, but while getting stuck into spreadsheets, graphs, and numbers, it can be easy to forget that we are dealing with human beings rather than robots. To me, it is hard to beat asking a player how they feel. The daily check-in provides this with one simple question: How ready to perform are you today? This helps us gauge the readiness of the individual player and of the team as a whole, and we can look for trends over the course of a season. The Readiness to Perform marker is an all encompassing subjective indicator, recognizing the bio-psychosocial nature of athletic performance. Keeping an eye on this gives us a huge insight into our readiness to perform when it matters most.
About the Author
We would like to thank our guest author Cairbre Ó Cairealláin for this insightful blog. Cairbre is currently Strength and Conditioning coach with All Ireland Champions Tipperary. He has previously held the position of Head Strength and Conditioning coach for Arsenal Women FC, after spending time working with the Arsenal FC Youth Academy. He feels very lucky to be in a position to pursue his passion for helping others to reach their potential as athletes and as people. You can read more from Cairbre on his blog feedmestrength.com. In his personal blog he explores his experiences in coaching, training, and in life. In doing so, he hopes to challenge his own thinking, and share what he has learned along his personal and professional journey, as well as the wisdom of others. We would like to thank Cairbre taking tfor his insightful blog into how he uses
About Metrifit
Metrifit allows athletes to communicate with you everyday via psychometric data such as sleep quality, sleep duration, stress levels, muscle soreness. What that means is that every day the coach has valuable pieces of information relating to every member of the team. It enables coaches and athletes to track and sift through all the variables that underpin performance, while looking after athlete health and well-being.
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