GPS technology to predict footballers' injuries

New Delhi, August 11: Remember Sachin Tendulkar’s tennis elbow, Messi’s back injury, Roger Federer’s knee injury? Forget it. Injuries could be a thing of past in competitive sports. GSP technology can actually be used to predict football injuries! True, according to a new research, footballers’ injuries may be predicted by looking at players’ workloads during training and competition. 

The University of Birmingham and Southampton Football Club joined hands to analyze the performance of players and find links between training and injury. The findings have been published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine and are being acclaimed.

Researchers have discovered that the greatest injury risks occurred when players accumulated a very high number of short bursts of speed during training over a three-week period.

The findings now provide a set of initial guidelines for helping to reduce the occurrence of injuries in elite youth football. They show that GPS technology and accelerometers can be used to predict the risk of both contact and non-contact injuries.

The Birmingham University study is the first such research on injury risk using GPS technology, which is generally used in football to track players’ speed and acceleration - both in training and competition.

“Our research has huge practical and scientific application. It expands a recent body of literature in rugby league and cricket, which has proposed that the prescription of workloads may be more indicative of injury than the load itself,” said lead researcher Laura Bowen.

According to the study, players generally don’t keep track of their training or actual workload on field. They don’t follow a particular pattern of training or executing the plan on the field. The GPS can keep track of all that and help analyze the weaknesses of body. A careful and structured training and sporting regime could be hence developed reducing the injury worry to the lowest.