GPS 3.0: from distance into zones toward better proxies of internal neuromuscular load in elite football
Buchheit M, Lopez Sagarra A, Boskovic A, Komino P, Norman D, Hader K. GPS 3.0: from distance into zones toward better proxies of internal neuromuscular load in elite football. Sports Performance & Science Reports. 2026 Feb;280:v1.
Full text here
Are you still counting GPS meters in speed zones and calling it “neuromuscular load”?
Our new SPSR paper, “GPS 3.0: from distance into zones toward better proxies of internal neuromuscular load in elite football”, argues that GPS 2.0 has reached its conceptual limits. After covering the metabolic side of load and response within the quadrant monitoring framework, it was overdue to tackle the neuromuscular side properly and put GPS back in its lane: external locomotor load, at best a weak proxy for internal neuromuscular load.
Its a heavy and deep paper, but here are the 3 most important practical takeaways.
- Typical GPS 2.0 metrics miss the multidirectional reality of football. When direction is ignored, a large fraction of true mechanical work disappears. In some football-specific drills, the “missed” non-linear component can reach ~70% of the true mechanical work.
- Load intensity matters more than volume when the goal is to understand tissue stress and fatigue risk. That is why the exposure concept we propose (i.e., exposure intensity time), makes sense as a direction. It is also why we are explicit that substantial work remains to test, calibrate, and validate methods before anything becomes mainstream.
Huge thanks to my co-authors for pushing the thinking and the applied examples: Andres Lopez Sagarra, Aleksa Boskovic, Peïo Komino, Darcy Norman, and Karim Hader. Thanks to Hudl for sponsoring the SPSR reports and supporting the ADI-driven analytics that make GPS 3.0 feasible.
This paper is also a legacy piece. Andrew Gray was doing the game-changing work on direction-sensitive mechanics more than 15 years ago with ADI. This is us catching up.
If you are designing sessions, auditing “top-ups”, or making RTP decisions from HSR meters, I would like your take in comments.
