Hitting the metrics, missing the angles: closing the directional gap in run-based compensatory training
López Sagarra A, Barba Balda E, Carruthers T, Granero Gil P, Buchheit M. Hitting the metrics, missing the angles: closing the directional gap in run-based compensatory training. Sport Perf Sci Rep. 2026; Aug; #316:v1.
This one started with an uncomfortable moment. We pulled the directional signatures of the compensatory drills we had been prescribing for years. Box-to-box, halfway, shuttle, max sprint, the S-run. Every one of them collapsed into the same narrow band: forward and backward, nothing else. The 45° diagonal, the 90° lateral, the 135° cut, all empty. Meanwhile the dashboard was telling us the session had hit its targets.
We were compensating for how much. Not for how.
Andres led this from the first question to the final table, and the idea came out of exactly the kind of conversation you only get when different practitioners sit in the same room and someone is willing to say the drills are not doing what we thought. Andres and I started sketching shapes that would force the missing patterns while needing nothing more than a centre circle and a few cones. Three letters came out of it. W for the 135° cuts, T for the lateral arc, C for the curved accelerations and decelerations. We called it the WTC, What The Compensation.
The numbers are in the paper. What I would highlight instead is the method. This only became visible because we stopped reading the session through distance and speed zones and started reading it through mechanical work and direction. That builds directly on the GPS 3.0 work with Andres and the team (SPSR #280, 300)
Two things we need to be honest about.
First, this does not replace ball work. A small-sided game produces all of this naturally and stays the first choice whenever it is possible. The WTC answers a narrower question: when the football context is gone, what is the least bad option.
Second, and this is the limitation I care about most, we measured mechanical and directional load only. We do not present heart rate here. From the microcycle data with Jakub Parak and Tero Myllymäki (SPSR #301), only about one in five non-starters reach the weekly target in the highest heart rate zones. So a session can be directionally complete and still leave the cardiovascular side under-stimulated. Both axes need checking. That is the next piece of work.
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