Taken Too Far? What the Locomotor Profile Does Well, Less Well, and Least Well in Football (Soccer).
Buchheit M, Van de Casteele F. Taken Too Far? What the Locomotor Profile Does Well, Less Well, and Least Well in Football (Soccer). Sport Perform Sci Rep. 2026 Nov;326
Mea culpa: I asked the anaerobic speed reserve to go too far. And I would still use it tomorrow!
For more than 20 years I have built on MAS, MSS and the ASR, from the 30-15IFT to ASR-based HIIT. Somewhere along the way, many of us (me included) started reading a sprint and a jump as a window on the muscle, and picking session content from the bucket.
To sort this out, I could not have found a better partner than Freek Van de Casteele @[handle]. His PhD on non-invasive muscle fiber typing in high-level football is outstanding work, built off the back of the incredible work of the Belgian group led by Wim Derave @[handle] and Eline Lievens @[handle]. His multi-biopsy study is the backbone of the muscle part of this paper, and all of this reshaped my thinking on why sprint and jump tests track fiber type not as well as I thought.
What we found:
– Intensity: a no-brainer. Setting HIIT from each player’s own MAS and MSS, or from VIFT, should stay the default. Don’t throw that away.
– Bucketing: still very important, because it forces you to look at players individually. A very good start to individualise training and, eventually, manage load.
– Muscle typology: this is where it gets less straightforward than we thought. A fast sprint tells you a player is fast, not necessarily what his muscle is made of.
So, not a U-turn. The profile still does many things very well; we simply asked it to do one too many.
Profiling for practice, not perfection.
