🛑 Isn’t Load Management Killing Performance?

We’ve traded coaching intuition and physiological principles for the safety of a “Green Light.” On the surface, tech has never been better, but in reality, we have become Slaves to GPS norms.

In my latest paper with Tom Little, we strip back the facade of modern tracking. We aren’t just critiquing the tech; we are calling out a culture that prioritizes job security and “low-risk zones” over the very reason we exist: maximizing athletic potential.

The “Inconvenient Truths” we found:

• Norms are just mirrors of the past: There is zero empirical evidence that a GPS norm is “optimal” for performance or injury risk; it’s usually just a reflection of what you’ve always done.

• The “Top-Up” Fallacy: We see athletes doing mindless linear “top-ups” just to satisfy a dashboard. This isn’t training; it’s chasing a metric that often has a weak link to actual adaptation.

• Metrics that lie: Standard GPS metrics often fail to capture the true mechanical load of multidirectional, sport-specific work. If you build your norms on flawed proxies, your targets are a fantasy.

• Safety over Stimulus: The drive to avoid immediate injury is ironically creating “fragile” athletes by encoding long-term under-training.

The Bottom Line: GPS should be a contextual guide for squad monitoring, not a substitute for sound training principles like periodization and specificity.

It is time to move to Sport Science 3.0. We need to stop managing spreadsheets and start training athletes again.

Read the full paper here: [Link]

#SportScience #HighPerformance #LoadManagement #HIIT #DataScience #PerformanceTheory

Would you like me to prepare a “FAQ” style response for the comments section to handle the inevitable pushback from the ACWR traditionalists?