Overview
The Canadian National Women’s Rugby Team seeks your advice on the role of workload and fatigue in Rugby 7s. Rugby 7s is a fast-paced, physically demanding sport that pushes the limits of athlete speed, endurance and toughness. Rugby 7s players may play in up to three games in a day, resulting in a tremendous amount of athletic exertion. Substantial exertion results in fatigue, which may lead to physiological deficits (e.g., dehydration), reduced athletic performance, and greater risk of injury.
Questions to Explore
- How reliable are subjective wellness data? Can you quantify the individual variation in self-reported data and use this to adjust measures of wellness?
- Should the quality of the opponent or the outcome of the game be considered when examining fatigue during a game?
- Some accepted (and even widely used) measurements of training load or fatigue are naive. For example, you’ll find in these data a “Monitoring Score” which simply sums the values of other subjective scores in an attempt to create a single overall measure of fatigue. Is a simple sum useful? Or can it be improved? For example, are all components of this Monitoring Score needed? Are some more important than others, and why?
- Be wary of missing variables. Most often they indicate that a player simply did not provide information or that sensors were not functioning. But in some situations values are missing because they are not meaningful in a certain context. You’ll find that a one- size-fits-all approach is not useful.
- You will find it tempting to use the location data to help inform on-field strategy. We advise against this because it is unlikely to help you understand fatigue. The location data are provided in order to help you study fatigue. For example, it could be used to, verify hypotheses, or evaluate player fatigue in different positions (e.g., how does a player’s position contribute to their fatigue?).
Analysis & Presentation
Conclusion
- Athletes Movement Density Plot
