“Metabolic Power takes to the field” is part of a series of webinars held by Cristian Osgnach to go deeper on the workload analysis and the concepts of metabolic power and high-intensity through specific examples on the field.

Part 1

Workload monitoring is one of the main goals for a football fitness coach, keen to use any tracking system. The interest is to evaluate the overall volume or, referring to the energetic approach, to identify the high-intensity volume. The selected parameters, used to estimate the high-intensity, are crucial to better understand the characteristics of the proposed exercises. In the following video, we will show some specific examples.

The first point is to evaluate the total workload. Following the traditional approach, we can express it as the total distance; while using the energetic approach we’d representing it as the total energy expenditure. The following video shows if, and how, these two parameters are affected by the increased accelerated activity during the 3 exercises.

It is not always easy for a fitness coach to think in terms of energy expenditure. For this reason, it is more convenient to represent it as the equivalent distance, which is the distance that the athlete would have covered with the same energy expenditure but running at a constant speed. In the previous three example, the equivalent distance is rather representative of the higher energy expenditure due to the greater amount of accelerations from exercise 1 to exercise 3.

What happens though, when the total distance is not the same – i.e. in today’s training compared to tomorrow’s, or in this week’s match compared to the last week’s? We’d need to normalise the weight of accelerations regardless of the total distance. The equivalent distance index (EDI) serves our purpose. It is the percentage difference between the equivalent distance and the total distance. Equivalent distance and EDI for our three exercises are the following:

As shown below, in the last exercise, the EDI is almost twice the cost to cover 400 meters at a constant speed. It is interesting to make some more observation on how utilise the two considered parameters.

 In the next article, we will go deeper into the high-intensity concept definition.

Additional references:

C. Osgnach, “How to detect the high intensity“
C. Osgnach, “A simple intermittent exercise analysis: gpexe vs traditional metrics“