Heart Monitors Fine Tune UConn Soccer Players
In this news article soccer players at UConn are now wearing heart rate monitors under their uniforms at practice. The coaches and players are looking to find out how and when each player becomes fatigued and is no longer playing at their full potential. The monitors can show exactly when each player's heart rate becomes elevated and when they start feeling too tired to move at full speed. I think this information gathered from these heart rate monitors can not only be used from a coaching standpoint, but also from an athletic trainer's perspective. The coaches note when the player becomes fatigued in order to make a substitution in order to help the team perform better. But it also lets the coach know when to remove an athlete from practice in order to prevent any types of musculoskeletal injuries. This technology could help become a great preventative measure for certain injuries like muscle pulls and strains. Maybe in the near future a study could be done to show how using the heart rate monitors to remove athletes from play when they reach a level of fatigue could help prevent these types of injuries.
