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.
I agree that this technology could be a great help to an Athletic Trainer. It could also help with the athletes that say they are good to go but really are struggling and don't have much energy left. The only thing I wonder with this is if the price of them for a full soccer team would be too much. It would become a question of whose budget it will come out of but I'm sure if they were a necessity, then something would be worked out.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting study that is being done on the women's soccer players of UConn. As you said, there will be so much information gathered on when a player no longer becomes effective and can even tell when a player might be more prone to injury. I can't help but think of the future and will every athlete be required to wear a heart monitor to establish how long they are able to go without injury and how this will affect athletics. I wonder if this is just something else that is going to make athletics that much more competitive or will it make people go too far?
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