Cutting-edge gizmos during pre-season training

Mirror writer Simon Bird straps on the cutting-edge gizmos that show how much pain footballers suffer during pre-season to become fit as butchers' dogs

Steve Bruce is chiding Asamoah Gyan to run harder, and asking what he’s been eating all summer.

There is banter, jokes and serious sweat as he powers the length of the pitch fast, then jogs across it.

This is the relentless slog of pre-season, a ritual for Sunderland - and every other club up and down the land.

But here in a German forest, surrounded by perfect facilities and zero distractions, there is no hiding place for Sunderland players.

As the Mirror is about to find out...

Bruce has bolstered Sunderland’s sports science team this summer, and installed a system to measure every aspect of work on the training ground.

So here I am squeezing into what can only be described as a sports bra for men (size: large, cup-size: ample)

It carries a motion tracker that feeds back key indicators to the laptop of Sunderland’s training performance analyst Richard Carrick, ready for live analysis.

This is Bruce and Sunderland leaving no stone unturned in a bid to beat the injury problems that wrecked the second half of last season, when at one point an entire potential starting XI was on the club's treatment tables.

Gyan and his team-mates wear GP Sports kit for every session.

Only four other clubs have it in the Premier League - Chelsea, Manchester United, Aston Villa and Fulham - while Real Madrid have just signed up too.

Slack off and it shows on a graph. Push too hard and alerts can flash up highlighting injury risk.

Bruce, who loves his image as an old-school boss and jokes he never uses email, can now access it all on his newly-acquired iPad.

Back to Gyan.

His heart rate and bodyload rating are high - not unusual for a man with a sprinter’s build - and his recovery time will improve over the next couple of weeks.

But he’s in better shape, thankfully, than me.

Here we go, running laps of the pitch, my every move fed back to Richard’s computer on the Statsports software.

I stride out the length of the pitch pitch, running 6.8m per second pace.

Resting heart rate of 56 soars to 173 - well into the “red zone.”

But the pulse stays at 150-plus on the jog, a sure sign I need to eat and drink less and exercise more.

If I was as fit as new signing Craig Gardner, that would rapidly drop to just below 100.

As the session progresses my “bodyload” rating increases to 71 as the impacts on my joints increase with tiredness.

Nimble players such as Steed Malbranque glide around in the low 50s. Gyan at his most powerful and fatigued was up at 100.

Next, short sprints half the length of the pitch.

No records are broken as I trundle up to a speed of 7.7m per second.

Richard explains Lee Cattermole does that, from box to box, for more than 1km during a game. I’m gasping for air.

Flat out, the computer shows 8.6 G-force going through my legs. I’m waiting for something to go twang.

Richard, a Northumbria University graduate, shows me a graph where tackles in training today have produced 11G on players joints.

I’ve covered 2,600m, and the intensity of the runs are shown on overlapping graphs matched against heart rate, and the forces on the body.

I’m in the red zone, at risk of injury. Bodyload rising.

A player in this condition may have to ease off.

Sunderland stars are measured from Wednesday to Wednesday, so the final two days of training before a match can be tailored to their physical state.

Bruce knows that when his team were averaging 10km-plus each during matches last season they were winning games and on top form.

Tweaking training to achieve that level of intensity is a vital juggling act for the sports science experts here.

As we sweat in the dug-out Bruce explains: “All the technology that’s out there, we’ve embraced and learned from it, in the hope of prevention of injury. That’s the big key for all of us after what happened last year. We’ve radically overhauled things and changed it and we hope that it does the trick.

“As I’ve always said, we need a bit of luck as well. Last year, we had four or five trauma injuries - Meyler, Campbell, Bramble, Turner. All of this stuff doesn’t do anything about that, but it does help on the soft-tissue stuff. We can monitor and gauge and understand where people’s bodies are. We’ve done everything we possible can to improve upon it.”

End of session? No chance.

Richard sends us off on a 6km forest trail run.

All I can think of is that bodyload graph going off the scale and red flashing up on his screen.

And how I’ve ruined the pre-season stats for new keeper Keiron Westwood, whose monitoring chip I borrowed.

http://www.mirrorfootball.co.uk/opi...re-season-fitness-training-article776146.html

 

Don't want to piss on your chips mate but this was done a week or so ago I think.

 

Cheers Billy, didn't catch it

 

Nee bother at all mate.

 

I must have missed it last time it was posted so cheers. Interesting to read.

8.6 G force going through the legs though? What the **** have they got them doing?!