My project aimed to try and use various technology to help athletes determine whether the amount of training and game play is creating detrimental fatigue. We used heart rate monitors to determine the athletes training load, which is derived from heart rate intensity, total distance covered and speed ran during practice and game. To determine if the athletes were fatigued or not we put them through a 10 second multi-jump test performed on force plates. The force plates gave us a key performance indicator called reactive strength index, which is how reactive the muscles and tendons are during a jump. Lower RSI means the athletes are fatigued, high RSI means they are not fatigued. The RIS test was done prior to the pre-season to develop a baseline, and twice during the season the morning after a night game. We expected to see the RSI drop for athletes that had high training load. Unfortunately this was not the case. So we looked at the athletes aerobic testing scores and found that the athletes with higher aerobic scores maintain similar RSI scores to their baseline, while athletes with lower aerobic scores were seeing much lower RSI's. This suggests that aerobic conditioning plays a role in recovery from high training load events.
