The Omniathlete Blog

In professional football, the relationship between squad availability and competitive outcomes is well documented. Teams that maintain a healthy, available squad through the final stages of a competition consistently give themselves better conditions to perform. High injury burden correlates with underperformance across a season, and the effect is particularly evident during congested fixture periods.

What is readiness, and from which observations is it actually inferred, given that a single autonomic signal does not provide it? The answer is less convenient than a single number, but it is more consistent with how the organism behaves. Readiness is best treated as a property of the whole system, estimated from several converging sources rather than read directly from one indicator.

Recovery, like loading, should be a deliberate process with physiological targets. And the most important place to start is not the muscle. It is the brain. The brain consumes over 20% of the body's total energy at any given moment. Roughly 50% of that is dedicated to oculomotor function and visual processing. These are not abstract statistics — they carry direct implications for how we think about fatigue, fuel delivery, and the recovery strategies we apply.

The anterior cruciate ligament rupture is one of the most studied injuries in sports medicine. The volume of research produced on ACL rehabilitation, surgical outcomes, and return-to-sport criteria over the past three decades is extraordinary. And yet, ACL re-injury rates remain stubbornly high. This article argues that ACL return to sport is not primarily a structural problem. It is a systems problem.

Heart rate variability (HRV) has become a widely adopted tool in sport science and athlete monitoring, often interpreted as a straightforward indicator of recovery status. In many applied settings, higher HRV values are assumed to reflect better recovery, greater readiness, and a more favourable autonomic state. Conversely, lower HRV values are frequently interpreted as signs of fatigue, stress, or insufficient recovery.

In athlete monitoring, a blood biomarker is frequently evaluated the same way it is in a clinic: a single value compared against a population reference range and pronounced "normal" or "abnormal". Ferritin sits within range, testosterone is adequate, vitamin D is sufficient — and the panel is filed as reassurance. Yet this approach answers a narrow question.

Understanding the dominant mechanical stresses experienced by rugby players can help practitioners make more informed decisions when planning strength training. By considering not only how much work athletes perform, but also the type of stress they repeatedly encounter, practitioners may be better positioned to develop targeted and context-specific strength training interventions.

HRV is not a magical window into the entire autonomic nervous system, nor a universal indicator of stress or fatigue. It is a specific cardiac signal, reflecting how the heart is being regulated at a given moment. And if we want HRV to remain a meaningful tool in sport, we need to move beyond outdated concepts and adopt a more accurate, nuanced understanding of what the signal actually represents.

Force plates have become one of the most valuable tools in modern performance environments. What used to be confined to biomechanics labs is now part of daily monitoring in gyms, clinics, and training centres. Coaches and clinicians increasingly rely on objective force‑time data to complement their own judgement—whether they’re tracking neuromuscular readiness, managing return‑to‑play progressions, or simply trying to understand how an athlete produces force and absorbs energ

Dashr gives you the ability to test speed, agility, power, reaction, and more—quickly and accurately—without complicated setups or recurring subscription fees. You can capture results instantly on your phone, give athletes immediate feedback, and still have everything synced for long-term tracking and reporting when you want it.

by Sports Excellence (Athens, Greece) p.s. This is the english transcript of the interview originally published on n. 6 issue (March 2020) of the e-Mag edited by Sports Excellence (https://sportsexcellence.gr/wp-content/uploads/fylladia/SE_emag_issue06_MAR_2020.pdf) Sports Excellence: How important do you consider the monitoring of an athlete to be, through the use of a modern software designed to measure training load and perceived tiredness? Antonio Robustelli: Monitoring i

Since the launch of the NordBord, Vald's first product to enter the professional sport market, the Brisbane-based company has grown exponentially by quickly becoming a leading athlete testing systems provider as well as one of the most innovative sports technology companies in professional and high-level sport today. Even if sports technology is a big opportunity and one of the single most important challenges in sport performance, very few systems have been adopted by team

Once you’ve designed your elite player profile and completed the assessment process with your athletes, it’s time to use the data to drive your decision making. The priority should always be managing injury risk, and this data is extremely valuable to identify your high risk athletes. These are athletes who performed below the minimum standard on a number of assessments, and should be managed differently than your athletes who performed above the minimum standard. I have crea

In any high performance environment the goal is clear, minimize the risk of injury and maximize athletic development. If you lay in bed at night and honestly tell yourself you’ve done everything in your control to protect your athletes health, then you certainly have an assessment process in place. Most sports have technical, tactical, and physiological (I suppose we could add psychological here, but we won’t for now) requirements. If you don’t work with elite level athletes,