All the load we cannot see.

It’s obvious that a finish with maximum speed holds a very explosive acceleration and a rapid deceleration of the kicking leg. However, when coaches check their data from upper body sensors, they won’t find any correlation between the registered high intensity accels and decels and the number of finishes made by the players. As coaches are searching for this missing piece of the load puzzle, we’ll get the question a lot.

The simple answer is, naturally, that finishing drills generate a lot of load. Often, we see 80-90-minutetraining sessions where the load from a 20-minute finishing drill constitute a surprisingly high percentage total load of the session. The sheer magnitude of the finishing load is often a surprise to even the most experienced coaches. The graph shows the data from three players in a 20-minutes finishing drill. The pink and yellow columns show the explosive and very high accelerations and decelerations from the N11 sensor at the players shooting leg and the grey columns show the amount of accelerations and decelerations in the highest zone registered by the players’ upper body tracking system.

It’s clear that the sensors at the upper body only register a fraction of the actual high intensity accelerations and deceleration from the players’ legs. Then, do we take a deeper look at the values from the explosive kicking accelerations from the N11 sensors, we see a repeated power output much higher than any other type of action on the field in training or matches. Furthermore, we see that the N11 sensor register all the finishes made by the players.