INVISIBLE T
CONTINUED.
experience in the field. The enthusiastic
Pastor is in his element as a member of
Vicente Moreno's backroom staff and feels
very much at home at Mallorca, a club
that's strongly committed to enhancing its
players' performance levels and well-being.
The influence and vast experience of the
club's board of directors, which features
Robert Sarver, the majority shareholder at
the NBA's Phoenix Suns since 2004, and
Steve Nash, a living NBA legend, is plain for
all to see. As Mallorca rose up through the
leagues, the club's facilities improved to the
current enviable levels of professionalism
boasted by the Son Moix outfit. Indeed, as
Pastor reveals, the set-up at Mallorca is far
better than those at many bigger clubs:
"Instead of bringing methodologies and
equipment back from Russia, I ended up
taking things out to Saint Petersburg."
Amongst all of the methodologies in place,
Pastor highlights one that's not all that
common: heartbeat variability to measure
player fatigue. "I'm a bit wary of using GPS
when it comes to studying sleep. With
everything that we already get the players
to do, it might be too much to ask getting
them to wear the vests in bed too," jokes
Pastor. Instead of using GPS technology,
the club employs very basic software that
features a band receptor which takes all
of three minutes to measure heartbeat
variability. "There's a time interval between
heartbeats and the greater the consistency
in this time interval, the greater the level
of fatigue. The software itself produces a
variability percentage that we can assess.
We run this test two or three times a week
before breakfast, when the players arrive atthe training ground," reveals Pastor. This is a
fine example of an effective approach that's
not overly invasive.
In addition to this routine, Pastor uses
other devices which are more widely found
across LaLiga. One such example is a
system that measures strength and power
in inertial machinery, using conical pulleys
to be specific. This kit is more advanced
than your traditional gym machinery, given
that it's able to replicate many movements
that are similar to those carried out
during games. The club also has a jump
platform, which is extremely useful when it
comes to vertical jumps, both to measure
performance and possible asymmetries
upon landing, which could point to an
injury. Meanwhile, the club is also reliant on
the widely used GPS technology.
Such is the scrutiny with which the
information collected by GPS technology is
handled that even training games and light-
hearted exercises are likely to be analysed:
"We recently did a football-tennis drill. On
that particular day, there were major levels
of asymmetry in the number of impacts,
because, of course, the impact is usually
just on one leg. So that's now something
we bear in mind in case the football-tennis
activity is overloading the supporting leg,
although the impact isn't intense," explains
Pastor. There's certainly no hiding place
from football's answer to Big Brother: GPS
technology.CA OSASUNA:
New Big Data Department turns the
Rojillos into second-half specialists
Talking of GPS technology, an excellent
example of the importance the system has
gained within LaLiga is to be found at top
flight newboys Osasuna. An interesting
statistic from the first half of the LaLiga
campaign tells us that if the half-time
scores remained the same at the final
whistle, the Navarran outfit would find
themselves languishing in the drop zone.
However, they'd be amongst the top six if
only second-half scorelines were counted.
Los Rojillos are a historic club in Spain,
founded a century ago and one of only four
clubs (along with Real Madrid, FC.Barcelona
and Athletic Club) owned by its members
as opposed to being Sports Public Limited
Companies. They have traditionally had
a reputation as being a side that never
gives in and, thanks to their current fitness
levels, they're now able to demonstrate
that virtue for the full 90 minutes. One man
who has been instrumental in this, along
with manager Jagoba Arrasate, is fitness
coach Sergi Perez, who has been with the
Pamplona-based side since 2018.
Sergi, whose brother, Jesus, served as the
fitness coach under Mauricio Pochettino at
Champions League runners-up Tottenham,
has a passion for fitness that instantly
shines through. Indeed, he reveals that the
brothers often exchange ideas and discuss
how they can implement new approaches
within their respective methodologies. One
of Sergi's biggest interests within his role
was the processing of all the performance
data collected by the GPS vests worn
by the players, the decisive factor beingFEATURE SPANISH TRAINING
Granada CF assistant fitness coach using the
Muscular Local Vibration device on a player.RCD.Mallorca fitness coach Dani Pastor
during a Fitness Team post-training meeting