Sport Science 3.0: The Return of Heart Rate

Bruce: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Irish Sport and Exercise Science Association podcast. I’m your host, Bruce Wardrop, and I’d like to start this episode by genuinely thanking everyone who got in touch about the last episode. That’s the football cooperative one. We had so much positive feedback and it was really nice to hear from you all. So thanks to everyone who reached out and got in touch.
Next, I want to acknowledge the fantastic news regarding the recently announced Memorandum of Understanding between us, the Irish Sports and Exercise Science Association, and the Chartered Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences, our equivalent representative body over in the UK. This first-of-a-kind strategic partnership will enhance the activities of each organisation through collaborative CPD offerings such as webinars, workshops, publications, and other resources, as well as the promotion of each other’s conferences. Congratulations to everyone involved who delivered this mutually beneficial MOU. It really is an important step for both organisations.
Finally, while I’m at it, I would like to also give a shout out to this month’s webinar, which will take place on Thursday the eleventh of December at midday with Professor Fiona Wilson. Professor Wilson is a physiotherapist who will present on the prevalence, risk factors, and management of back pain in athletes. It’s bound to be a fascinating webinar and if you would like to attend, it is free to register on our website.
Okay, back to today’s episode. Shane Malone is a lecturer in sports science in the Technological University of Dublin, whose research focuses on topics like match running performance, training load monitoring, and injury prevention in team sports. Shane is not just an academic researcher; he is also a passionate practitioner who has spent many seasons in the trenches with a variety of teams. Following a stint with the IRFU, Shane spent six seasons with Dublin GAA as their Head of Sports Science. During that time, Dublin won the Leinster Championship every year—not unusual for them—but they also picked up one league title and three All Irelands while Shane was with them.
After stepping back from that role, Shane is now working with his local club Ballyboden St Enda’s, who are on a great run of form this season. They defeated Nenagh to win the Dublin Senior Football Championship and have battled their way through the Leinster Championship to the final, where they face off against Athy tomorrow in Croke Park. By the time you are listening to this, the champions will have been crowned, so best of luck to both teams. Shane, how you doing? You’re very welcome to the podcast. Thanks a million for joining me this evening.
Shane: Cheers. Thanks, Bruce. Good to get on and chat around Gaelic football and training and stuff. And it’s great to get this up and going after a couple of email exchanges. So I’m excited to be here.
Bruce: In fairness, now you’re being generous there. It was a bit more than a couple of emails. We’ve been back and forth over, I don’t know, six or eight weeks trying to get this up and running. But you’re right. We initially floated the idea of talking around pre-season training. And, you know, I think I said to you that it took us so long to organize this, I half said the pre-season must nearly be over, but it’s actually turned out to be just pretty well timed.
Shane: Literally, like you have teams now coming back probably the last maybe two or three weeks, and probably players started doing their own little bit of work, maybe three, four or five weeks ago in terms of preparation for the pre-season block ahead of kind of the national competitions, kind of your O’Byrne Cups, your Walsh Cups and then ahead of obviously the league in end of January, start of February.
So it’s actually literally right on cue. It’s worked out really, really well. This could be a really nice part for your club coaches who are coming back maybe in January, and definitely your inter-county coaches, who are probably right in the thick of it tonight or yesterday or tomorrow on the field with their players, so it’s really apt. It’s worked out really well.
Bruce: Yeah. And like you said there, you know, we were trying to line up a podcast recording for last night, I think it was, but you were back on the pitch with your club.
Shane: Yeah. So lucky and fortunate enough to be involved with Ballyboden St Enda senior footballers. And they’re in preparation now for a Leinster final this weekend against Athy and hopefully, look, all going well, we’ll get over the line there and get into an All Ireland semi-final. But um, it’s actually funny to say that they would have started training in January 2025 and if we play, if we get through, hopefully against Athy, will be pretty much a year on the road because it will be January 2026 when we play the All-Ireland semi-final.
But look, I suppose no more like anything else, focus on this weekend and try and get the lads in the best shape as possible. And they’ve had—some of them had—a really, really long year because they’ve been obviously playing for Dublin inter-county level. So it’s trying to keep everything fresh and all hands to the pump and obviously maximise yesterday and our match day minus two to ensure that we’ve got obviously the right levels of freshness to maximise our performance at the weekend.
Bruce: Yeah, it’s interesting, like it is challenging with the… I know it’s not meant to happen, but with the overlap that happens for some of these players. So like you said, you’re going to be working with players there who have been going at it solidly for twelve months. So the idea of pre-season, in-season, off-season… it doesn’t quite fit the way we’d see it in a textbook.
Shane: Yeah, like Gaelic is a fun… I try and explain it to maybe some of my international colleagues around Gaelic football and hurling and you know, it’s a really cool sport to be involved in because obviously the athletes are amateur in nature but all but professional in terms of training ethos. So, we have this split season that’s been proposed by the GAA. But you know, we’ve kind of highlighted here some of the practical realities of it. If you’re with a successful club, whether you be in Cork, Kerry, Munster, Ulster, Connacht or Leinster, you can have players who are playing at inter-county level that could have a twelve month season. And, you know, when they finish up with their club, they might get two or three weeks. And then the inter-county manager is on the phone to them to say, “Look, we need you back because you’re an important player” and it can just be this kind of hamster wheel.
I suppose as a practitioner that’s a really cool place to be because you’re managing fitness and fatigue and you’re trying to consistently maximise performance of these players. We’ll get into it in a little bit more detail around kind of the monitoring and how we want to strategize to maximize performance. But simple stuff like RPE or jumps or groin squeezes can tell us a lot of information. And then if you don’t even have those technologies, just the simple stuff, or just managing time on feet and understanding how many game minutes these players are playing can be really, really valuable to maximize what these players are undertaking across the twelve month period.
Bruce: Well, let’s take that. You know, in an ideal world, your pre-season preparatory block. So, talk us through it and tell us what you think: what should it be? What’s important about it and what do you like to see happening?
Shane: Yeah, like as in, I suppose for me, I think everything we do as a scientist or as a sports practitioner stems back to a little bit of the theoretical underpinnings of what we’re actually meant to be doing, and then mesh that with kind of the practical environments of the team you’re working with. So straight away you have teams that have set their goals already around what success looks like this season. So it might be “I want to get to an All Ireland final” or “I want to win the All Ireland.” Or it might be maximising your league period or it might be maximising the pre-season competition period in that kind of O’Byrne Cup phase. So straight away there’s three different things that we need to consider.
But I think if we go back to our Tudor Bampas or these type of guys, these seminal researchers… you’re talking about essentially a preparatory block where we’re trying to overload the physiology of our athletes to maximize performance. So straight away, things you need to consider is that stress is cumulative. It’s not just about this session. It’s about how many sessions we have in our pre-season, reverse engineering our pre-season back as to what are the most important competitions, what are maybe the most important games. And I suppose looking at our micro cycles: what are our working blocks, what are our restorative blocks or our recovery blocks.
I suppose for me, when I think about pre-season and kind of stuff that I’ve engaged with and said to coaches before is that straight away off the bat, a coach will ask you the question: “Do we have the required running fitness to execute the game plan?” So straight away things you’re thinking of is the pre-season is there to increase the general conditioning base of all our players. And someone will say to me, “Well, how do you understand that?” Well, we have to have an assessment either at the start of pre-season and then at some particular point. That can be anything. But typically what you see in Gaelic football is it might be a Bronco, might be a particular time trial, it could be a Yo-Yo test, it could be a 30-15, but some form of aerobic fitness assessment to understand: has our pre-season been effective?
The next thing which is a little bit harder to quantify—and you kind of quantify it at the end of the year—is your injury prevention. So do you have, with your physio teams, good data collection around injury rates and occurrences and reoccurrences? Has your pre-season and your athletes completing pre-season resulted in a lower injury rate in-season? We know based on Aussie Rules that the more sessions you complete in the pre-season, the less likely you are to get injured in the in-season. And Paul Fisher has done some really cool work in Gaelic football, where he compared a high load and a low load group in pre-season, and the higher load group had a reduction in injury. It wasn’t significant, but there was a large effect difference there.
Also from a physiology perspective, strength and power become important. Again, assessing our athletes in terms of their strength relative to their body weight and then tailoring the program based on, you know, are they a novice? Are they maybe an under-20 coming into the panel? That will have different goals in terms of maybe getting strong under the bar and then maybe focusing on hypertrophy or putting size on the athletes so they can meet the demands of senior football. Then you’ll have your intermediate guys, maybe two or three years on the panel. Their program will look a little different. You’ll have your guys who are maybe five, six years on the panel, kind of your general mid-career guys who are strong relative to their body weight. We want to kind of maintain that but focus on a little bit more power development. So you might see maybe drop jumps or jumps at 30% body weight for peak power production, you might see a little bit more plyometrics for them.
And then your elder statesmen, for want of a better term. Your more experienced and seasoned athletes. For them, S&C and running looks very different versus your novice guys. They have legacy fitness built in and I suppose we need to respect that. And they also have a very good understanding of what works for them. So, you’re being very cute in terms of… I suppose “bucketing” is a terrible term, but you’re kind of branching your athletes off into what is needed for them.
I think also with the pre-season, sometimes what’s missed is coaches want to be the best running team in the country. But teams that can combine running and skill execution are teams that are most successful. So we need structured and planned overloads of the technical and tactical stuff. And then look, integration I think is the most important thing here. We need to be well integrated as a staff and well integrated as a multidisciplinary team. But integration of the physical, the technical and tactical together because we’re a time-poor sport. Gaelic football is a time-poor sport. So every minute you spend generically conditioning your athletes… while it is important because when they’re on the ball they’re sport specific, when they’re not on the ball they’re generic in terms of how they run. But every minute you spend there takes away from the coach’s ability to get across the game plan and the game model.
So ideally have those traditional “Red” sessions of small sided games—11v11, 12v12—paired with some blocks of generic conditioning, whether it be tempo running, some form of maximal aerobic speed work, whether it be speed endurance work, whatever tool is in the toolbox. But pairing technical-tactical with some generic and building that out across the session.
I suppose I’ll finish on this point: what does a successful pre-season actually look like? Straight away the most important thing is there should be an increase in understanding as to how the team wants to play, and you should physically see your athletes kicking the ball and moving the ball better with hand and foot and being able to close down spaces better. Improved physical fitness—so again, changes in your time trial, your 30-15, your Yo-Yos. Increases in muscle mass ideally for your underage athletes. So that will require you to link in with your nutritionist, see some probably some body fat decreases.
And then in-season, what you might see over time is that if you’re wearing heart rates, they might spend less time above 90% Max HR. You might see lower RPEs for games that are traditionally quite more difficult. So, if we have a successful pre-season and we’re playing, for example, a Mayo who run in transition the ball at speed, we should see maybe a lower RPE across the squad for that game. And that would again highlight that our pre-season work has led to an actual impact on physical performance, because we have a lower RPE, a lower internal cost, a lower time at 90%, while also maybe increasing some of our running outputs from a GPS perspective.
Bruce: You’ve given me a lot there. So between trying to manage the different types of players you have, manage the different types of activities that they’re doing and manage all the information that’s coming back to you… I’m thinking, what’s the relative importance to you for planning the pre-season? You’re not just rocking up and deciding an hour before a session what’s going to go on that evening. You know what the objectives are and how you’re going to meet those objectives.
Shane: Yeah. And what I would say is like even across my time being involved with Gaelic football teams, it’s becoming more professional in terms of communications with players and staff. There’s more professional staff involved, like PhDs and people who have a genuine interest in sports performance.
I suppose if you ask how do you plan it? There’s a famous quote from Seneca that I always change and manipulate: “If you don’t know where the port is, no wind is ever going to be favourable.” So if we don’t know how we’re mapping our pre-season—when our Red sessions are, when our Yellow sessions are, when our Green sessions are in terms of load—well then how do we manage maximising performance? Because you’re looking at that old General Adaptation Syndrome curve that I keep presenting to players. For every stress that’s imparted on the body, whether it be physical, environmental or anatomical, there’s an element of fatigue. And if we don’t manage that stress/fatigue response, we just end up with injuries.
It comes back to, for example, a simple question like: when can we introduce high speed running? High speed running has become, thanks to STATSports and Catapult and all the other GPS companies, just this number that everyone attacks. Like “how much high speed running do I need to do?” Typically the guidelines I give to coaches—and they are just guidelines—is that for the first two or three weeks, I think it’s important to curtail your high speed running. So build from small pitch dimensions all the way up to your larger pitch dimensions. Look at your smaller 1v1 small sided games and then maybe progress to your 10v10, 11v11, 12v12, then up to full match play.
And it’s important as well… another thing that’s probably my fault and a couple of other researchers was this exposure to Maximum Velocity. And yes, it’s really important, we know it protects from injury (“speed vaccine” for want of a better term). But when you think about planning it, you plan from a short-to-long approach in terms of distances. So we’re getting our acceleration, our 5, 10, 20 meter acceleration. We’re improving our mechanics there in our physical warmups. And then we progress towards kind of that 80, 90, 95% max speed exposure, and that in turn creates a natural general overload for players because you’re increasing the distance, you’re increasing the intensity.
If you think about your Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday—which would be a typical periodization on field for Gaelic footballers—your Tuesday should be that more extensive session. So in the pre-season it’s probably going to be just smaller pitch dimensions at the start. But when we get through the first two weeks of essentially return to performance, that Tuesday becomes an extensive session. So larger pitch dimensions, your 8v8 to 15v15, your max speed exposure. Then you have your Thursday which is going to be your intensive session. So you’re going to have your 1v1s to 7v7s, your accel/decel, change of direction focus in your warm up. And then Saturday becomes a combination of the two.
So when we think about where do we add the running? There’s a common trend out there that if it’s an intensive session (Thursday) you do change of direction or intensive top ups. For me, I actually disagree with that because I think if you do that, you just end up with the same session repeated consistently over time. So I think if you’re going extensive in terms of your small sided games and your gameplay (Tuesday), your conditioning should be extensive on top of that. So your tempo running, your maximum aerobic speed stuff, your 10 on/20 off, your 15 on/15 off. And then in your intensive stuff (Thursday) then you can add your change of direction, your shuttle work, your Bronco reps if you want to do a longer type interval.
But again, that’s that planning piece. You have to have a framework. Otherwise it’s just going to be a free for all. And the football coach with the forwards is going to do mad stuff. The defence coach is going to do mad stuff and the manager’s going to be in the middle going, “What’s going on here guys?” And then you’re with the iPad trying to feed back data going, “This looks a bit crazy.”
Bruce: So like, okay, so we’ve got our pre-season, we’ve got our plan structured appropriately. What should like typically… what’s the kind of tech that you’ll be using? What are you looking for on your iPad? And what are you trying to feed back to the players?
Shane: I think I’ll take it from probably the gym then onto the pitch. So in the gym everyone goes to bar speed, your outputs, your force plates, your groin bars. I think probably from a conditioning perspective, people have forgotten maybe the Wattbike and a couple of other things that give us data as well that can aid kind of that off-feet stuff.
But on pitch then, things that have really come to the fore… we’re still living in a world where we’re collecting RPEs. But things that are placed on the player that we definitely look at is GPS and heart rate. So GPS technology, whether it be true STATSports, Catapult, PlayerData… that’s collecting data at 10Hz. I suppose the good thing with that is that now comes live into an iPad. So we can be very, very specific in terms of targeted loads.
Remember I talked about “bucketing” those players in the gym? We now can bucket the players on the field as well based on how they test. So if you have a poor aerobic fitness test or you have a poor acceleration or poor repeat sprint ability, we can set your target loads in terms of total distance, high speed running and max speed exposure for our group. And then if players don’t meet that then we can top them up with a little bit more running.
And then from a heart rate perspective, there’s nothing better than looking at heart rate in terms of understanding the internal load. And we know that it’s that internal load that leads to positive physiological adaptation. It’s that internal cardiac load, that time over 90% Max HR, that really leads to positive adaptation. A funny one that I got from a coach only last year when we started using heart rate… the coach just said, “RPE, what does it stand for?” I said “Rate of Perceived Exertion.” And he goes, “Really pointless estimate,” especially when we had heart rate because now I can really dig into time over 90 and understand what guys are maybe significantly overloaded from an internal perspective. To be honest, what I would say for most inter-county teams is you’re missing a trick if you’re not monitoring heart rate. As torturous as it is to get players to wear it, it just gives you so much bang for buck in terms of topping lads up appropriately.
Bruce: Yeah, I know that you were involved in a paper very recently. You mentioned earlier on like, you have novice players just breaking into an inter-county squad, you have fellas who were there a couple of years, you have the seasoned pros. But even within those groupings, not every player is going to respond the same way. So talk me through that a little bit.
Shane: So again this I take no credit for this. This comes from Martin Buchheit. We were chatting one day and I just said, “Look, we’ve heart rate data here and we’ve 30-15 data.” And he’s like, “Let’s have a look at it from a physiological profile perspective.”
One thing that I was noticing with the live heart rate data was those players who I would have deemed a “speed” type athlete were just getting a lot of time over 90% Max HR. And my initial thought was, well, the aerobic effort for them is probably a little bit more costly, they recover poorly, so that leads to higher time over 90. And then on the flip, we had guys that we identified as a “gazelle” or a “war horse”—he’ll go all day—and he had very little time over 90.
This brought me to the Anaerobic Speed Reserve (ASR) work. Basically identifying profiles based on the difference between your Max Speed and your Maximal Aerobic Speed (30-15 score). So you have your Endurance Profile (strong aerobically, massive engine), your Speed Profile (low aerobic base, but really, really quick), and your Hybrid guy in the middle.
I suppose what hadn’t been looked at before was: does that profile actually impact dose-response? What we found was that Time >80% and Time >90% Max HR were correlated with changes in fitness. But the profile matters.
Endurance Players: Had the strongest correlation. They were slower responders initially but bigger gainers over time in terms of the volume that they get.
Speed Players: Initially have a massive response to improvements in aerobic fitness, but they basically decay and it plateaus. They suffer from “diminishing returns.”
Then we looked at what is an effective dose. For every extra 10 minutes that you do over 80% or 90% HR Max, you got roughly 2-4% improvement in your running performance. I kind of look at it this way: Your speed players will get the early wins, but that will diminish over time. Your endurance guys will grind their way to improved performance. And we were kind of the first study to show that heart rate monitoring probably has to be tailored to the physiological profile of the players.
Bruce: Where does that leave you then? If you have your gazelles and your greyhounds and everyone in between, do you think it’s better to take a more tailored approach with them in the pre-season?
Shane: I think it’s probably a little bit in the middle. The physiological profile is really important. But again, given what we know with the literature, that aerobic base of conditioning is important as well. So whether they like it or not, all the profiles probably have to do a little bit of suffering during the pre-season and do runs that they probably aren’t physiologically tailored to. That’s just the natural reality of Gaelic football.
But once you do return and you get your assessment of max speed and fitness, that’s where you break your athletes into their conditioning profiles. What have I learned?
For our Speed Guys: Long intervals over 60 seconds? They do not enjoy them and get no real bang for buck. Short intervals (15 on / 15 off)? They don’t really enjoy them either due to the monotony. But they are really comfortable in Tempo work (20s on / 40s off). That is a really good way to build an aerobic base with a low level of fatigue for those guys. They also love sprint intervals (10s on / 60s off).
For our Endurance Guys: The 10 on / 20 off is just too quick for them. But they can do 15 on / 15 off or Tempo (20/20) all day. The only thing that will go is their head because they’ll be like “this is the most boring thing ever,” but mechanistically it works fine.
No matter what your program, someone’s going to be disappointed with it! In that four weeks before they return, I kind of see that as my “Load, Stress and Flux” block where I don’t really care what profile you are, you’re going through hell on earth. That’s your 400s, 600s, 1K repeats. So when we return as a group, I can go to the coach and go, “Most of these lads have completed 7-8k of generic running. So we can now return to football.”
Bruce: I’m also curious to know your opinion, Shane. The recent rule changes in the game (the “Solo and Go”, the kick outs), how do you think they’re going to impact gameplay? Are they going to change the GPS data?
Shane: So in some positions, yes. In other positions, no. We looked at it in-house. For our Full Back / Full Forward, high speed running is drastically down. They’re basically curtailed. For our transitional lines (Half Back, Midfield, Half Forward) it’s increased a little bit. But what I would say is the change is within the natural variance of the measure from game to game.
Does it change your conditioning philosophy? Probably not. Is it important to acknowledge that the game is a little bit quicker? Yes. There’s a shift towards shorter and sharper, more frequent powerful actions. But we can get that through small sided games quite easily. We can set up scenarios that over-expose players to those demands. So it hasn’t changed most people’s philosophies too much. It’s just about getting down and dirty with the nuances of the technical and tactical changes.
Bruce: It comes back to what you said at the very start: it’s technical and tactical execution under pressure, under fatigue and high speed. That’s what’s going to make the difference.
Shane: Yeah. A question I always ask of all the coaches I work with is: “What is your game model?” If you’re not training those principles of play in every session, you’re just wasting your time. Every game a player has is like sitting an exam. Can they execute the game plan in the most chaotic environment? If you haven’t given them the proper environment to learn how to execute the game, they’re not going to be successful.
It requires the sports science staff to educate a little bit but also understand that some of these coaches have that gut feeling and intuition. I always say: “Know your coach, take a walk in their shoes.” It’s like a negotiation. There might be a session where the coach wants to work on a very specific tactical output that has really low GPS, but that might be a Tuesday when we wanted high speed running. So you need to negotiate: “Right, you can have that block, but we probably need to apply that then in a 15v15 scenario.” That collaboration leads to better outputs and avoids those load spikes which are directly related to injury.
Bruce: It’s fascinating Shane, I feel part of me feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface. But just to wrap up, what are some quick wins or quick tips you have for just improving and increasing that load safely for your athletes?
Shane: I think again, look at the really good work that’s been done. There’s that common trend of anywhere between 10 to 20% increases per week. So if you’re on the pitch for 60 minutes on a Tuesday, going to 66-70 minutes the following Tuesday is an okay increase. If you’re going from 60 to 80 minutes out of nowhere, you’re open to risk.
The reality is that if you were to pare everything back and have no technology, Time on Field is directly related to GPS outputs and Heart Rate. So managing your time on field, thinking about that 10-20% increase, going from short to long in terms of your warm ups, and just manage that first 10 to 14 days when you return. Think about that as “Return to Football.” Reintegration of the technical, the tactical. A little bit of running when it’s needed. But don’t go mad. Those first two weeks can be really important in terms of setting the tone for the year and making sure you don’t suffer needless injuries.
Bruce: Yeah that’s a great place to finish because you’ve given us something that absolutely everyone can do. As long as you can time your session, you can get it done. Fantastic, Shane. I’m definitely going to be coming back to you for some more in-season advice. Thanks a million for speaking to me this evening.
Shane: Cheers. Thanks for having us on.