How Florida State Used Science on

Football Player Workouts

Posted by cmorris on Sep 1, 2014 in Muscle and Fitness, Training | 0 comments

BY NOAH DAVIS Mens Fitness
Rashad Greene, a 6-foot, 180-pound speedster from Albany, GA, may very well end his collegiate career as
the greatest wide receiver in the history of Florida State University football. No humble feat, of course. FSU is a
perennial powerhouse and gridiron talent factory that in recent years has churned out top NFL receivers like
Kelvin Benjamina first-round draft pick this yearas well as big names like Peter Warrick, Laveranues
Coles, and three-time Pro Bowler Anquan Boldin.

In 2013, Greene caught 76 balls, the second-highest total ever in a single Seminoles season, and snagged
nine receptions for 147 yards in the 2014 national championship game against Auburn. The Seminoles won.
This season, Greene is primed to break FSUs all-time records for total receiving yards, career receptions, and
receiving touchdownsthe first two are records that have stood since 1968.
But, for all his accolades, promise, and well-earned swagger around FSUs practice field, today the 21-year-old
nursing major with the quiet temperament is just another player whos slacking his way through a workout.
And theres no way he can hide it.

Greene, along with the rest of the Seminoles skill guysspeedy wide receivers and defensive backsis
going through a series of grueling conditioning sprints on the turf at FSUs new $15 million indoor facility, near
the end of the teams spring practices in Tallahassee. Vic Viloria, a stout former linebacker whos now the
teams head strength and conditioning coach, oversees the drill. Instead of focusing solely on the players,
however, his staffers are glued to an array of computer monitors that display a constantly updating stream of
colorful numbers, bar graphs, and pie charts. Some of the numbers indicate that Greene might be dogging it a
little.

The information comes from a sensor about half the size of an iPhone 4, which Greenealong with every
other playerwears on his back under the uniform, held in place by a triangle-shape sports bow secured at
the neck and under the armpits.

Developed by an Australian sports science company, Catapult, the sensor tracks more than 100 metrics,
including distance, speed, acceleration, deceleration, and heart rate. It also monitors change in direction using
3-D accelerometers, 3-D magnetometers (essentially digital compasses), 3-D gyroscopes, a GNSS antenna for
GPS, and a processor with a memory unit. As it collects data, the sensor transmits numbers wirelessly to the
coaches sideline command center. There the computers use algorithms that factor in the players vitals and
other biographical info, then elegantly format the information into readableand actionablegraphs and
charts.

At Florida State, the data is sacred. This is a football program that finished in the top 5 of the Associated Press
poll every year from 1987 to 2000, routinely steamrolling its opposition in the Atlantic Coast Conference. But it
struggled through a slump in the 2000s, in the twilight of the tenure of long-running head coach Bobby
Bowden. Recently, though, the team has surged back to prominence under new head coach Jimbo Fisher, a
longtime Bowden acolyte who took over the top job in 2010. The data never lies, argues Fisher, who credits it
for helping guide the Seminoles back to their rightful place atop the world of college football. Its helping me
manage the team in terms of where we want to peak during the year, he says, speaking at the pace of a
hyperactive child.

On the practice field, Viloria notices that Greene is slowing up a few yards before the end of each sprint. In the
past, Viloria wouldve had only his eyes and intuition for such a split-second observation, but now the sensors
offer figures to back it up.

Greene, like the rest of his teammates, knows not to question the data; so when Viloria shakes his head and
tells him the last sprint didnt counthe slacked off in the final stretchGreene doesnt argue or hang his head
in complaint. He merely lines up and does another 100-yard gasser, running full-bore to the very end.
He looks over at Viloria, whose readout confirms the effort. Greene hits the showers as the coach smiles,
another training session altered slightly but significantly, another national championship a fraction closer.
Welcome to the new age of football, where real-time information influences a head coachs practice decisions
on a daily basis, and every athlete gets an individualized training program intended to maximize potential and
reduce injury. And the Seminoles, headed by the irrepressible Fisher, are leading the way.
FSU football was the first major college football program to really adopt the Catapult technology, says Ethan
Owens, a sports scientist for the company. We created it, but they had to figure out how to take it and use it to
benefit FSU football.

The Seminoles became Catapults first U.S. client in 2011, a year after Fisher took over the team. Viloria and
his then assistants, Erik Korem and Joe Danos, pitched him on the Catapult devices after seeing them in
action at a practice of an Australian rules football team, the Greater Western Sydney Giants.

Catapult was founded in 2001 by engineers Shaun Holthouse (now the companys CEO) and Igor van de
Griendt. The duo developed a unique athlete-tracking microtechnology, and eventually found themselves
working with several Aussie pro football teams.
Viloria and Korem, fascinated by what they learned from watching the Catapult system in action, brought the
idea back to their head coach. Fisher, always searching for an edge in the hypercompetitive world of elite
college football, approved the program.

The first year, FSU used 30 GPS sensors for the entire team. Initially, Viloria says, the data was little more
than noise, what with the small sample size and the fact that the Australian sports scientists who designed
Catapult didnt know what stats to cull for an American football team. Each sport, they argue, comes with sport-
specific movements and conditioning drills that produce wear and tear on the body in different ways. But as
FSU gathered more dataadding additional sensors each year, topping out at 80 this season (at the cost of
more than $100,000 a year)they began to develop profiles for different types of players. Previously, Viloria
could only theorize that a series of sprints or route-running drills would have a different effect on Greene (6,
178 pounds) than on Benjamin (65, 234 pounds). If I take two guys with different body types out on the field,
well, ****the same workload is going to be a lot more stress on one than on the other, Viloria says. We
knew it before, we just couldnt prove it.

So last year, the much heavier Benjamin ran shorter conditioning sprints (90 yards) than the lithe Greene (a full
100 yards). Big offensive linemen, meanwhile, went 60 yards. Each individual player can only sprint for so
long, Viloria says. Beyond that, its no longer speed. Its not cardio or endurance either, because theyre
exceeding the heart-rate zone you want them to be in. At the end of the day, if you get rid of that, you get rid of
a lot of potential injury.

Viloria now establishes benchmarks at the beginning of the season for each playersimilar to a weight room
max-out figurethat can be followed all year. Its been a total culture change, he says. Everyone used to run
the same distance. But in the weight room, we wouldnt ask a 190-pound guy to lift what a 300-pound guy lifts.
That would just be stupid. The only reason we know that is because we get baseline numbers. We do the
same with the sensors on the field.

The data also provides a way to cut through the obstacles of player personality and stubbornness. For
example, if Greene can sprint at 20 miles per hour for 100 yards without slowing down, the coaching staff can
tell him to run at 80% for a training session and observe if hes following through or not. It takes all the
guesswork out of it, Fisher says. Some guys dont show how tired they are. Others do. This lets me have
correct data so I can make direct decisions. We know over a period of time where each guy performs his best
at the end of the week, so we can adjust each practice specifically for him. Players arent cattle. You cant train
them all the same. They all have different parts.

The Catapult sensors arent your average Garmins or Jawbones, either, delivering only basic information like
heart rate and speed. The system relies on proprietary algorithms that vacuum up several metrics in real time
and assemble them in easily digestible ways. The most important metric for FSU, for instance, is the all-
encompassing PlayerLoad variable, which takes into account sagittal, frontal, and transverse planes of
motionbasically, movement in every directionas well as other factors like age, weight, high-intensity
running, time spent walking versus running versus sprinting, and the number of accelerations and
decelerations.

PlayerLoad crunches the numbers to provide a single figure that represents how hard a players working.
Call it the Holy Grail number, the figure that turns all this fancy verbiage into football talk, says Viloria.
Based on those PlayerLoad numbers, Fisher, Viloria, and the rest of the staff may keep a practice going, end it
a couple minutes early if the entire group is overworked, or instruct individual players to take a rest if their
workload gets too far over their benchmark.

When practice ends, Fisher studies a printout detailing the workload of every single FSU player who was
micd upteam lingo for wearing a sensor. If the team was supposed to go 80% but went 85%, hell dial back
the next day to give his troops some rest by increasing repetitions but lowering the intensity, or reducing the
amount of physical contact between players. This, he says, keeps players in football condition while
simultaneously giving their bodies and muscles a bit of a rest so they can peak in time for the games. For all
the data programs success, Fisher was initially skeptical about the role of data in monitoring and maximizing
cardiovascular fitness.

It really was hard for me to adapt, because its against everything Ive ever been taught in sports, he says. In
football, he points out, players are supposed to go 100% all the time. Anything else runs counter to the sports
religionthat melodramatic, Rudy-esque belief that players should always be pushing themselves, painfully,
to some metaphysical limit in hopes of improvement. But, according to Fisher and Catapult scientists, that
mindset is not only rapidly becoming obsolete, but has possibly been dangerous all along.

You wouldnt drive a car in a race without a dashboard, so why do we do that with our athletes? says Gary
McCoy, Catapults senior applied sports scientist in the U.S. He argues that we all have different-size engines
that can operate at full speed for only so longand no two are the same.

Fishers opinions on the benefits of data changed as he saw its effects. In 2013, when the teams data-
monitoring program was in full swing, the Seminoles began the season ranked 12th in the USA Today poll
and never stopped winning. They won nine straight games by at least 27 points, including four against ranked
opponents. FSU finished a perfect 140, defeating Auburn 3431 in the national championship game on a
dominating drive during which they looked as fresh as they had in the first quarter.

We were able to peak damn near every week because we had all the data coming back, Viloria says.
The team also dramatically reduced injuries. Soft-tissue injuriesmuscle, ligament, and tendon issues that
arise from overstretching, lack of strength, and, most important, fatigueare down 88% over the past two
seasons, primarily because FSU is limiting overtraining.

Most soft-tissue injuries are preventable, says sports scientist Michael Regan. Were giving them a tool to
measure the movement of their athletes, and, therefore, their fatigue and load. By building up benchmark data,
youre understanding the risk of soft-tissue injuries and can be proactive in reducing them. Not a single player
missed a game in 2013 due to one. Thats a remarkable statistic for such a high-level NCAA football program.
(The University of Florida, meanwhile, suffered 10 season-ending injuries during the same stretch.)

Conditioning drills are safer as well. Weve been able to stop five or six heatstroke situations by monitoring
players heart rates during practice, Fisher says. Wed go grab a guy, get him cooled down, then get him back
out there. Viloria, the man overseeing the cardio training, put it even more simply. I dont have to wait until the
guy passes out to sit him down, he says.

Its an about-face for Viloria. The first year, when the data didnt really make sense, I was the typical
bonehead. I began to think that I didnt need the ****ing computer to tell me how to do my job. The second
year, I thought it was OK. Now, I really feel bad for the teams that dont have it. Its gonna extend careersand
save kids lives.

Catapult has also been a boon for recruiting. Fisher uses the data-monitoring program not only as a selling
point for the university, but also as a means of better preparing players for a pro career. He argues that the
data will help deliver them to the sports highest level in the best possible shape.

In 2011, Kelvin Benjamin arrived at FSU as the eighth-best high school wide receiver in the country, according
to *****s.com. And though he caught 30 passes in 2012, the coaching staff felt he was relying on his physical
gifts during games, content to glide through training sessions. Given his massive size and quickness, he
should have dominated. Viloria believes that providing real-time feedback to Benjamin helped convince him
that he needed to work harder on the practice field.

Theres no more arguing, says Viloria. I dont have to be the typical strength coach. I give them a number
and show them where they should be. It gives them some ownership. Its their body.

Other teams are catching on. Oregon and LSU use Catapults trackers for their programs, though they have
nowhere near FSUs 80 sensors. The University of Kentuckys football team hired away former Viloria assistant
Erik Korem to run its GPS program, while Viloria disciples Joe Danos and Alex Hampton now work as strength
and conditioning coaches with the NFLs New York Giants and Jacksonville Jaguars, respectively. In total,
Catapult has contracts with 19 college programs and 14 NFL teams.

Catapult doesnt offer a consumer product yet. Thats coming in the future, according to CEO Shaun
Holthouse. He believes that it will lead a new wave of wearable, high-performance devices that not only
measure your outputs but also run them through algorithms and help do your thinking for you. For example, if
youre a long-distance runner, youll have your own version of the PlayerLoad variable, which will incorporate
your heart rate, weight, and age, and be able to tell you if youre slacking or going too hard. The same will
apply to all kinds of endurance activities.

You could compare it to Formula 1, where great high-end technology is developed and proven at the elite
level, then over time makes it down to production cars, Holthouse says. The great thing about our technology
is its strong scientific pedigree and the fact that it has such a demonstrable performance benefit for the worlds
most elite athletes. Its very different from bottom-up devices like Fitbit and the Nike+ FuelBand, which are
focused more on sedentary lifestyles and obesity problems.
Fisher agrees. Winning isnt about going 100% all the time, he says; its about peaking at the right time.
The last two years are when weve really been able to use it, he says, and were 26 and 2. Injuries are down.
Weve had two ACC championships and a national championship.
And, hell tell, FSU is just getting started.

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