The Case for Adopting a Multivariate Approach to Optimize Training Load Quantification in Team Sports

Professional sports teams are investing substantial resources inmonitoring the training load (TL) in their players in an attempt to achieve favorable training outcomes such as increases in performance and a reduction in negative outcomes such as injury. This investment is likely to increase as organizations explore the most recent developments in wearable technology that allow a wide variety of objective physiological and other measures to be collected concurrently and over long periods of time. The question of how all of this data can be used is one that many in our field are now asking (Foster et al., 2017). To answer this, we have to start with a definition of TL. Soligard et al. (2016) recently defined TL as: