Aspire in the World Fellows Book - 2022

45 44 Round Table Topic 3 Optimizing the recovery strategies First Half Enric Gimenez – Mexican Football Federation For recovery one of the most important things is communication with the clubs. First of all, understanding their context. We have agreements with universities so we can research and understand how to recover when you have only 24 hours. What needs to adapt when you are living at more than two thousand meters altitude, like the Mexican cities? Secondly, what is the difference between each high-performance team? They need to individualize everything. With the younger categories, our main focus is on educating them. Teaching them is our main focus because we usually don’t have the players. In a year that we have a big competition, sometimes we have the players for 80-100 days. So, we try to adapt it to the different ages, different categories, and different genders. We try to differentiate the load depending on the objective of the category. If we focus on the first team, we try to individualize or to understand how they come from the club. We try to understand the framework of different areas, talking with different specialists. We talk around a table, what happens to that player? If he is not adapted to the high altitude, what can we do? In the end, understanding the player profile and doing that framework makes it easier to take a decision and to determine what we should do with him. What players really like is that you pay attention to them and make them feel special. Once you build this relationship with them, they are open to do practically whatever you teach them. Three years ago, we started to build a program that we called a scholarship structure. We differentiated the years into three kinds of categories. The official years where we have an official tournament, depending on if it’s under 17, under 20 etc. Then we start counting down and we structure all the contents depending on performance, habits, or knowledge. In the youngest categories, we start to build the knowledge in collective and individual sessions. A kind of theoretical session could be learning the names of the materials and machines. Philosophically, we try to understand if a coach who has worked for 40 years as a coach can adapt and learn new things, a player of 30 years can also learn, but in a different way. That kind of approach needs to be more individual, led by the captain or the coach. The key thing is to organize the contents, the knowledge and in this case, we try to understand how we can do it. In our case, we have two different approaches to sleep. For the last three years, we started a wellness approach. A specialist teaches them the different phases of sleep. The players get to understand how the different cycles work, they get involved in their own process of sleeping. The second approach is we started trying different kinds of technologies. For interventions to improve sleep, our approach was always teaching them to understand the process and then monitor it. That’s why we prefer to teach them and make them understand the importance and how they can improve their sleep. Maurizio Fanchini: Sport Science Director – AS Roma I try to help people to make decisions about what they do in terms of providing data and interpretation of the data. In addition, we try to have an evidence-based approach, with high-quality information coming from the scientific literature. This season, we had a lot of matches, but it’s the same that every club has at this level. I think it is something more related with psychological aspects than the physical or technical aspects, but we arrived to the final of the Europa Conference League with 99% of the players able to play. Our recovery and loading strategies depend on the day of the week and the contest. From the first team to the under 18, we have congested weeks but not for the youth categories. If it is the day plus one and the week is not congested, it is free, there is no load. If it is congested, we have training in the second day, but the first day after the match is for recovery for people who played all the match, and the second day is management of the load. We also have some other criteria. For example, RPE and how they perceived the recovery the day after. It’s multifactorial, but it is data driven and person driven by speaking with the player, coach or other staff member. We like to think about more than the usual recovery strategies. If I can leave all the players free to do whatever they want, I think that I can find them in the gym doing some activity recovery. Physiotherapy is another thing that they perceived to be very helpful. The pool and cold water are very individual, some of them don’t like it and some like to do it. In general, I think that they prefer active recovery or physiotherapy more. Some years ago, players felt too controlled. They didn’t like to be monitored so we’ve spent time with them showing them data about their performance. We started to attract themwith that. Now, we have a team that can collect external load and internal load every day. If we don’t send a report every day after the training session, they text me asking for the report. In terms of education for the youth, we have prepared something with our media center and with our psychologists. We worked to finalize a small cartoon series, in which there are some key messages where they can recognize themselves, doing bad and good things and seeing what happens as consequence. Sleeping is very important, it’s the first part of the recovery. We provide sleep rings to every player. After one season, we have some of the players who wore it every night and some who just gave me back the rings. It’s something that you cannot force them to use. We are checking sleep efficiency as well as duration. After two months, we could see some trends and provide feedback to them, but it’s very individual. If we find that they are not sleeping well, I speak to them to increase the duration or go to bed earlier. The players sleep at the club once a week because we have two matches and sometimes it’s one away match and one home. 90% of the time when we have matches, we sleep there. We ask them if they’re comfortable or not with the mattress. The ones that aren’t, we change the mattress with memory foam. If we find some sleeping problems with the players that we are monitoring, we just speak with them to understand what we can do.