Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ALEX SANDERSON
We pride ourselves here at Saracens about looking for new ways to get an edge. And if sport science is one avenue, then we'll explore that avenue. The players are the resource so the rehabilitation and injury prevention of our best players and all our players is paramount to our success over a 10, 11-month season.
And for that, we have one-to-one rehabilitation. We've got guys that see them through every step of the way. And our players actually come back, I'm proud to say, stronger, better, physically better specimens than they were when they were injured because of the amount of resources and energy and time we put into the rehab of players. And part of that is technology.
JOE COLLINS
Rugby is an extremely progressive sport. It marries innovation with the art of coaching and science extremely well and that's versus any other sport that I've seen. I came from professional football and Olympic sports to rugby union. And actually, I was very surprised about how advanced the sport was, really, in terms of screening, monitoring, injury prevention, load management, the use of GPS-- essentially, the holistic management of a pro rugby player.
The aim of the game for us really is to balance innovation with doing the basics incredibly well. We're definitely an analytics-based club. So we use stats and information gathering on a whole variety of different parameters on the players-- so their wellness, their recovery, their readiness to trade and play-- and then balance that with the art of knowing the player, how ready they are in themselves really to get back on the pitch. So there's a whole degree of information collection that we'll have here.
TOM SHERIFF
This is the GPS receiver and the heart rate receiver. It picks up all the information from the equipment the lads are wearing. We have 30 GPS units, they're the ones they wear in the bra tops. They sit in between the shoulder blades and they transmit information around distance and speed and these days will pick up accelerations, impacts, tackles, and changes of direction. So it's a mechanical load.
And they've all got their heart rate straps that they wear under their shirt. In session, we'll just look at how much time they spend above 85 per cent of their max heart rate. If you want to get a conditioning element out of it or if you want to keep it low-intensity, make sure they're below that threshold. So that all comes in real time to the laptop.
The guys who've been here a while, they've got four or five years’ worth of data. So we can start seeing if there's any trends, as if they do pick up an injury, is it related to any sort of common features of how we load them and try and avoid that in the future?
JACQUES BURGER
The game of rugby, is it brutal on the body? I think it kind of feels like you've been in a car accident every weekend. Your body is just wrecked for two days off. And I think the way we are looked after scientifically and how the game has evolved in itself, it's incredible. And I think it's something that's really helped me in my professional career.
TOM SHERIFF
It used to be, can they sprint and can they cover 4K? But a lot of people can do that and can't play a half of rugby. So it's how you get to that 4K or how you get to that speed and how many times you get to that speed, which is where we're at now. So it's a very sort of individual process.
PAUL GUSTARD
Because of the sport science, because of GPS, because of heart rate monitors, we can measure them more accurately in terms of what they're actually putting their body through. We now recognise that it's not just what you do training-wise. It's the rest. It's the recovery. It's the nutrition. It's the sleep-- these things that weren't really spoken about 15, 20 years ago.
We thought, more is good. More is good. More is good. We now understand less is more. The boys actually train way less but are bigger, faster, stronger, heavier, and more powerful.