UnderdogHelp
← Back to app

Game Demands

The game is the reference. Elite S&C plans each training day as a percentage of what a match costs — dialled per stressor, coded to match day. Game Demands turns your squad's own match GPS into that planning currency: "Wednesday at 80% of game demands, Friday lower and on a different axis."

Who can use it: admins and coaches. It's a desktop surface, gated on the Game Demands feature toggle in Settings → Features (default on). It reads best once you have a few timed matches on record.

It sits alongside Conditioning: that engine answers "how do I run this drill for each player"; Game Demands answers "what should the whole session cost, relative to the game." A tab strip across the top switches between Game profile · Planner · Planned · This week · Microcycle.

The stressor families

Everything is split into three independent families — the coach's "cardiovascular vs muscle strain" split — because a lighter day isn't just "lower", it's a different axis lowered differently:

  • Locomotor / metabolic — total distance, HSR, sprint distance, HMLD, sprints (the running / "cardiovascular" load).
  • Mechanical / neuromuscular — accelerations, decelerations, DSL (the accel-decel / "muscle" load).
  • Speed exposure — the typical game top speed (a max-velocity ceiling, not a rate).

Some families are only measured by richer GPS vendors. Where a metric isn't measured (e.g. accel/decel on a summary-only SPT feed), it shows as "not measured" rather than a fabricated zero.

1. Game profile — what a game costs

A read-only reference: for each GAA position line (GK / FB / HB / MF / HF / FF) and the squad, what a match demands across the three families — built from this squad's own match GPS.

  • Each athlete contributes their median rate per active minute over their matches; the line value is the median across players with a P25–P75 spread, so one high-match-count player can't skew it.
  • A full-game projection multiplies the per-minute rate by the club's default match minutes.
  • A confidence dot (ok / low / none) is always shown, never hidden — so you know how much match data sits behind each number.

Toggle Position ↔ Individual, per-game ↔ per-minute, and filter by family.

2. Planner — dial a session

Turn the reference into per-position or per-player targets at a chosen % of game demands, with one dial per stressor family (0–150%, so overload is allowed).

  • Presets name the intent — Volume (MD-3), Intensity (MD-2), Sharpener (MD-1), Recovery (MD+1), Balanced — and set the three dials for you; then tune.
  • Pick the basis: Total dose (% × full-game total — a fixed session dose) or Intensity (% × game per-minute rate — dose scales with session length). Speed is always a target top speed.
  • Set the session length, choose Position ↔ Player scope, and the targets recompute live.

Save to plan freezes a snapshot (config + every athlete's resolved targets) keyed to a date, optionally linked to a scheduled match/training event. Frozen means re-testing later never silently changes a saved sheet.

3. Planned — the frozen sheet

The Planned tab lists saved plans; open one for the frozen, print-clean detail (and a delete). Once the date has passed, Plan vs Actual appears: each athlete's summed GPS totals that day, banded on-target ±15% / under / over (taking a stressor down matters as much as up). No GPS that day reads as "no data", never "missed".

This week — game-equivalents

The This week tab sums each athlete's actual load over a 7 / 14 / 28-day window and divides by the one-game reference — so a week reads as game-equivalents (1.0 = one game's worth). It's the "what did we actually do" mirror of the planner.

Microcycle — plan the whole week

The Microcycle tab plans a training week as a unit. Anchor it to a match and the days lay out at MD-3 / MD-2 / MD-1 with the taper applied; it seeds training days from your schedule (or manual dates), and each day is a fully editable Planner plan. A planned game-equivalents header shows the week's dose relative to one game. Save groups the day-plans under one microcycle; re-open to view (frozen, print-clean) or edit.

← PreviousScheduleNext →Game Demands: evidence base