Training load monitoring in team sports: a practical approach to addressing missing data

ABSTRACT

Training load (TL) is a modifiable risk factor that may provide practitioners with opportunities to mitigate injury risk and increase sports performance. A regular problem encountered by practitioners, however, is the issue of missing TL data. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of missing TL data in team sports and to offer a practical and effective method of missing value imputation (MVI) to address this. Session rating of perceived exertion (sRPE) data from 10 male professional soccer players (age, 24.8 ± 5.0 years; height, 181.2 ± 5.1 cm; mass, 78.7 ± 6.4 kg) were collected over a 32-week season. Data were randomly removed at a range of 5–50% in increments of 5% and data were imputed using 12 MVI methods. Performance was measured using the normalized root-mean-square error and mean of absolute deviations. The best-fitting MVI method across all levels of missingness was Daily Team Mean (DTMean). Not addressing missing sRPE data may lead to more inaccurate calculations of other TL metrics (e.g., acute chronic workload ratio, training monotony, training strain). The DTMean MVI method may provide practitioners with a practical and effective approach to addressing the negative consequences of missing TL data.

KEYWORDS:

• Training load
• missing data
• team sports
• injury
• performance

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge with considerable gratitude the members of the Irish Rugby Injury Surveillance (IRIS) Research team for their help throughout the study period and the Irish Research Council for financially supporting this research.

Data availability

The analyzed datasets and the R code used during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

All authors contributed to the design and implementation of the research, to the analysis of the results and to the writing of the manuscript. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Irish Research Council under Grant number [GOIPG/2019/4261].