When USA Rugby’s Eagles suffered a 57-14 blowout defeat against Ireland in Dublin last November, the result was no surprise. Ireland enters the Rugby World Cup ranked No. 1 in the world, and the USA lags behind at No. 13. But the Eagles’ sports science team, lead by strength and conditioning coach Huw Bevan, used technology—both the GPS data collected from each player’s STATSports device and the match video—to leverage the loss as a lesson.
That analysis became a training benchmark for the underdog Eagles to understand the physical demands of playing against elite teams. USA begins its Pool C play against world heavyweights England (No. 3) on Thursday and France (No. 8) six days later. The Rugby World Cup began Friday in Japan with the host nation defeating Russia, 30-10.
Team USA’s monitoring also marks part of its compliance with new World Rugby guidelines. As each player takes the field over the next month and a half, they will be carefully surveilled by their teams under the World Rugby Council’s “load passport” rule, which aims to ensure the workload on each player is carefully managed.
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“It’s elite sport and you have to push those boundaries, but the workload monitoring is a good tool in terms of helping you do that,” says Bevan, who spent the previous two decades working with rugby and cricket teams in the United Kingdom. “The GPS information is crucial to that. Every minute of every session is monitored and planned initially with a target distance and target intensity and target duration in mind.”
The origin of the load passport stems from a study commissioned by World Rugby, the global governing body for rugby union, and led by its chief medical officer, Dr. Martin Raftery. That research, which culminated in a paper published by the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2017, found between 89% and 93% of an elite rugby player’s workload stems from training, as opposed to competition.
The new bylaw was passed by the WRC in November 2018. One month later, a survey conducted by the International Rugby Players, a global advocacy group, found that lack of recovery time and training were players’ chief concerns with their workloads. Elite rugby players must split time between club and country. Most noteworthy: 45% of players reported that they had “felt pressured by team coaches or staff to train or play when not fully fit.”
The World Rugby load passport rules do not require the use of wearable technology, although they do recommend such devices. Regardless, most, if not all, elite clubs already use wearables.The primary recommendation is for a team’s staff to consider what’s known as the FITT—frequency, intensity, time and type—of training sessions and to keep a proper balance between acute and chronic workloads. Sudden spikes are a known risk factor for injury. “If you’re looking to maximize the performance potential of your team, you’d be doing this anyway,” Bevan says. “It’s a very sensible measure, but to be honest, it’s something that we would do as a matter of course.”
In an email to SportTechie from Japan, Raftery emphasizes that the objective of the passport program is to build awareness of load, and “the legal requirement for the World Cup was the collection of load data” by teams’ “varied knowledge and resources.”
“For the past few years World Rugby’s medical focus has been on establishing a solid awareness, management and prevention program for concussion. This, rightly, has distracted us from a general injury prevention focus which traditionally is the responsibility of the team,” Raftery writes, adding: “The RWC is the highest profile rugby event, and my intention was to use this tournament to restart an awareness program around load management.”
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The clock in a rugby match runs for 80 minutes, but the ball is usually in play for only 40 to 45 minutes of that time. Catapult sport scientist Gordon Rennie says players’ running demands during that live action period can average as much as 120 meters per minute (4.5 miles per hour). Players tend to run more while defending, but at higher speeds in attack. Wings also run more than players on the interior of the formation.
“We try to base our training on the game as much as possible,” says Welsh Rugby Union sport scientist Ryan Chambers. “Knowing what each player does or each position is required to do in a game, we can then ensure that our training elicits those sorts of intensities and demands in training.”
Wales, which is currently ranked No. 5 but had been No. 1 just last month, has been a pioneer in player load management. The WRU provides sport science support not only for its national teams, but also for its four professional domestic franchises—Cardiff Blues, Dragons, Ospreys and Scarlets—that play in the Pro14 league. For the past seven years, the training and match data for every player across that system has been stored in the same central database. “When players are coming into camp with us,” Chambers says, “we know what they’ve been doing for the past five, six, seven weeks or since preseason with their club team.”
In any sport, the competing loyalties of club and country can be tricky to reconcile, with players often pulled one way or the other. “In soccer, the club game is probably greater than the international game,” Chambers says, “whereas probably in rugby it’s the other way around.”
The Welsh rugby team will play its first game in the World Cup against Georgia in Toyota on Monday. But over the last 12 months, Wales has played 12 international games, many of which overlapped with domestic seasons. Five of those matches were part of the annual Six Nations Championship, the other seven were the rugby equivalent of international friendlies—aka “Test Matches.” Unlike in soccer, those games are considered much more important.
An important question in terms of preparation for Japan is whether the style of play and physical exertion will be any different in the World Cup compared to any other international competition. If nothing else, the World Cup has quicker turnarounds between games than other formats. Clubs rarely play more than once a week, but several World Cup matches are four days apart. (USA’s final pool games against Australia and Tonga, for example.)
“If there’s a difference between the domestic game and the international game—and it’s a big ‘if’—are they preparing the players for the demands of international rugby?” Rennie says. “That congested fixture schedule, it doesn’t even happen in other international tournaments. It will be a new experience for a lot of players.”
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A newer frontier for wearable device data in rugby is the collection of information from tackling. Chambers has been working on exactly that problem for a Ph.D.—entitled “Development and Validation of Microtechnology-Based Algorithms for Quantifying Collisions in Rugby Union”—at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, Australia. In the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport in July, he demonstrated an ability to “detect rucks and tackles for all positions involved.”
“What we’ve found is that the devices can detect and differentiate between the tackle, ruck and scrum events,” he says of the Catapult wearables worn by Welsh players. “So using those devices, we can look at the contact element of the games whereas, previously with GPS, you were only looking at the locomotive or running demands. From a conditioning and management perspective, we know how many contacts a player should do in a specific week and the types of contact they should be exposed to.”
The WRU has established parameters on what constitute high-contact or low-contact sessions. According to Chambers, the challenge for the sport science team has been finding the sweet spot of exposing players to enough cumulative contact to build up tolerance while not overburdening them and putting them at injury risk.
“I think we didn’t do enough contact in a training week probably a few years ago—maybe seven or eight years ago—when we did pull back on contact a little bit,” he says. “Subsequently, we did pick up a couple extra shoulder injuries. Whether the two are related or not is difficult to tell because we didn’t have the technology then to know the causality of those injuries. But, anecdotally just from seeing, you think, ‘maybe.’ “
Both Chambers and USA Rugby’s Bevan believe that the use of newer wearable technologies is only one component of a proper monitoring program. They also collect basic sleep, energy, and wellbeing data, including the subjective rating of perceived exertion. The RPE scale has been used in sports for nearly half a century, and has been widely used in rugby for 20 years. The Welsh players also have been spotted wearing heart-rate monitors during practice.
There are currently no penalties for not adhering to its guidelines, nor specific rules that must be followed. For example, there is no compulsory rest period for players who exceed a certain load threshold. There are unlikely to be any outwardly visible differences to the game in Japan.
“I am not sure where the future lies with this intervention,” Raftery writes. “We have developed some guidance documents. The goal at this time is to raise awareness, and whilst we have been successful with the introduction, we have many steps to climb before awareness is successful.”
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