Strength and conditioning coach Lee Fearn on good medical results
We spoke to strength and conditioning coach Lee Fearn about the introduction of new practices within the medical department over the course of the last 18 months which helped them to achieve their best results, in terms of player availability, in almost a decade last season.
“I’d like to think the approach we take is a step forward for the club,” he said. “We sat down as staff on day one, when Keith [Curle] came in, and we tried to identify areas where we could develop and move forward.
“The first season was a chance for us to bed new ideas in and we saw a lot of benefits from the strategies we put in place. Having done that, we know we can’t then sit on our laurels and think we’re there, because we need to continually develop each area and improve our working practices.”
“We all want to improve as much as we can and I think we’ve seen real evidence of that,” he continued. “Injury rates have gone down and that’s a real positive. We also gained a lot of good performance data from players last year and I know some of the fans have seen that we’ve started using the GPS trackers on match days.
“One of the most common questions I’m asked at the moment is why the players are wearing a sports bra. It’s actually that GPS system and that’s so we can watch what a player does during a game. In turn that helps us to tailor his training load throughout the week.
“Using that data this season helped us to produce fitter players and I think we conceded the least amount of goals in the division in the last 15 minutes of games. That’s also good to see.
“That isn’t always a good marker of fitness, because you do concede goals if you’re chasing a game, but when you’re consistently defending well and scoring at the other end late in games then it does tell you something.”
The second part of this interview will appear on the official website on Tuesday morning.
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