Monitoring Strategies

Training Load and Recovery Monitoring for High School Football Athletes Student Instructor Institution Course and Code Date Training Load and Recovery Monitoring for High School Football Athletes As a strength and conditioning coach with a high school American football team, including freshman through senior athletes, a functional training load and recovery monitoring system is essential to maximize performance and reduce the risk of injury. These athletes' wide age group and developmental level pose special challenges and demand a complex but realistic monitoring strategy. Proposed Monitoring Framework I would use the session Rating of Perceived Exertion (sRPE) technique as the primary measure of internal load as the basis of my monitoring program. Yang et al. (2024) observe that the session-RPE model employs intensity and time spent during the training sessions to calculate the training load, which is particularly relevant to high school environments where state-of-the-art monitoring equipment may not always be available. The advantage of this technique is that it is based on the subjective response of the athlete to the training stress, both physiological and psychological. The pragmatic translation here would be that the athletes rate their perceived exertion post-training session on a scale of 1-10, multiplied by the session duration to provide training load units. To balance the sRPE approach, I introduce a simplified wellness questionnaire with a smartphone-based application or paper-based system that I will administer three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). This questionnaire measured the quality of sleep, fatigue, muscle s...