Running Is a System. Stop Treating It Like a Parts List.

Coaching DevelopmentCoaching & CareerCareer Pathways

6 Jun

Last week I sat down with the performance staff at a high-profile football club in the UK. A squad full of elite athletes and some shiny new silverware. The kind of environment where you'd assume the data picture is about as complete as it gets.

We were reviewing one player. A genuinely fast athlete who'd had recurring hamstring issues over the past 18 months. Same side, every time.

The team had collected some SpeedSig data on reference from a national team that I consult for. The signal was there clearly for mine. Less vertical force production. A longer toe-off distance (foot was further behind the centre of mass at ground departure). Hip flexion on that side was reduced. Ground contact time was slightly longer. A consistent pattern across kinetics and kinematics.

When I flagged the vertical force deficit, one of the staff pushed back. “Vertical force doesn’t have anything to do with hamstring injury”.

I must admit was taken aback.

The symptom had been mistaken for the cause!

The hamstring was being injured because it was trying to repeatedly solve the issue created by the lack of vertical force production.

With lower vertical force, flight time was reduced and hip flexion became shallower…the limb was forced to over stride to maintain speed. As the athlete fatigued, that reduced hip flexion would only get worse…not better. The toe-off distance blows out. Frequency drops further, and the body compensates. It attempts to increase step length to maintain speed. The foot lands further in front at touchdown. Now you've got a hamstring under load in a compromised position at high velocity, on the same side, every time.

While the issue starts as a vertical force problem it cascades quickly. Running is a system not a collection of parts.

The signal was already in the building

So, I asked the staff to pull up their hop test data. And there it was — the athlete was 15% lower on the injured side across two different tests. The signal was already in the building. Nobody had connected it to the issue at hand because they really didn’t understand running mechanics, specifically the balance between capacity and control.

This is the thing I keep coming back to, and it's the message I want to land here.

We've got to stop thinking about athlete monitoring as a collection of independent data points and start thinking about it as a system. Systems theory is simple: elements, interconnections, purpose. In field sport, the purpose is not absolute top speed — it's repeatability, sustainability, keeping people on the park. But most environments are operating purely at the element level. Vald data over here. GPS data over there. Running biomechanics somewhere else. All sitting in silos.

The interconnections are where the answers live.

That athlete wasn't broken in the first place. He was producing a small vertical force asymmetry that was quietly unravelling his mechanics at the back end of games. The information to see it existed across multiple data sources. What was missing was a framework to connect them.

That's what SpeedSig does. It's not another layer of data — it's the interpretation layer that ties what the force plate, the GPS, and the biomechanics are all trying to tell you about the same athlete at the same time.

If you're a physio, rehab specialist, or performance practitioner who wants to start extracting more from the GPS hardware you already own — and start seeing the system instead of the parts — while you’ve got a WORLD CUP break send me a DM and I'll show you through it.