Join Catapult’s Sophie Goves as she talks through what the research suggests for senior and junior female soccer players.

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We’ve got a question here from one

of our users working in Women’s football.

They’ve asked which value should I set

as my speed and velocity thresholds?

Let’s jump into it.

Before you decide which thresholds to use,

you need to understand whether you use

absolute or relative bands in zones.

Absolute bands are used with

more of a performance outlook.

Relative bands are more often than not

used as part of development outlook.

If we look at absolute values, the best place

to start is probably what is used by the

governing body in 2019 FIFA Women’s World cup.

They used the following thresholds to determine walking,

jogging, running, high speed running and sprinting.

The values in bold feature in

the report and the research here.

We’ve also converted these into other units for you.

Research by Strauss and Lopez Fernandez both use more

bands with smaller increments denoting high speed, running at

4.3 to 5.6 and 4.4 to 5 meters/second and

sprinting as above 5.6 and above 5 meters/second respectively.

If you’re working with junior cohort, the

thresholds may need to be adapted.

Research by Harkness, Armstrong, Till, Datson and Emmons

reduced the number of bands to four.

If you’re wanting to use relative velocity bands in

speed zones, this can either be done by looking

at percentages of max velocity and speed, or by

using percentages of MAS and ASR.

MAS stands for maximum aerobic speed and is

strongly correlated with minimum speed at VO2

max ASR stands for anaerobic speed reserve.

This is estimated using maximum sprint speed.

The benefit of this is to understand

which energy systems the athlete is utilizing

during training sessions and matches.

The paper by Abbott et al. will be linked below

the video to detail how these can be calculated.

Thanks for listening. I hope you found that useful.

Please continue to check in with the

Unleash platform for more content like this.

I’ll see you next time.