How Tracking Technology Reaches its Potential: A Letter from Andrew Gray

What is Possible: Re-Establishing Intensity Through Mechanical Power

The next frontier isn’t just about better raw data (GPS/LPS receivers and Optical tracking systems); it's about applying better physics and intelligence to the data we already capture.

Power is Not Speed

This is the fundamental lesson: Power is not speed; they are very different things. Power, or Mechanical Power, calculates the rate of energy transfer by combining both force and velocity. It accounts for the effort required to change speed AND direction. By quantifying the true mechanical work done by the athlete, we can re-establish our understanding of intensity in MD sports.

This allows us to correctly quantify the most intense periods of competition and training, providing crucial insight to better understand match demands and the positional differences within our sports. 

For example, the traditional ‘midfielder’ in all field and court sports, often overlooked by HSR, suddenly appears as a high-effort athlete when analyzing mechanical power density, better aligning with our coaches' intuition.

The Blueprint for a Smarter Sports Science

With this power-based approach, the ceiling of possibility lifts dramatically. ADI's core function is to automatically detect and analyze every meaningful maneuver — both linear and multidirectional. This offers insight into the distribution and execution of every movement type. 

This gives us four pillars of superior insight:

1. Complete Acceleration and True Mechanical Work

ADI's model captures the complete acceleration—the combination of Speed-change Acceleration (what you feel when you speed up or slow down) and Direction-change Acceleration (what you feel when turning a corner). 

Ignoring the latter makes it impossible to truly measure the mechanical work athletes perform, directly affecting workload, conditioning, and recovery needs.

2. Advanced Performance Profiling with the Power Curve

The transition to mechanical power allows us to redefine what a "Peak Period" is. ADI automatically generates a true power curve for every athlete from all training and match data. 

This curve includes:

• Short Peak Periods: Explosive bursts that highlight an athlete's ability to generate high power quickly (anaerobic capacity).

• Longer Peak Periods: Sustained outputs that show aerobic conditioning under real-world, multidirectional loads.

By using this curve as a reference, practitioners can benchmark change-of-direction (COD) performance beyond rigid, time-consuming COD tests. We move from guessing performance to directly comparing an athlete's multidirectional output across different durations.

3. Targeting Injury Risk and Rehabilitation

• Hamstring Injury: Research confirms that 85% of sprints in football are non-linear (curvilinear). Traditional methodologies are not sufficiently measuring the costs of these efforts by considering speed alone. ADI quantifies the additional mechanical costs of curved sprinting. Failing to detect and measure these movements has potential far-reaching implications for hamstring injury risk and rehabilitation.
• Invisible Screening (IMU Technology): This is where the IMU sensor (Inertial Measurement Unit) inside the hardware becomes vital. Leveraging sophisticated ML processes, ADI extracts and analyzes step symmetry across four key movement types: Linear Constant-Speed, Linear Acceleration, Linear Deceleration, and Change of Direction. This analysis is non-disruptive, integrating seamlessly into training and competition. It provides auto-insights that highlight deviations from each athlete’s recent norms, enabling early intervention.
• Multidirectional Rehabilitation: Using this data, we can perform sector-categorized COD performance screening without standalone testing, from actual match data and under match fatigue. This visibility is crucial to successfully completing the most challenging stages of rehabilitation, such as the multidirectional integration of ACL reconstructed athletes.

4. Predictive and Proactive Load Management

We can use mechanical power to invisibly predict physiological markers of performance. If we can understand the power curve characteristics of our athletes, we can better identify the correct training strategies for optimal performance and move toward fatigue modelling with the addition of live multidirectional mechanical power (MMP)—the list is endless. 

This capability allows practitioners to rate drills not just by content or length, but by how much demand they place on the athlete relative to their historical peak.

The Shared Vision: Why I’m with Hudl

My ultimate message to you, the reader, remains: We are not done with tracking technology. We should not move on to the next big thing yet; we haven't given this one the attention it deserves. It is time to let it reach its potential.

I came to Hudl because they share this fundamental vision. They possess an unparalleled ecosystem—wearables and optical systems, match analysis, and recruitment tools—all in one unified platform.

By integrating ADI's intelligence into this environment, we gain:

• Global Reach and Scale: The chance to take proven, elite-level concepts global, expanding within and across all sports and levels.
• Seamless Integration: ADI is hardware agnostic. Whether your team uses GPS, LPS, or optical tracking, ADI applies the same consistent algorithms to produce meaningful, comparable metrics. This ensures longitudinal data consistency when teams evolve their technology, eliminating the risk of losing historical data.
• Breaking Down Silos: We are enabling the combination of tracking + event + video data to drive truly holistic insight, unifying physical load with tactical analysis.

As a practitioner, I was genuinely driven by  a simple goal: giving every athlete the best chance to reach their potential. It is now time we do the same for the technology we use to care for them.