Brian Moore of Orreco joined Wednesday's OTB AM to explain why players may struggle with injuries when the Premier League returns.
Orrecco have developed an app to help sports clubs track COVID-19 symptoms that has been adopted by Premier League teams and could be rolled out by other sports including amateur ones such as Gaelic games.
Moore's company has analysed blood data across several sports and he believes injuries will be more prevalent with the busy schedule planned for the return of football and restrictions around medical contact for players.
"There has already been a spike in injuries in the Bundesliga," says Moore, "where players have returned and got soft tissue injures because of the increase in load after a truncated season. Then they had a period of de-training, then a ramp back up.
"So one of the upsides of COVID is that nobody needs to be reminded about what the immune system is, so what we are doing with blood data is getting a check on it. What we are starting to see is an increase in oxidative stress, poor anti-oxidant defences, so like fruit and veg intake.
"The advice is consistent in that you need to recover. That's where our company name came from, 'orr' is the Irish for gold, and 'recco' is short for recovery.
"It's fueling, it's controlling the load properly, and then everybody is handling that load in an individual way. Some players can tolerate higher loads it seems and others just need additional support."
Higher probability of injuries
Is there a higher probability of injury following lockdown?
"There is precedent," says Moore, "if you look at the NFL lockout of 2011, with a very similar run-in period there was an epidemic of achilles injuries, so it really is a concern.
"The performance staff are working double time because they would normally have a lot more time with the players to build in contact training, it is definitely challenging.
"Our tools are a part of that, one of those challenges is under the return to play protocols, medical treatments are limited to 15 minutes. So not only do you have less contact time with players, you are mandated so you can't do the usual treatment protocols.
"There are real practical challenges on the treatment side. On our blood site, we ran some of the return to play full COVID protocols, and see what some of the challenges are unless it's an emergency treatment it's not going to happen.
"We are all delighted to see sport coming back there are really significant things to take into consideration behind the scenes."
Orrecco supply sports data solutions to a range of sporting organisations globally including the NBA and many professional footbal clubs.
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