O’Leary: Teams pairing new data with tried and true load management

Lucky Whitehead was suited up for practice on Monday in Guelph with his teammates, but the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ emerging star wasn’t a full participant.

The receiver/returner bounced around the field, sometimes running alongside a fellow receiver after he’d made a catch and broken through the holes that a practice defence offers up at the start of a short week.

Whitehead wasn’t injured, but Bombers head coach Mike O’Shea and the training staff decided it was best to give their player a lighter day of work on their extended trip out east, ahead of Thursday night’s game in Toronto against the Argos.

It’s not the first time this season that the Bombers have tried to maximize opportunities to give their players a rest. Their veteran star running back, Andrew Harris, became a full participant in training camp on Day 7 this year. The team gave linebacker Adam Bighill almost a month off, taking advantage of a reported hamstring issue early in the season, hoping he’ll hold up for the remaining two-thirds of the schedule.

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Winnipeg Blue Bombers receiver Lucky Whitehead stands for the national anthem (Shannon Vizniowski/CFL.ca)

As the Toronto Raptors spent this past year carefully picking their spots on when and where to use Kawhi Leonard, the term load management worked its way into the everyday sports vernacular.

O’Shea laughed when the phrase was brought up on Monday.

“Yeah (the team has used it). We just didn’t call it that. We’ve been doing that for a long time,” he said.

“It’s the reason why in a short week, you practice the way you do. There’s a reason why you practice the way that you do when you come off of a bye week, which has to do with adding load back on.

“Al (Alain Couture, the team’s director of health and performance and head athletic therapist) and Brayden (Miller, the team’s assistant athletic therapist and strength and conditioning specialist) do a great job and we communicate a lot on those ideas.”

The idea of load management continued to gain validation in the mainstream of sports as the Raptors leaned on a rested Leonard through the playoffs, en route to their first-ever NBA championship. For athletic therapists and team trainers, though, it’s long been on their minds. In football and in the CFL in particular, it takes a different shape.

“As a sports science, right now (load management) is like if you’re going to the shop with your car and you’re plugging the computer into the car to see what’s going on with the players,” said Rodney Sassi, the Montreal Alouettes’ head athletic therapist.

“On our side, (implementing it) might be a bit easier (after the Raptors’ success) because everyone’s got to buy-in. It’s not just the sports science group. It’s the coaches, how they conduct their practices, when they conduct them, it’s nutrition, recovery. Sleep is huge and so is hydration, all that kind of stuff. There are so many factors that go into it.

“Load management is a pretty vague term that everyone has to buy into from top to bottom, the players, the management. There’s going to be a time where we push the player and load him and there’s going to be a time where we unload him.”

Of course, football’s demands are drastically different from the other three major sports. Where Leonard was able to sit out 22 of the Raptors 82-game schedule, missing games in the CFL’s 18-game schedule is much more difficult.

“As a strength and conditioning coach I have a whole week to get these guys ready for their exam (game day),” said Vincent Roof-Racine of the Alouettes.

“If you have three games during the week in the NBA and the NHL, it’s different. In between the games, you don’t work them out in the gym the same way I do, because of time constraints. They have less time and it has to be more focused on recovery and mostly on trying to perform at a very high intensity and load, repetitively.

“For me, it’s a build-up throughout the week. The weeks are not set up the same. We’re probably using tracking or looking at the same metrics but we’re not using the metrics the same way.”

“Same on the rehab side,” Sassi said. “Basketball and hockey, their recovery strategies are a lot different than ours because they have three games during the week. It’s a different strategy, even going into rehab.”

Barring an actual injury that keeps players out of action, managing their in-game reps takes a backseat to making their workload through the week leading up to the game lighter.

“We call it pitch count,” Edmonton Eskimos general manager Brock Sunderland said.

“If a guy has sore legs or is nursing an injury that’s not serious…if it’s a lower grade soft tissue issue then we’ll pitch count.

“They hit Day 1 and we’ll let him warm up and let him do individual drills and shut him down and see how that responds. Day 2, we’ll see if he’s okay. Let’s see if he handles individual drills fine that day, then indy, skelly, Team 1, shut down. By Day 3 if the next morning he’s fine with that, there we go. You manage the load that way.”

It’s a different approach than other heavier day-to-day sports, Sunderland said, but the theory is the same.

“It used to be prevalent when I was growing up, but if there was a prominent veteran player who was already established and he doesn’t practice during training camp or during the week, we’ll say he gets a vet day. That’s code for load management,” he said.

Bombers QB Matt Nichols admitted that when game day gets here, he wants all of the reps, but that teams do a good job of picking the right spots to rest on the road to game day.

Having played in Hamilton this past Friday, the Bombers have a short week, suiting up in Toronto six days later. The team got back to its hotel in Guelph Friday night and didn’t practice on Sunday.

“I think they do a good job of making sure you’re not playing 13 weeks in a row and practicing three heavy days,” he said.

“It’s how you feel and how your body is reacting to certain games or certain practices and keeping track of that stuff and making sure you don’t do too much,” Harris told Donnovan Bennett on The Waggle a couple of weeks ago.

“It’s definitely important as you get older but you have to stay on it and don’t let those little bumps and bruises and nicks pile up.”

Nichols sees a big change in how teams prioritize player maintenance, even from the time he was in college at Eastern Washington University in 2006.

“It used to be you’d run everyone into the ground and you’d run sprints after practice,” he said. “Now it’s having quality reps instead of quantity of reps. We chase the ball down during practice, rather than having to run sprints after practice. You kind of get your conditioning in during plays.

“And then the addition of cold tubs and hot tubs and massages and massage guns. I think it’s just gone to the next level. I think ultimately it just helps everyone be healthier for the course of the season.”

“I think what you’re seeing a lot, whether it’s NFL or CFL, it all comes down to CBA rules,” Sunderland added.

“In the general sense, gone are the days where you practice for hours, full pads, two-a-days starting at eight in the morning, you go three hours, you get a two-hour break.

“The whole landscape of what football was from when I was growing up and playing to being around training camps is entirely different. And it all goes back to one thing, which is injury prevention. Whether it’s major injuries, or just, you know, keeping your body fresh for the length of the season.”

Having gone through his rookie season as a GM in 2017 when he saw his Esks team endure a record-setting amount of injuries, Sunderland also knows that sometimes there will be nothing you can do to prevent injuries happening.

“I think load management is very productive. One, yes for injuries. But two, it’s more for people. (Sports science) tries to maximize your potential…to maximize your peak performance on game days. That’s where load management comes in,” he said.

“You can do everything right and if you snap your Achilles, you snap your Achilles. There are some things that in athletics, any sport, there are going to be traumatic injuries. It’s like if it’s people who have zero athletic ability who are playing pickup basketball, you can tear your Achilles.

“Is there data that supports load management being smart? Yeah. But there’s also common sense from three years ago, where you say, ‘Hey, this guy is a little bit sore so you don’t practice today.’

“I think it’s always been there to an extent. It’s become a more focal point with all the data we have.”

O’Shea echoes a similar sentiment on the idea. There’s more information and better technology today than ever before, but load management isn’t a new practice.

“We just don’t call it anything fancy here,” the coach said.