Emma Fahey: Philadelphia Union report

How does higher altitude v’s sea level games effect the Philadelphia Union football team, on Muscle Soreness, Distance/Minute covered ground, and High Speed Running? If so what could be improved to improve on the findings.

These charts compared muscle soreness, distance covered and high speed running at the 2 altitudes.

The chart indicates that there is not a great deal difference in any of the 3 variables at the 2 altitudes, although when analysed with a statistical model, it highlighted the details.

Soreness (green), visualy they look similar with similar mean scores, although using statistical analysis tools, soreness is a statistical difference at the highter altitude.

Distance per minuted covered during the games, (pink), again looks similar visually, this time the analysis agrees, that although there are differences, it is not a statistical difference.

High Speed Running (blue), the models show that at lower altitudes there is more high speed running, but not a significant amount to be a statistical difference.

Statistical findings.

Pairwise Contrasts for Soreness_1 with 95% Confidence Intervals and p-values

contrast	estimate	SE	df	asymp.LCL	asymp.UCL	z.ratio	p.value
altitude - sea_level	-1.26	0.5	Inf	-2.25	-0.27	-2.5	0.01

Pairwise Contrasts for distancemin with 95% Confidence Intervals and p-values

contrast	estimate	SE	df	asymp.LCL	asymp.UCL	z.ratio	p.value
altitude - sea_level	-3.79	2.49	Inf	-8.67	1.08	-1.53	0.13

Pairwise Contrasts with 95% Confidence Intervals and p-values

contrast	estimate	SE	df	asymp.LCL	asymp.UCL	z.ratio	p.value
altitude - sea_level	-69.51	46.95	Inf	-161.53	22.52	-1.48	0.14

What can we do as a team to avoid the muscle soreness?

The data shows that altitude on match days only effects soreness statistically, so this is something we could address. Altitude impacts muscle soreness due to the oxidative stress altering muscle recovery and fatigue, this has been proven it is a factor in your team. We could look at arriving at a higher altitude further before a march, but that would then impact training days. So another option would be to explore altitude training. This is a conversation we can have.