Our data has shown that every time we had an off day, our skill positions had higher Vmax on 2nd day back from the off day than they did on the 1st day back. Giving the athletes a day to ramp back up before expecting their highest outputs is a good way to set them up for success.

You can bang your head against the wall and expect Tuesday to be very high speed, but it probably won’t be. And the reasons for having them at full speed on gameday go without saying. We used this model intuitively based on our own planning and the data backed it up.

Were there confounding variables making the data a little messy? Sure. Could we have been unknowingly influencing the outcomes by the constraints we gave the athletes? Sure. But the differences were large enough and happened over enough separate examples that a trend became clear