Developing a footballer is about more than preparing them for the next match. It means understanding what that individual player needs to keep training, developing, and ultimately reach their potential.

Mattia Modonutti joins us to share his approach to player development and performance within elite football. Rather than treating performance as a collection of separate disciplines and datasets, Mattia explains why the real value comes from getting coaches, strength and conditioning staff, nutritionists, medical teams, and mental performance practitioners around the same table to build a richer
understanding of the athlete.

The conversation explores training continuity, individualizing load within a team environment, balancing match demands with long term physical development, and the difference between simply using a physical capacity during football and actually training it. Mattia also shares how his thinking has evolved as he moved from hands on coaching into performance leadership and why being evidence informed means combining research with experience, practitioner expertise, and athlete feedback.

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Speaker:

Mattia Modonutti: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattiamodonutti/

For decades, VO2 max, movement economy, and fractional utilization of VO2max have been widely presented as three key determinants of endurance performance. But how strong is the evidence for that third piece?

Yannick Sondermann and Dr Lars Schwalm join us this week to challenge some long standing assumptions around fractional utilization and explore whether it truly deserves the weight it has been given in traditional endurance performance models.

Drawing on their recently published work, they unpack what fractional utilization actually represents, whether it changes meaningfully with training, and why improvements in the metric may not always mean what we think they do. They also explore VO2max, movement economy, durability, strength training, and what coaches should actually focus on when trying to improve performance.

The conversation ultimately comes back to a simple question: are we focusing on the variables we can actually change?

Interested in learning more about the latest developments in endurance performance and sports science? Subscribe to the HIIT Science email list for updates on new research, courses, and educational opportunities.

Today's Speakers:

Prof Paul Laursen https://www.paullaursen.com/

Yannick Sondermann: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yannick-sondermann/

Dr. Lars Schwalm: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-lars-schwalm-223ab2420/

Resources:

https://journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/ijspp/aop/article-10.1123-ijspp.2026-0039/article-10.1123-ijspp.2026-0039.xml

We have more athlete tracking data than ever before. But are we actually measuring what matters?

Dr Ted Polglaze joins the podcast to reflect on more than three decades in sports science, from manually tracking athletes on VHS tapes to the arrival of GPS and today's increasingly sophisticated approaches to measuring movement and load. His career has spanned multiple Olympic campaigns, elite field hockey, water polo, rowing, and other high performance environments.

The conversation dives into metabolic and mechanical power, why speed and distance alone cannot capture the true demands of team sports, and the importance of acceleration, direction, movement orientation, and what Ted calls "erraticness." Ted and Martin also discuss one element that has increasingly disappeared from modern tracking analysis: time.
From the limitations of current models to where athlete tracking could go next, this episode is a reminder that better technology does not automatically mean better understanding.

Interested in learning more about the latest developments in endurance performance and sports science? Subscribe to the HIIT Science email list for updates on new research, courses, and educational opportunities.

Today's Speakers:

Dr Martin Buchheit: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-buchheit-6a355828/?locale=fr
Dr Ted Polglaze: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ted-polglaze-oly-23b6a81b3/