Local Player Monitoring

English translation of coverstory about

Inmotio’s lpm Soccer3D®
in Dutch magazine for football trainers:

Voetbal Trainer no. 170, June 2010
www.devoetbaltrainer.nl

Louis van Gaal bets on digital technology

The 2009-2010 season will go down as the time when Louis van Gaal succeeded in
returning Bayern Munich to the ranks of the top clubs in the world. As a trade journal,
we feltthat we had to investigate one factor in the success of his approach that we have
not yet covered. We discovered an advanced technological system, LPM Soccer 3D,
which Van Gaal uses for his football conditioning objectives and tactical analysis. The
text and explanation with this are provided by his Dutch training physiologist Jos van
Dijk, of course with the permission of Van Gaal himself.J os van Dijk
Exercise physiologist at FC Bayern Munich. His tasks include planning and
phasing of the football conditioning training for the top team of FC Bayern
Munich. He also works on monitoring and assessing the fitness of the team
and the individual players. Together with the fitness trainers he draws up
individual training programs for players and analyses training and matchinformation.
Jos van Dijk studied Human Kinetics, has a Trainer-Coach-1 diploma and is a
KNVB coach. Before he went to work for FC Bayern Munich, he had a similar
role with Willem II and AZ.

Leaving nothing to chance at FC Bayern Munich

Louis van Gaal bets on digital technology
Louis van Gaal was voted coach of
the year by his colleagues in the
Netherlands last season, and he has
now beenawarded a similar honour
in Germany. The coach of Bayern
Munich was selected as the best
coach in the Bundesliga in his first
year. Winning the national championship, the national cup, reaching
the Champions League final as well
as the style of play will undoubtedly
all have contributed to this!
As a coach, Van Gaal wants to eliminate the element of chance. One of
his conditions to come toFC Bayern
Munich was the installation of an
advanced technological system
with which he had already had
good experiences at AZ. He worked
there together with Max Reckers,
who now also works for Bayern.
With the system (LPM Soccer 3D),
a huge amount of information can
be measured during training, such
as the heart rate, distance covered,

positioning, speed and acceleration
of eachplayer. Dozens of times per
second, ‘beacons’ that are set up
around the training field determine
the position of each player who
wears a vest with sensors. In
contrast to a GPS powered system,
this system delivers very high
measurement precision. This is
important, because in football small
accelerations or changes in direction can have a major impact.
The technology had to work from
thefirst training session at Bayern.
Before the start of the first training,
all the players immediately had a
specially prepared vest calibrated
for them. Van Gaal set the tone
from the beginning by inspecting
everyone to see that the vest was
worn. For Bayern’s training physiologist Jos van Dijk, a situation was
immediately created in which he
could do his work excellently.

performplays of the best quality
for the full 90 minutes. But the most
important thing is that players keep
making the right decisions, even
if they’re tired. Excellent football
conditioning has to support all of
this. When we look at football plays
in the key moments, these can be
connected to different parts of
football conditioning. For example,
we distinguish speed in the first few
metres,starting speed, power to
accelerate, duelling force, jumping
force, aerobic fitness and the capacity to continue to make plays for 90
minutes. It is clear that the demands
of the match can be different for
each position. Of course they also
depend on the chosen style of play
(see figure 1).

Football conditioning
Jos van Dijk: “The performance of
players and a team depends on a
lot of...