LJP PRO PERFORMANCE SERIES — A player walks in and tells the staff he’s fine. His jump numbers say otherwise.
The honest answer is neither, by itself. The data tells you something changed. It doesn’t tell you why, and it definitely doesn’t tell you what to do about it without a conversation. That conversation only happens honestly if the player trusts the person having it. Readiness monitoring gets sold as a technology problem. In practice, it’s a relationship problem with technology attached to it.
A readiness system pulls from a few streams: subjective wellness (sleep, soreness, stress, mood), neuromuscular status from something like a countermovement jump, heart rate variability, and external and internal load from GPS and RPE. Each one is a signal, not a verdict. The subjective piece only works if the athlete reports honestly, and athletes don’t report honestly to staff they don’t trust, especially about fatigue or stress, because in a results-driven environment, “I’m struggling” can feel like a competitive risk to admit.
I’ve seen organizations with excellent hardware and mediocre outcomes, and organizations with basic tools and strong outcomes, and the difference usually isn’t the technology. It’s whether the staff has enough of a relationship with each athlete to interpret the data correctly and to have the follow-up conversation without it feeling like surveillance. When monitoring is introduced without that trust already in place, athletes learn to manage the numbers instead of reporting honestly, which quietly breaks the entire system. When it’s built on an existing relationship, the data becomes a shared tool. The athlete wants the staff to know when something’s off, because the relationship makes that safe.
The Bundesliga’s return from its 2020 COVID break is a useful data point here, not because the injury spike proves technology failed, but because it happened during a period when normal routines, including the relational ones, staff checking in, conversations at training, the informal read a coach gets from being around a player daily, were disrupted alongside the physical schedule. Condensed fixtures and reduced preparation time played a real role. So did the loss of the ordinary relational infrastructure that usually catches problems before they show up in a report.
There’s a deeper problem with treating a jump score or a load figure as an objective read on capacity: it assumes the athlete executed with full intent. A rep performed without intent is a wasted rep, not a data point. A test performed without real buy-in doesn’t get executed anywhere near the athlete’s highest potential, which means the number you recorded isn’t a true indicator of what he can actually do. It’s a true indicator of what he was willing to give you in that moment, and that’s a function of his perception of you: the relationship you’ve built, and whether you’ve actually explained the why behind what you’re asking of him and how it moves his career forward. Not whether the data got collected.
A number pulled to show a director that monitoring is happening measures compliance, not capacity. Those are not the same thing, and confusing them is how staffs end up making decisions off numbers that were never accurate to begin with.
You don’t get an athlete’s full intent by asking for it. You earn it, by being someone whose why he actually understands and whose interest in his career he actually believes in. He gives you everything when he’s convinced this is for him, not for your report. Win that first, and the data starts reflecting real capacity instead of whatever he was willing to hand over to someone he hasn’t bought into yet.
A director’s question worth asking
Does it trigger a conversation, or just a training-load adjustment nobody discussed with him?
If it’s the latter, the technology is ahead of the relationship, and that gap is usually where trust, and eventually data quality, quietly erodes.
The skill worth building isn’t reading a dashboard. It’s using the data as a reason to have a better conversation than “you good?” It’s noticing a trend, sitting down with the player, and asking what’s actually going on, then using what he tells you alongside what the numbers say to make a call together rather than handing him a decision he had no part in. Athletes commit to plans they helped shape. They tolerate plans imposed on them.
This is the layer most organizations skip, not the sensors, but the relational work that makes them mean something. If you forced me to pick only one, I’d take the relationship, every time — a coach who actually knows his players will get more truth out of a five-minute conversation than any sensor gets out of a readiness score. But that’s not really the choice you’re making, and framing it as one hides what happens when you have both.
If you’re thinking through how to build that into your own environment, reply to this email. Happy to talk through it.
Luis Jeronimo, MS, CSCS | Founder, LJ PERFORMANCE
Luis Jeronimo is a High Performance Coach, consultant, and innovator who has operated at the highest levels of sport - from Olympic programs, to the private sector working with some of the most elite athletes in the world, to multiple MLS clubs. He is the architect behind the performance systems and winning cultures those organizations have run on.
Today, he runs LJ PERFORMANCE in Columbus, OH, with one mission: to demonstrate what true high performance in soccer looks like, by fusing elite-level performance, recovery, technical, tactical, and holistic methods drawn from his time at the highest levels of sport, building a unique standard the next generation of athletes will train by.
That same standard, the systems, monitoring, and coaching used with professional athletes, is what every athlete at LJ PERFORMANCE trains under.