# Quantifying the Training and Match-Play External and Internal Load of Elite Gaelic Football Players
## 1 Introduction  
The evolving nature of elite Gaelic football has resulted in a requirement for increased scientific knowledge regarding the optimization of training planning and structure. Indeed, Gaelic football competition is multicyclical in nature with the typical seasonal calendar including preseason games, national league games, provincial games, and All-Ireland games across a yearly calendar [1, 2]. For example, during a typical national league game week, these amateur athletes may go through a weekly round of competition, recovery, training, and a subsequent round of competition. The above training and competitioncalendar results in an increased requirement of backroom staff to appreciate the typical training loads completed by elite Gaelic football players on a weekly and segmental basis across a seasonal period. These analyses allow staff prepare players to maximize performance across the seasonal period, but also for players and teams to peak at the appropriate time of the season namely the All-Ireland series which is deemed the most important competition across the Gaelic football calendar [2]. In line with this demand, there has been a proliferation of quantitative athlete monitoring approaches and strategies within elite Gaelic football teams, that are executed on daily basis [2]. The recruitment of sports science and strength and conditioning staff to the backroom teams of elite Gaelic football teams has resulted in the emergence of training load monitoring practices within these teams, with this exponentially growing across the last number of years owing to the need to monitor individual responses to training practices. Initially, practitioners were limited to the use of subjective scales to monitor players training load across weekly and seasonal periods (e.g., pre-season, in-season, club, provincial and championship phases). However, in recent times advancements in technology have resulted in the utilization of global positioning systems (GPS) and accelerometers within Gaelic football teams [3; 4; 5; 6; 7]. These two training load constructs of internal (RPE, sRPE) and external (GPS) load represent the two main monitoring mechanisms utilized by coaching staff to understand players loading across daily, and weekly phases during the season [8; 9], with a combination of these two training factors typically manipulated for training planning, volume, and intensity [10; 11]. The ability of conditioning staff within Gaelic football to understand internal and external training load allows for more effective training prescription, for example, GPS technology can provide important objective information pertaining to training drills, internal training games, specific conditioning interventions, global training sessions and global match-play. These systems allow for in-depth analysis on the running profiles of athletes with measures such as total distance travelled, total high-speed running completed, average metabolic power and mechanical loading through acceleration and deceleration analysis typically reported [12; 13; 14]. Furthermore, the utilization of the rating of perceived effort methodology across sessions (s-RPE), provides practitioners with actionable and useful information in determining the internal load of athletes; such that the physiological stress to the external load, can effectively be captured [1; 2; 15; 16]. These data allow coaches and conditioning staff to manipulate athletes through periods of high and low training volume and intensity to ensure these athletes are optimally balanced within the fitness-fatigue paradigm to provide increased readiness for maximal performance levels during competition. This approach has now been adopted by several teams as part of their training monitoring systems across elite Gaelic football teams [1; 2; 17]. Periodization plans require careful manipulation of training volume and intensity to increase performance levels [8; 18; 19].