Episode 234: In this episode of Sports Science Insights Podcast, host Steve Barrett is joined by Niklas Virtanen, who leads the sport science efforts at FC Midtjylland. With over eight years of experience in elite sport and high-performance consulting, and backed by UEFA fitness coaching and physiotherapy credentials, Niklas has built his work around a data-driven approach to optimising player performance and development.
Much of the conversation starts from a premise that is easy to say and harder to sit with: GPS has been mastered. Total distance, high-speed running, sprint counts — the metrics that once felt like the frontier are now table stakes, tracked by almost every club at almost every level. The interesting question is no longer whether you can collect them, but what you do once collecting them stops being a competitive advantage.
ㅤ
From there the discussion turns to what sits underneath the movement data. Niklas makes the case for IMA and IMU signals as a way of understanding how a player is performing an action, not just what action they performed — the accelerations, decelerations, changes of direction and mechanical signatures that separate two players covering identical distances in completely different ways. It's a shift from describing workload to interpreting quality, and it changes what sport science can offer a coach.
ㅤ
The episode also explores where that leaves practitioners: the discipline required to stop adding metrics, the value of asking better questions of the data already being captured, and what genuine progress looks like once the obvious layer has been solved.
ㅤ
Topics Discussed:
- GPS Is Mastered — So What Should We Be Doing Now?
- Using IMA/IMU Data to Understand How a Player Is Performing, Not Just What They're Doing
- Moving from Workload Description to Movement Quality
- What Progress Looks Like Beyond the Obvious Metrics
Where you can find Niklas:
—
Sponsors
Axon: Performance teams spend the morning after game day stitching together six systems before the coach gets an answer. Axon Perform fixes that. Every source you already use, Catapult, StatSports, VALD, Opta, OVAL, Wyscout, WHOOP, Garmin and the rest, connects into a dedicated Snowflake warehouse.
Ask Axon, the in-platform chat, lets analysts and sports scientists query the lot in plain English. Reports that took hours now take seconds.
Used by the Springboks, England RFU, Japan RFU, Sydney Roosters and a growing list of rugby, football & cricket clubs and federations. Your data, reports, measures and AI models stay yours, fully portable.
See if your data is ready for AI at axonperform.com
BTL: BTL Industries develops advanced rehabilitation and performance technologies, including SIS DUO, Shockwave Therapy, High-Intensity Laser, TR-Therapy, Lymphastim and R-FORCE. BTL systems are designed to support recovery, pain management, functional rehabilitation and return-to-play pathways across clinical and elite sport settings.
VALD Performance, makers of the Nordbord, Forceframe, ForeDecks and HumanTrak. VALD Performance systems are built with the high-performance practitioner in mind, translating traditionally lab-based technologies into engaging, quick, easy-to-use tools for daily testing, monitoring and training
Hytro: The world’s leading Blood Flow Restriction (BFR) wearable, designed to accelerate recovery and maximise athletic potential using Hytro BFR for Professional Sport.
-
Where to Find Us
Keep up to date with everything that is going on with the podcast by following Inform Performance on:
-
Our Team
