Altitude, Heat, and Fatigues Impact on Performance
A Deep Dive Into World Cup Data on Performance
We all know that altitude and heat impact performance. It’s not rocket science. Just come train in Houston, Texas or go up to Park City, Utah and you’ll feel the effects pretty quickly.
But with the World Cup we got an interesting case study to help quantify how each impacted performance just by following England’s journey. I covered altitude and heat before each of their matches, but it’s worth a deep dive retrospective to see what actually occurred.
England played their first 4 games either indoors or in temperate climates, before then playing Mexico at Mexico City (7,200 feet altitude) and Norway outdoors in Miami (120 minutes in hot and humid conditions). Before playing Argentina a few days later at an indoor stadium.
This provides a nice baseline of normality for their play before we can take a look at what altitude, humidity, and fatigue do to their players. I used FIFA’s in depth statistics to look at total distance run, high speed running distance, sprint distance, and number of sprints completed.
Notes: To standardize because Norway went 120min versus other games 90, I calculated meters per minute to help give us a better comparison. Zone 4= anything above 20km/hr. Zone 5 = anything above 25km/hr.
