Introduction:

Pre-season is a critical window in the elite sports performance calendar, where athletic foundations are built, squad fitness and injury risk is carefully managed.

But for sports scientists and S&C staff, it’s also one of the most demanding periods of the year. Testing, monitoring, and individualising workloads across an entire squad can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. That’s where STATSports technologies offer a smarter solution.

Combining live, on-pitch monitoring via Sonra Watch with deeper post-session insights through Sonra Desktop, practitioners now have access to a unified performance ecosystem designed to reduce inefficiencies, eliminate manual testing processes, and unlock powerful, real-time decision-making.

Whether it’s using the Sonra Watch to control training load live on the wrist, or leveraging force-velocity profiling and sprint split analysis through Sonra Desktop, STATSports provides the tools to run a more effective, streamlined, and athlete-specific pre-season, without compromising on data quality or coaching intent.

Sonra Watch 

Sonra Watch app is the ultimate link between the art and science of coaching, revolutionising accessible live data, in every session, on your wrist.

Metrics are calculated and processed on board the Apex device and transferred to the Sonra Watch app via Bluetooth Low Energy 5.0, meaning zero data drop-out.

STATSports is the only provider in the industry to give 100% identical live and post-session download data quality. Accurate live data leads to confident decision making for athlete load management, management of athlete injury risk, and rehabbing players.

Sonra Watch puts the power back in the hands of end users, which is why we recommend that it be used as a trusted tool as part of your pre-Season toolkit. There are many features, but here are four features we recommend using: 

• Player Comparison 
• Thresholds 
• Pacemaker  
• Steady State 

Player Comparison: 

Useful for viewing players off one of the 28 metrics available in live. Player carousel can allow a quick snapshot of up to 8 players at once and how they compare on a single metric.

Practitioners can use the touchscreen on the watch to scroll left/right to flick between players live during a session. The metric on display in the player comparison carousel is completely customisable to the user. This is easily changed by the user depending on what they wish to see for each player at that specific time or during the session.   

Thresholds: 

Useful to ensure players do not exceed the session output for the day, ensuring the session is aligned with the output.

The application allows another simple, yet effective dimension of analysis given the ability to set thresholds. 

To access the threshold scale settings, on the watch home screen, select settings, then threshold scale.

Thresholds can be set globally with the players selected for that session, or, can be individually set. Users have the ability to edit these threshold percentages using the crown on their Apple Watch.    

For a full tutorial on how to set or edit thresholds, check out the video below:   

PaceMaker: 

The STATSports Sonra Watch Pacemaker is a powerful training feature designed to help athletes maintain a target speed or intensity during runs and conditioning sessions.

Acting like a virtual coach on the wrist, Pacemaker provides real-time feedback to keep users within a set pace zone, ensuring training loads are both controlled and effective.

Ideal for both individual and team settings, it helps deliver consistency in performance, which is critical for achieving desired physical outcomes.

With live pace monitoring and immediate alerts, Pacemaker enables athletes to stay accountable to their targets, whether pushing for improvements or holding back to avoid overtraining. 

Setting up the Pacemaker feature is simple and efficient. Before a session, the user selects their desired pace range using the Sonra app or directly on the watch.

Once active, the Sonra Watch tracks the athlete’s live pace and provides clear visual or vibration alerts when they stray outside the set threshold, either prompting them to speed up or slow down.

This becomes especially valuable during pre-season, when players are building fitness and coaches are managing workloads carefully.

By ensuring players stay within optimal speed zones, Pacemaker helps prevent early-season injuries, reduces unnecessary fatigue, and supports the gradual development of aerobic and anaerobic systems.

Coaches can also use this live data to intervene mid-session, correcting pacing errors in real time to maintain training quality and intent.

Steady State:

The STATSports Sonra Watch Steady State feature is designed to help athletes maintain a consistent level of effort over a set duration, distance, or speed zone, making it a key tool for structured aerobic development.

Unlike traditional intervals or high-intensity work, Steady State sessions focus on sustaining a moderate, controlled intensity, which is essential for improving endurance and metabolic efficiency.

The Sonra Watch tracks the user’s metrics in real time, ensuring they remain within the prescribed zone, and delivers alerts if they drift outside the set parameters.

This allows for precise, purposeful training that targets specific physiological adaptations without unnecessary spikes in load. 

To set up a Steady State session, users define their target speed zone, duration, or distance via the Sonra app or watch interface. Once the session begins, the Sonra Watch continuously monitors performance, alerting the athlete if they fall below or exceed the set threshold.

In a pre-season context, Steady State is particularly valuable for conditioning players without overloading them.

It ensures that athletes are working at the right intensity to build an aerobic base, while also providing live feedback to coaches.

If a player is drifting above or below the intended effort level, the watch will prompt them—or allow the coach to intervene—to adjust accordingly. This keeps sessions efficient, safe, and aligned with the goals of progressive pre-season loading. 

Sonra Desktop 

During pre-season, the combination of live insights delivered via the Sonra Watch application, and post-session analysis through Sonra Desktop, creates an ideal environment to bridge the gap between field-based testing and overall physical preparation for the demands of season-long training and competition.

By leveraging Sonra functionalities such as Force-Velocity Profiling and Sprint Split Analysis, practitioners gain a deep understanding of each athlete’s strengths and limitations in relation to sprint efforts within just a few clicks.  

This enables hyper-individualised training prescription and effective monitoring of progress, ensuring every athlete’s program is tailored to drive long-term performance outcomes.

These powerful analytics capabilities remove the need for additional equipment such as timing gates and specific sprint testing sessions, significantly reducing the time spent on setup, data collection, as well as complex manual calculations and analysis. 

Force Velocity Profiling 

STATSports’ Force-Velocity Profiling (FVP) feature is an invaluable tool for pre-season preparation, helping practitioners assess an athlete’s ability to generate force and velocity during sprint efforts.

By identifying whether an athlete is force or velocity deficient, coaches can design targeted, individualised strength and conditioning interventions to address each athlete’s specific needs.

STATSports’ Sonra now simplifies this process, automatically generating FVP metrics from sprint data with just a few clicks, eliminating the need for complex manual calculations, making physical performance data immediately actionable.

And all data processed through the Force Velocity App is independently validated as seen in the latest research conducted by Robert Stockdale and colleagues. 

During pre-season, FVPs can be used to build a clear physiological profile of each athlete. This allows performance staff to prioritise foundational strength (force) or top-end speed (velocity), depending on what the data reveals.

For example, athletes with low force output (f0) can focus on heavy resistance work like squats and sled pushes, while those lacking velocity (v0) can shift toward flying sprints, overspeed training, and technical sprint drills.

By tailoring programs in this way, coaches not only improve the individual components of speed but also work towards optimising power output (Pmax), which is essential for explosive movements and high-intensity efforts in competition. 

The insights gained through FVP in Sonra help structure a more effective training program that truly sets each athlete up for season-long physical performance gains, from building base qualities early in pre-season to developing speed and technical efficiency.

Ultimately, it enables practitioners to uncover insights into athletic deficiencies in seconds, that were previously unattainable for time-poor performance staff, ensuring each athlete is optimally prepared to outperform competition throughout the season.  

Sprint Split Analysis 

To add to FVPs, Sprint Split Analysis is a game-changing addition to pre-season preparation, giving performance staff unprecedented access to detailed sprint performance data with minimal disruption to training flow.

Available with the click of a button through Sonra, this feature uses GNSS data to automatically break down sprint efforts, such as a 40m sprint, into highly customisable distance or time-based intervals (e.g. 5m, 10m, or 1-second splits).

It replaces traditional timing gates with a faster, more scalable solution, delivering highly accurate, squad-wide data from just one sprint attempt. 

While Sprint testing is already commonplace in pre-season, STATSports’ Sprint Split Analysis enables practitioners to efficiently capture detailed sprint data across the squad.

Instead of timing each player individually, staff can collect sprint splits for an entire group in a single rep, saving time while also improving the richness of physical performance data.

This enables early identification of acceleration profiles, top speed markers, and potential technical inefficiencies in sprint mechanics.

Physical performance coaches and sport scientists can then tailor strength and conditioning training based on accurate split data, whether focusing on initial acceleration, max velocity or late-phase speed endurance. 

This integration with Sonra makes the process seamless: performance staff simply record the sprint, define the desired split intervals (metres or seconds), and export the metrics.

Ultimately, this tool turns training into testing, supporting continuous, efficient monitoring of speed development while embedding performance assessment into the natural rhythm of pre-season training. 

References: 

1. Stockdale, R.A., Dos’Santos, T., McDaid, K., Nagy, P., Gaffney, C.J. & Barry, T.J. (2025) ‘Validity and reliability of sprint force-velocity profiling in elite football: Comparison of MySprint, GPS, and radar devices’, PLOS ONE, 20(6), article e0325611. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0325611.