The Power Curve: Gaining High-Resolution Understanding with ADI’s Peak Period Analysis

Don’t just track how fast they go—track how hard they work. Measure mechanical power across all time intervals, and redefine what intensity really means

In professional sport, we often talk about intensity.

But how are we measuring it—and what are we missing?

Traditional tracking metrics like speed, total distance, and high-speed running offer a narrow view of athlete output, especially in the complex, multidirectional environments of field and court sports. That’s where Athletic Data Innovations (ADI) changes the game.

By using mechanical power as the central intensity metric—not just linear speed—we automatically generate a true power curve for every athlete from all training and match data, regardless of tracking system (GPS, LPS, or optical), or tracking provider. This approach opens up a far more accurate, contextually relevant way to evaluate performance and training effectiveness in multidirectional sport.

Recapping What We’ve Covered

Over the last few blog posts, we’ve shown how:

• Traditional metrics fall short when it comes to capturing the true demands of multidirectional sports.

• ADI solves data consistency problems, allowing you to transition between systems without compromising your historical data.

• Mechanical power and multidirectional movement analysis offer a far more accurate picture of athlete intensity.

• Peak Periods (PPs)—those short bursts of high-demand activity—are the most physically taxing and defining moments of competition & training, yet they’re often under-measured or misunderstood using traditional athlete tracking methods.

These foundations bring us to a powerful concept: the individualized power curve.

Peak Periods Build the Power Curve

ADI’s Peak Period analysis automatically detects and analyzes the most intense actions from both training and match data. These Peak Periods range from just a few seconds to up to 15 minutes, and they are always calculated using mechanical power—not speed—as the primary intensity metric.

This allows ADI to construct a mechanical power curve for each athlete that includes:

• Short Peak Periods – explosive bursts that highlight an athlete’s ability to generate high power quickly (anaerobic capacity).

• Longer Peak Periods – sustained outputs that show aerobic conditioning under real-world, multidirectional loads.

And because ADI measures all curvilinear, cutting, and high-intensity directional changes, as well as surges from higher starting speeds, the full mechanical cost of movement is captured—something traditional systems miss entirely.

Why Power Curves Matter

Once each athlete has an individualized power curve built on complete, consistent data, we gain:

1. Deeper Performance Profiling

   Rather than guessing or relying on only high-speed thresholds, we can directly compare an athlete's multidirectional performance across durations—from sharp explosive efforts to extended workloads.

2. More Accurate Rehabilitation Monitoring

   Instead of relying on linear metrics like distance or peak speed to assess return-to-play readiness, we now compare the athlete’s actual mechanical power output to their pre-injury performance—across different time intervals and movement types.

3. Training Effectiveness & Fatigue Detection

   Changes in an athlete’s ability to hit high points on their power curve can reflect changes in fitness, training response, or early signs of overload or fatigue.

4. Smarter Drill Design

   With Peak Period data contextualized across intensities and durations, practitioners can evaluate whether drills truly replicate the demands of competition—or fall short. This enables better alignment between training and match performance.

5. New Insights into Intensity and Workload

   ADI enables practitioners to track how close an athlete comes to their all-time, or match peak output for any given time window. By quantifying how often an athlete reaches, say, >90% of their peak power in a session or week, we shift from simply logging high-speed distance or acceleration counts to understanding the true density and distribution of work. The same total distance or number of accelerations can have dramatically different effects depending on how they’re performed, or clustered.

   
   

Drill Evaluation by % of Peak

With ADI’s power curve as a reference, practitioners can determine the percentage of an athlete’s known peak that any drill represents—for any time duration. This allows for rating drills not just by content or length, but by how much demand they place on the athlete relative to their historical best. It’s a new way to rate intensity that’s both personalized and performance-informed.

No More Ignoring the Cost of Multidirectional Movement

Perhaps most importantly, the power curve ensures we’re no longer missing the significant physical cost of the most frequent and intense movements in team sport: multidirectional efforts.

Sprinting, decelerating, cutting, and curving all involve complex mechanical demands. These aren’t isolated events—they often happen at the same time, and at speed. With ADI, they are finally captured, quantified, and contextualized.

Consistent, Contextual Data—No Matter the System

One of ADI’s unique advantages is that this level of insight is tracking-system agnostic. Whether your team uses GPS, LPS, optical tracking—or moves between them over time—ADI imports the raw data and applies the same consistent algorithms to produce meaningful, comparable insights.

Even as teams evolve their technology, ADI ensures that performance data remains aligned, interpretable, and useful.

The Future of Athlete Monitoring Is Here

The adoption of ADI by leading professional teams and federations is a signal: It’s time to go beyond traditional metrics.

By using mechanical power to define intensity, and Peak Periods to drive performance analysis, we now have a way to profile, compare, and develop athletes that’s:

• Grounded in physics.

• Reflective of real-world demands.

• And consistent across systems and time.

Get in Touch

If you’re ready to track what matters—not just what’s easy to measure—ADI is ready to help.

Let’s redefine intensity and build the future of athlete monitoring, together.

Learn more at our website https://www.adi-data.co/ and watch the technical video on mechanical power https://www.adi-data.co/video

Get in touch today to explore how ADI can integrate into your environment.