Are traditional tracking systems telling you the whole story? On July 9, 2026, Hudl highlighted a critical discussion from a Sportsmith Live Roundtable featuring three titans of sports science: Andrew Gray (Founder, ADI), Martin Buchheit (renowned applied sports scientist), and Darcy Norman (Director of Performance, Chicago Fire).

The session, titled “The limits of linear: Rethinking athlete monitoring for multidirectional sport,” challenged the industry to look beyond standard GPS metrics to understand the true physical cost of athletic performance.

Key Takeaways from the Discussion:

• The “Invisible” Half of Performance: Andrew Gray revealed that traditional tracking systems miss 40–50% of an athlete’s mechanical work because they struggle to account for multidirectional acceleration. In modern sport, linear metrics simply don’t capture the reality of on-field movement.
• Precision in Injury Prevention: The panel discussed how modern IMU sensors can detect subtle, movement-specific asymmetries (such as those affecting Achilles or ACL health) that remain hidden during straight-line running but appear during changes of direction.
• Capacity vs. Demand: Martin Buchheit and Andrew Gray argued that training intensity should not be anchored solely to match demands (which are inherently unstable). Instead, practitioners should anchor training to an athlete’s individual capacity, defining “readiness” as the gap between that capacity and the game’s physical demands.
• The Role of AI: While AI is a powerful assistant for building dashboards and analyzing data, the experts cautioned that it is not an authority. High-quality output requires foundational knowledge; practitioners must avoid “collecting for the sake of collecting” and ensure AI usage is governed by clear hypotheses.
• The Power of Centralization: The panel emphasized that the next generation of analysis is only possible when data is centralized. With the integration of ADI into Hudl Signal, performance data, video, and advanced movement analysis can now be managed in one place, allowing practitioners to interrogate data using natural language AI agents.

Watch the full roundtable discussion and read the complete breakdown of these insights on the Hudl Blog.

This summary was generated with the assistance of Gemini based on the original article, with the aim of translating the research into insights for coaches and support staff.