Heart rate remains one of the most accessible yet often misused tools in athlete monitoring. In this roundtable, we bring together three leaders in high performance sport to unpack how they actually use heart rate data to quantify internal load, spot early signs of fatigue, and inform readiness decisions across very different competitive environments. Darren Burgess, Director of Performance at Juventus, brings two decades of experience across the AFL, Premier League, and now Serie A. Michael Davie, Director of Strength & Conditioning and Sport Science for BYU Men's Basketball, draws on his time with the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks and Australia's Olympic system. Matt Aldred, Head Strength & Conditioning Coach for Michigan Men's Basketball, helped lead the Wolverines to the 2026 national championship. Together they'll discuss the practical realities of heart rate monitoring: what metrics matter, where the data breaks down, how to separate signal from noise, and how they translate readings into decisions about training load and recovery for their athletes. Whether you work in professional soccer, college basketball, or any performance environment in between, this conversation will offer grounded, experience-based perspective on getting more out of a tool every practitioner already has access to....
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