Firstbeat Sports Launches Movement Efficiency Variable: See How Effectively Your Athletes Turn Effort into Performance

Firstbeat Sports, a physiology-based coaching platform for elite sports teams, has introduced Movement Efficiency to its Premium Plus solution.

Movement Efficiency describes the ratio between external and internal load. It helps quantify how efficiently an athlete moves during training or competition and is used as an indicator of endurance performance.

Firstbeat big data reveals that Movement Efficiency tends to decrease during the soccer season, indicating accumulated fatigue over the season. This pattern is aligned with research on performance decrements over a long season.

Whilst tracking these subtle changes would usually require regular testing during the season, Movement Efficiency delivers additional insights calculated automatically from every session, without the need for structured testing protocols. It helps coaches to easily spot outliers, declines, and track progress, all without extra testing.

Using Firstbeat’s customized reporting tools, coaches can analyze Movement Efficiency trends across team, positional, and individual levels, providing a comprehensive view of how players are coping with seasonal demands.

“While there are nearly unlimited descriptive metrics for external and internal workloads,  Movement efficiency summarizes the load and response in a single number. When used with our contextualized reporting tool, it provides new ways of tracking readiness and trainability trends of the players between similar sessions,” said Veli-Pekka Kurunmäki, Director, Professional Sports at Firstbeat.

Because movement patterns differ across sports and individuals, Movement Efficiency naturally varies between disciplines and types of workouts. A higher score indicates that an athlete is managing the external demands of training efficiently at an internal level.

When Movement Efficiency improves over time, it suggests enhanced aerobic conditioning, which aids an athlete’s ability to sustain strength, power, and speed more effectively under similar workloads.

Movement Efficiency is best interpreted alongside other Firstbeat metrics such as Movement Load and TRIMP, giving coaches the context behind shifts in performance, answering not just what happened, but why.

Domenik Theodorou, Performance Coach at RASTA Vechta, and a Firstbeat customer, says:

“The Movement Efficiency variable enables me to assess how an athlete internally responds to the externally imposed training load. This provides valuable insights not only for detecting acute deviations during a specific training session but also for identifying long-term fitness trends.”

By integrating seamlessly into daily workflows, Movement Efficiency streamlines how coaches monitor athlete performance and recovery.

Movement Efficiency is available to all Firstbeat Sports Premium Plus users as part of their subscription.