Optimising Team Sport Training Plans With Grammatical Evolution

We present a novel approach to generating seasonal training plans for elite athletes using the grammatical evolution approach to genetic programming. A grammatical encoding of a team sport training plan dictates the plan structure. The quality of the training plan is calculated using the widely adopted fitness-fatigue model, which in this study incorporates four performance metrics, namely distance covered at low to medium speed, distance covered at high speed, distance covered accelerating, and distance covered decelerating. We compare performance of the evolved training plans to a control setup which generates plans using a pseudo-random search process, and baseline against the training plan adopted by an elite team of Gaelic Football Players. Significant potential performance gains are achieved over the control setup and baseline elite team plan.