Heart Rate in Futsal: Using Monitors to Manage Rotations and Shifts
How to use heart rate straps in futsal: find each player's real max, read recovery on the bench, check small-sided games and understand the limits of the data.
Written by
João Araújo
Physical Education Teacher (FADEUP – University of Porto) · Futsal Coach – Level II · UEFA B License · Master’s in Physical Education
15 years teaching Physical Education in schools, 20 years coaching futsal at youth development level and 5 years coaching football. Federated and amateur football and futsal player.
In futsal, heart rate is the cheapest physiological measure available and the most wasted. Plenty of amateur teams already have half a dozen chest straps sitting in a kit bag, bought in a moment of enthusiasm. They used them for three weeks. Looked at some graphs full of spikes. Didn’t know what to do with them.
The problem isn’t the technology. It’s the question. A heart rate strap won’t tell you whether a player is playing well or should come off. It tells you how his heart is responding to the effort, and that, read properly, helps answer three very specific questions: did the session hit the intensity I planned? Has this player recovered enough to go back on? Is the weekly load climbing too fast?
This article is about those three questions.
What Heart Rate Tells You in a Futsal Match
Studies with futsal teams at various levels show a consistent pattern: while on court, average heart rate sits around 85 to 90% of maximum. A large part of each shift is spent above 85%. It’s a sport with very high cardiovascular demand, short breaks and little room to “rest” within play.
The big difference from football is the bench. In futsal, substitutions are unlimited and players come off and go back on several times. That means a match heart rate curve looks like a saw blade: up on court, down on the bench, up again. And it’s the drop on the bench that gives the coach the most useful information.
There are clear differences by position too. Wingers usually show the highest averages, because they’re involved in almost every transition. The defender has a steadier curve with fewer peaks. The pivot alternates maximal efforts (runs in behind, back-to-goal duels) with low-intensity spells waiting for the ball. And the goalkeeper, except when he steps out as the fifth outfield player in a power play, rarely goes above 80%. Comparing a winger with a defender by average value makes no sense. Comparing each player with himself does.
That’s also why I don’t publish heart rate rankings in the dressing room. The winger will always “win”, and the defender will read it as a verdict on his effort. The data is for the coaching staff to read in context, not for a league table.
Step One: Know Each Player’s Real Maximum
Everything that follows depends on knowing each player’s maximum heart rate. The “220 minus age” formula is useless here. The individual error can be 10 to 15 beats, which shifts the zones completely.
There are two practical ways to find a real maximum:
- The Yo-Yo Intermittent Recovery Test (level 1), done in pre-season. The highest value recorded at the end of the test is a good estimate.
- The highest value recorded in matches and hard sessions during the first four weeks. If a player hit 196 on a counter-attack in the 38th minute, his maximum is at least 196.
In practice I use both: the Yo-Yo as a starting point, updated whenever a higher value shows up in a match.
Three Practical Uses in Training and Matches
1. Confirming the intensity of small-sided games
It’s the simplest use and, in my view, the most useful. A 3v3 on half a court with goalkeepers, in 3-minute bouts, should keep players above 85-90% of max for most of each bout. If the average is 78%, the drill isn’t doing what you planned. Maybe the area is too big, maybe the rules allow too many breaks, maybe the coach is stopping play every 30 seconds to correct things.
Heart rate lets you adjust the drill with data rather than feel. When a small-sided session is meant to be high intensity, I note the target percentage in the SportsLabTools Futsal Planning tool and compare it with the real values after training. After a month, I know which formats deliver and which need changing.
2. Reading recovery on the bench
When a player comes off, his heart rate drops. How fast it drops in the first minute is a reasonable indicator of how fatigued he is at that moment.
A player who comes off at 185 and is at 145 after 60 seconds is recovering well. One who comes off at 185 and is still at 170 after 60 seconds is struggling. In matches with live transmission to a tablet on the bench, the sports scientist can flag to the coach that a particular player needs another minute before going back on.
It’s a supporting criterion, not a rule. The coach makes substitutions based on his tactical reading of the game. But knowing that the winger about to go on hasn’t recovered yet can stop him entering the two most intense minutes of the match at 70% of his capacity.
3. Measuring weekly load
The most common way to turn heart rate into load is zone-based TRIMP: add up the time spent in each heart rate zone, multiplied by a factor (1 for the lowest zone, 5 for the highest). The result is a number per session that lets you compare weeks.
It isn’t perfect, but it’s more objective than the coach’s impression. And cross-checked with the RPE players report, it catches mismatches: a player whose TRIMP is normal but whose RPE is very high may be building up fatigue his heart isn’t showing yet.
A Zone Table for Futsal
| Zone | % max HR | Where it shows up in futsal | TRIMP factor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 50-60% | Bench, active recovery | 1 |
| 2 | 60-70% | Warm-up, unopposed technical work | 2 |
| 3 | 70-80% | Tactical drills with pauses, set plays | 3 |
| 4 | 80-90% | Full match play, larger small-sided games | 4 |
| 5 | 90-100% | Small small-sided games, repeated sprints, decisive match moments | 5 |
In a typical Thursday session, the main tactical day, I expect a good share of time in zones 3 and 4. In a Tuesday session built on small-sided games, zone 5 has to appear. If a pre-match activation session shows a lot of time in zone 5, something went wrong in the planning.
What Heart Rate Doesn’t Tell You
This is the part that often gets forgotten, and it explains why so many teams give up on their straps.
It doesn’t measure neuromuscular actions. A sharp stop, a shot, a duel with the opposing pivot all cost the muscles a lot and barely move heart rate, because they last only a few seconds. A defender can have a cardiovascularly “light” game and have done a huge amount of mechanical work.
It lags. The heart takes 20 to 40 seconds to respond to a change in intensity. In a sport where efforts last 3 or 4 seconds, heart rate shows the average, not the peaks.
It’s influenced by external factors. Heat in the sports hall, dehydration, coffee, stress, a bad night’s sleep. All of these raise heart rate without the effort being any greater. In a poorly ventilated hall in May, values will be higher than in January for the same session.
So heart rate should never be the only data point. Combined with match stats, it becomes much more valuable. In the SportsLabTools Futsal Stats tool I log actions by quartet, and when I compare them with each rotation’s average heart rate, I can tell whether a quartet is suffering physically because it’s defending longer without the ball or because the players are simply tired.
See also: Load Monitoring in Elite Futsal: RPE and Data by Quartet: how to combine heart rate with RPE in a complete monitoring set-up.
Getting Started on a Small Budget
You don’t need to kit out the whole squad. A reliable chest strap costs between £35 and £80. With six straps you can monitor one quartet and the goalkeeper, or rotate the straps through the week to get data on everyone.
I prefer chest straps to watches with an optical wrist sensor. In futsal, with sharp arm movements and contact, wrist sensors lose accuracy exactly at the moments of highest intensity.
You don’t need live transmission to get started. Downloading the data after training already covers the first and third uses (drill intensity and weekly load). Live data is only needed to read recovery on the bench during matches, and that can come in a second phase.
An opinion I know isn’t universally shared: for an amateur team with limited time, I’d rather have heart rate used well on four players than GPS data misread on twelve. Heart rate is simple, cheap and answers questions coaches actually have. The rest can wait.
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