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GPS Speed & Distance Metrics: What All 27 Actually Mean

GPS speed and distance metrics explained: what all 27 columns measure, the thresholds behind high speed running and sprinting, and the five worth reporting.

Published 27 August 2026

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What GPS speed and distance metrics actually measure

They answer three questions: how far the athlete moved, how fast they were moving while they covered it, and what the fastest moment was. Every column in the speed and distance block is one of those three at a different cut.

Quick answer

A GPS export typically carries around 27 speed and distance metrics, and they resolve to four families: total and thresholded distances, band distances, per-minute rates, and effort counts, plus top-end speed. Several are the same number under two names. Five carry the signal: total distance, distance per minute, high speed distance, sprint distance and max velocity.

GPS speed and distance metrics describe how far an athlete moved and how fast they were going while they did it. That's the whole job. The reason the export runs to 27 columns is that the same session gets cut by speed range, divided by minutes, counted as efforts and renamed by provider. Once you can say which question a column answers, most of the block collapses into a handful of numbers you already have.

Velocity band

A speed range with a floor and a ceiling. Band 1 is standing, band 6 is sprinting. Distance accumulates in whichever band the athlete's current speed falls into.

Example: A 40 m run that peaks at 6.5 m/s puts metres into bands 3, 4 and 5, and none into band 6.

Threshold

The speed a run must exceed to count as high-speed or sprint. Defaults are 5.5 m/s and 7 m/s, and both are settings someone chose, not laws of physics.

Example: A 24.5 km/h run is a sprint at WIMU's 24 km/h default and not a sprint at Catapult's 25.2.

Work rate

Distance divided by time, in metres per minute. It makes a 25-minute drill and a 90-minute match comparable, which raw distance can't do.

Example: 6,000 m in 60 minutes and 9,000 m in 90 minutes are the same 100 m/min.

10,000-13,000 m

Typical elite football match distance

Varies by position. The benchmark most club totals get read against.

100-120 m/min

Typical professional match work rate

Distance per minute in match play. Training drills sit above or below it depending on design.

Comparability

What counts as a sprint depends on who made your units

The default lines sit at 5.5 m/s for high speed and 7 m/s for sprinting, and almost every provider deviates from one of them.

Every high-speed and sprint figure in your export sits downstream of one setting: the threshold. The industry defaults are 5.5 m/s (19.8 km/h) for high-speed running and 7 m/s (25.2 km/h) for sprinting. Those defaults are common, not universal, and each provider documents its own lines. The same training session produces different sprint counts on different hardware without anyone doing anything wrong.

Provider	High-speed line	Sprint line
Catapult	5.5 m/s default; HS Distance sums bands 5 and 6	Band 6, >7 m/s default
STATSports	5.5 m/s, the Zone 5 threshold	Sprint entries held for at least 1 second; documented default 19.8 km/h
WIMU	21 km/h default	24 km/h
Fitogether	Combined zones 4 and 5, above 5.5 m/s	Above 25 km/h, held for at least 0.6 seconds
JOHAN Sports	19.8 km/h and above	25.2 km/h and above, labelled High Sprint
GPEXE	Critiques fixed speed thresholds; prefers metabolic-power detection	No fixed line published

Move the sprint line

19.8 km/h25.2 km/h

Between 21 and 24 km/h is where several providers' defaults scatter. Counts drop sharply with every extra km/h, which is why two clubs' sprint numbers rarely match.

There's a second school that skips absolute lines entirely and sets the sprint threshold relative to the athlete, commonly at around 70% of their individual maximum velocity. A youth player and a senior winger then get judged against their own ceilings rather than one squad-wide number. It's fairer, and it costs you a reliable maximum velocity for every athlete before it works. The same choice exists on the acceleration side, and the reasoning in our guide to GPS acceleration metrics carries over unchanged: pick a line, write it down, never move it mid-season.

Threshold values per each provider's public documentation as compiled in Fractall's cross-provider GPS reference, August 2026. Defaults are configurable at account level, so treat any published count as uncomparable unless the threshold is stated alongside it.

Reference

All 27 speed and distance metrics, grouped by what they do

Grouped by function rather than alphabetically, because the useful question is which of these is the same number twice.

Volume: how far

Total distance and its thresholded cuts. Each row keeps a narrower, faster slice of the same session.

Metric	Unit	What it tells you
Distance	m	Total metres covered. The baseline volume figure that every other distance metric filters down.
High Speed Distance	m	Metres above the high-speed line, 5.5 m/s by default. The share of the volume that meaningfully taxes the athlete.
High Intensity Distance	m	Metres between the high-speed and sprint lines. High-speed volume with the sprint metres stripped out.
Sprint Distance	m	Metres above the sprint line, 7 m/s by default. Small totals, and the number to watch for top-end exposure.
Explosive Distance	m	STATSports metric: high metabolic load distance minus high speed running. Hard work in tight spaces that never reaches speed.

Explosive distance is the odd one out. It's a STATSports metric, calculated as high metabolic load distance minus high-speed running, and it exists to catch the hard accelerations in tight spaces that never reach 19.8 km/h. Catapult doesn't ship it as a standard field, so if your report needs it on Catapult hardware it has to be built as a custom parameter.

Band distances: the same metres, renamed

Six bands, and up to three names for each. Standing, walking, jogging and running distance are velocity bands 1 to 4. Zone 5 and zone 6 are bands 5 and 6. If your report carries both a named distance and its band twin, one of them is furniture.

Band (default speeds)	Also exported as	What it covers
Velocity Band 1 (0-0.2 m/s)	Standing Distance	Standing or virtually stationary. Fills the total, tells you nothing about load.
Velocity Band 2 (0.2-2 m/s)	Walking Distance	Walking. Recovery between efforts, set-piece positioning, water breaks.
Velocity Band 3 (2-4 m/s)	Jogging Distance	Jogging. Usually the biggest single band in a football session.
Velocity Band 4 (4-5.5 m/s)	Running Distance	Moderate running, below the high-speed line.
Velocity Band 5 (5.5-7 m/s)	Distance Zone 5 / High Intensity Distance	High-speed running below sprint pace. Where high-intensity volume accumulates.
Velocity Band 6 (>7 m/s)	Distance Zone 6 / Sprint Distance	Sprinting at or near maximal speed. Same number as sprint distance under default bands.

One nuance stops this being a pure renaming exercise. Catapult's HS Distance sums bands 5 and 6 together, so it includes the sprint metres, while zone 5 distance alone stops at 7 m/s. Two reports can both say “high speed” and differ by exactly the sprint distance. Check which one your export gives you before comparing across systems.

Rates: how much per minute

Distances divided by session minutes. This is the group that turns volume into intensity, and the group that makes drills of different lengths comparable.

Metric	Unit	What it tells you
Distance Per Minute	m/min	Total distance divided by session minutes. The standard work-rate figure.
Average Speed	m/min	The same calculation as distance per minute under another name. Catapult calls it meterage per minute.
High Speed Distance Per Minute	m/min	High-speed metres per minute. The rate at which high-intensity running accumulates.
Sprint Distance Per Minute	m/min	Sprint metres per minute. Sprint exposure as a rate rather than a total.

Counts: how many runs

Efforts past a speed line. A count and a distance answer different questions: sprint efforts tells you how often, sprint distance tells you how much.

Metric	Unit	What it tells you
Sprint Efforts	efforts	How many runs crossed the sprint line. Ten short sprints and two long ones read very differently here than in sprint distance.
High Speed Efforts	efforts	Runs past the high-speed line. STATSports exports this as zone entries.
Velocity B6+ Efforts (Gen 2)	efforts	Catapult's band-system count of sprint efforts. The same question as sprint efforts in a second vocabulary.

Peaks and indices: how fast at best

The fastest moment of the session, in absolute terms and relative to the athlete's own ceiling, plus one proprietary index.

Metric	Unit	What it tells you
Max Velocity	km/h	The single fastest moment of the session. A capacity marker, not a load marker.
Max Vel (% Max)	%	Session peak as a percentage of the athlete's own maximum. Tells you whether they touched top speed this week.
Speed Intensity	AU	STATSports proprietary index: a weighted accumulation of instantaneous speed. Trend it within one system only.

Top-end speed

Max velocity: the number that anchors everything else

It's the denominator for every relative threshold and the fastest single data point of the session, which is exactly why it needs care.

Max velocity is the highest instantaneous speed the unit recorded, usually derived from Doppler-shift processing rather than position differences. It reads like the most objective number in the export. It's also a single data point from a short burst, which is where GPS measurement error concentrates, so a session peak can flatter or shortchange an athlete by a stride.

That matters because max velocity does double duty. As a capacity marker it tells you an athlete's ceiling. As a denominator it defines every individualised threshold you might set, including the 70% sprint line from the previous section. If the maximum is wrong, every relative zone built on it is wrong with it. The practical fix is to establish each athlete's true maximum from a standardised sprint test rather than trusting whatever peak match play happens to produce, then let session peaks update it only when they clearly exceed it.

How to read Max Vel (% Max)

The percentage version answers a different question: not how fast is this athlete, but how close to their own top speed did they get this week. Athletes who go weeks without touching high percentages of maximum velocity are training in a narrower band than they compete in, and the first sprint that breaks the pattern arrives in a match, unrehearsed. Sprint exposure is a planning decision, and this is the column that shows whether it happened.

Definitions and measurement notes per Fractall's GPS metrics reference, compiled from provider documentation and validation literature, August 2026.

The verdict

Which speed and distance metrics should you actually report?

Five: total distance, distance per minute, high speed distance, sprint distance and max velocity. Everything else duplicates one of those at a different cut.

Report these five

Total distance. Your volume headline, and the number the rest of the staff already understands.
Distance per minute. Your intensity headline. Without it a short sharp session looks lighter than a long easy one.
High speed distance. The volume that costs something. Check whether yours includes the sprint band, then stay consistent.
Sprint distance. Top-end exposure. Small totals, so trend the weekly figure rather than judging a single session.
Max velocity, read alongside % of max. The capacity anchor, and the check on whether sprint exposure actually happened.

Drop these, and say why

Named band distances alongside their zone twins. Standing distance and velocity band 1 distance are one number with two labels.
Walking and jogging distance in a coach-facing report. They fill the total without changing a decision.
Average speed next to distance per minute. Same calculation, second name.
Per-minute variants of metrics nobody acts on. High speed distance per minute earns a place in drill comparisons; most reports don't use it.
Speed Intensity outside an all-STATSports environment. Proprietary index, no cross-provider equivalent.

If you're building the report from scratch, our guide to which GPS metrics to track in football covers how these five behave across a real training week. And none of the 27 can tell you how the athlete responded to any of it, which is why a distance panel belongs next to session RPE and wellness rather than on its own.

In Fractall

Where the speed and distance data lands

Four of the six metrics Fractall charts from a GPS file come from this block.

Fractall doesn't sell GPS units and doesn't reproduce all 27 columns. The GPS module reads the CSV your provider already produces and charts six external load metrics out of the box. Four come from this article: distance, high speed running, sprint distance and max velocity, sitting alongside accel + decel efforts and player load. A metric picker opens the wider catalog when you need it, but the default set is the shortlist argument, applied.

From provider export to squad chart

Run your normal post-session export. Catapult, STATSports, Oliver Sports and WIMU files are read directly, and columns from other providers can be mapped to Fractall's metrics manually when you bring the file in.

Drop the CSV into the GPS tab and link the athlete names in your file to your Fractall squad. You do that once, then every later import lines up on its own.

Sessions get labelled MD-3, MD-1, MD, MD+1 and charted together, so this week's high-speed and sprint volume sits next to last week's and next to the athlete's RPE and wellness.

Fractall microcycle volume chart comparing distance, high speed distance, accel plus decel efforts, sprint distance and max velocity across a full matchday cycle — Distance, high speed distance, sprint distance and max velocity charted across a full microcycle. Demo team data.

Import the export you already have

Drop your Catapult, STATSports, Oliver Sports or WIMU CSV into Fractall and chart distance, high speed running, sprint distance and max velocity across the microcycle, beside RPE and wellness. Four-week free trial, no card.

Start a free trial

FAQs

Common questions about GPS speed and distance metrics

What speed counts as a sprint in football?

Most systems default to 7 m/s, which is 25.2 km/h. But defaults differ by provider: WIMU documents 24 km/h and Fitogether counts actions above 25 km/h held for at least 0.6 seconds, so two clubs can count different sprints from identical runs. An increasingly common alternative sets the line at around 70% of each athlete's own maximum velocity.

What is high speed running on GPS?

Distance covered above the high-speed threshold, which defaults to 5.5 m/s (19.8 km/h) in most systems. WIMU sets its default higher, at 21 km/h. The metric isolates the running that meaningfully taxes an athlete, rather than counting every metre equally.

Are Zone 5 distance and high speed distance the same thing?

Close, but not always. With default bands, Zone 5 covers 5.5 to 7 m/s. Catapult's HS Distance sums bands 5 and 6, so it includes sprint metres too, while Zone 5 alone stops where sprinting starts. Check whether your report's high-speed figure includes the sprint band before you compare anything.

What is a good distance per minute?

Professional match play typically runs at 100 to 120 metres per minute. Training values depend on the drill: small-sided games sit lower on distance rate, running-based conditioning higher. Use it to compare drills and sessions of different lengths, not to chase a match number in training.

Do speed and distance metrics replace internal load monitoring?

No. They describe what the athlete did, not what it cost them. Session RPE and wellness carry the response side, which is why a distance panel works best sitting next to internal load rather than instead of it.

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