THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. -- Practicing makes players better at football. That's obvious.

It also wears down their bodies, makes them susceptible to injuries and limits their availability, which ultimately matters more than anything. Tyler Williams, the Los Angeles Rams' sports science coordinator, operates within those margins, continually pursuing the perfect balance between preparation and availability.

"You want to flirt above and below that line," Williams said. "You don't want to go too far below where you're underprepared, or too far above where you're overworked."

Tyler Williams and the Rams' player-tracking group helped to make the Rams one of the NFL's healthiest teams last season. Courtesy photo/Los Angeles Rams

On most days, one can usually find Williams between the two practice fields of the Rams' headquarters. Williams, director of sports medicine Reggie Scott, strength and conditioning coach Ted Rath and a handful of others are equipped with tablets that track every step each player takes, using the data to help determine when they need more work or when they have had enough. The information comes instantaneously through miniature GPS and radio-frequency identification tracking devices that are sewn on players' shirts or inserted into their shoulder pads.

Each player has a running tally for the amount of yards he has covered and the various speeds he has traveled. Pre-established speed zones -- 15 to 20 mph, for example -- provide a gauge for how much time they are operating at higher intensity levels. And each player -- 63 of them, if you include the practice squad -- has his own baseline for what constitutes an optimum amount of work, based on age, position, personal history and overall preference.

The process is complex, but the objective is simple.

"My main focus is to increase player availability," said Williams, who is in his 11th year with the Rams and in his third under his current title. "The more availability you have, theoretically, the better percent chance you have to win.”

It ultimately didn't help their record, but the Rams were one of the NFL's healthiest teams last year. Some of that is the luck of avoiding a freak injury. But the Rams' progressive, collaborative approach toward player tracking also helps push the odds in their favor. The vast majority of teams use GPS or RFID tools to track workloads between games, to varying degrees. But Williams said the Rams "like to try to push the envelope as much as we can" with its overall implementation of sports science.

"I think they're the best at it," said outside linebacker Connor Barwin, entering his ninth NFL season.

Barwin spent the previous four years with the Philadelphia Eagles, who were coached by Chip Kelly from 2013-15. Kelly in some ways helped pioneer this method. His Oregon teams implemented Catapult technology to monitor practice workloads, and eventually that data spawned a lot of his outside-the-box philosophies. Barwin was exposed to that in Philadelphia.

"But at that time," Barwin said, "they didn't really know what they were doing."

Nobody really did; the data was too fresh for proper context.

Williams started using this information about five years ago and was overwhelmed at first. The tracking devices spit out hundreds of metrics, so much of it trivial. It took Williams and the Rams' analytics staff two years of combing through reams of data to figure out which ones were relevant, and even now he'll tell you that the process is "evolving."

For the past two years, Zebra Technologies, an Illinois-based company, has been using its RFID chips to track each player's movement on game days. Teams are now privy to that information, but everything else is produced internally. Teams don't share their player-tracking data from practices with one another. For rookies, the only collegiate player-tracking data that NFL teams get comes from the Senior Bowl.

Thus, players who join the Rams essentially come with a clean slate. Their ideal baseline evolves as the team navigates through the offseason program and training camp. Williams' goal is to have a good sense for what their bodies can tolerate as they head into the regular season. They're asked to fill out a survey about how their bodies are feeling almost on a daily basis, and the communication is constant.

"They try to stay on top of everything," Rams inside linebacker Mark Barron said. "They really do their research."

Barron was one of several Rams defensive starters who did not appear in preseason games, along with outside linebacker Robert Quinn and cornerback Kayvon Webster (and, of course, defensive tackle Aaron Donald, who is holding out in a contract dispute). Others, including Barwin, nose tackle Michael Brockers, inside linebacker Alec Ogletree and strong safety Maurice Alexander were held out of the third preseason game, which is typically when teams play their starters the most. Rams first-year head coach Sean McVay attributed most of that to a "maintenance program," which has its roots in the data that Williams and others pore through.

The Rams say that what sets them apart is their cohesiveness. Every department -- medical, strength and conditioning, nutrition, analytics, coaching -- buys into the way they implement sports science.

"They communicate well together, and they follow it," Barwin said. "A lot of times the training staff and the strength staff are on different pages. These guys are all on the same page, which I think is really important."

Williams, Scott, Rath and others on the strength-and-conditioning staff all play a hand in monitoring player workloads in the moment, with the analytics team studying a larger sample of data later. They'll split it up by offense and defense and sort through it all on their tablets. For a normal practice, a receiver and a cornerback will cover somewhere between 4,000 and 5,500 yards, while a linebacker will be between 3,000 and 4,000. But some of the most pertinent information comes from the amount of distance a player covers within his pre-established speed zone.

Williams sees it all as a slider scale, with optimal readiness on one side and broken-down fatigue on the other.

The key is to widen that gap as much as possible.

"The more football you play, the better you are at football, but the more exposure risk you are for a breakdown or injury," Williams said. "So, it's that balance. And that's where we use some of that objective data, to make sure we're within that range and balance where we want to be.”