As the Coyotes rack up their game total with an every-other-day rhythm that includes the occasional back-to-back, another item on their itinerary shrinks: time off.

The Coyotes are in the midst of their busiest stretch of the schedule yet, packing 17 games in 31 days before a league-wide break Dec. 24-26. They’ll go on another 17-in-31 run in March and April to close out the season.

This week the team will cram a four-game road trip that starts Monday in Pittsburgh against the Penguins in six days, wrapping up Saturday in Minnesota for a matinee against the Wild.

RELATED:Rookies shine in Coyotes’ slump-busting win over Predators

And to help them identify how those gaps on the calendar can best be utilized as practices, optional sessions or complete rest days, the Coyotes have adopted more resources to have objective data point them in the right direction.

“It’s just showing our players that we’re willing to do whatever it takes, big and small,” General Manager John Chayka said. “Give them the best experience and make sure they feel cared for and that we’re willing to do whatever it takes to optimize their health.”

All season long, the Coyotes have been measuring their players’ heart rates to keep tabs on their workloads and how they recover. They purchased standard heart-rate monitors for each player and enlisted a company called Firstbeat to capture the results.

Firstbeat has done extensive research in hockey, Coyotes strength and conditioning coordinator JP Major said, and is used by about 10-12 other NHL teams.

In the past, the Coyotes used a vertical jump test and a hand grip dynamometer test to measure readiness and fatigue but upgraded their approach amid an offseason that beefed up the infrastructure all over the organization with the franchise relocating its American Hockey League affiliate to Tucson and hiring development, skating and skill coaches, additional scouts and more hockey-operations staff.

“Evolution of our organization,” coach Dave Tippett said. “Ownership put funds to some of those things this summer that we felt like allowed us to get up to speed with a lot of other teams in the league.”

MORE:Coyotes claim Josh Jooris off waivers from Rangers

The cost for outfitting the Coyotes and the Roadrunners with the monitors and the tracking software was between $50,000 and $75,000, Chayka said. This investment hasn’t necessarily translated to a better performance on the ice, as the Coyotes are still stuck at the bottom of the Pacific Division after snapping their season-long six-game losing streak Saturday, but it’s early in the data-collection process; it can take up to two years for trends to emerge, Major said.

Already, though, the returns are helping influence decisions of when to practice versus rest – insight that can be tailored to individual needs as the team may have some players stay off the ice rather than skate with the group.

And in a physical sport where overtraining is a concern during a slate of 82 games, managing players’ workloads can make a difference.

“Typically it’s always kind of been by intuition and gut instincts,” Chayka said. “This is just to help the coaching staff, the players themselves, understand where their bodies are at and how they can optimize their health.”

On practice days, players will report to the team’s gym to grab a monitor to strap to their chests. They also get weighed to get an idea of their hydration since they’ll get weighed again after they skate. Players will then go through a three-minute recovery test that tracks the time between their heart beats.

“We want to see high variability between beats,” Major said. “It tells us there’s a balance in the nervous system, and it’s a good sign of recovery.”

After a meeting, they get on the ice and their training load – basically their workload or how much energy they’re using – is tracked and a score is created to try to quantify the difficulty of each practice for the team and each individual. An hour-long hard skate would rank 150; on the days before games, the group average should be under 100. Only scratches are monitored during game-day skates.

RELATED:Max Domi injury latest to sting Coyotes

Major posts up on the bench during practice with a receiver that reads the data in real-time and a computer that logs it, and Tippett will check in to see how the sessions are progressing. So do players, who are also curious about their readings.

“I’ll look at it and if it looks like it’s been a really hard day in terms of the workload stuff, then I’ll know to relax a little more at home and try to recover more for the next day,” defenseman Connor Murphy said.

Players’ data can be organized by position, for specific drills and in what Major calls “buckets,” categories that divvy up the players by where their heart rate usually trends – low, high or somewhere in the middle.

“It’s confirming a lot of things we thought we knew,” Major said. “But we wanted an objective number to say we are doing things right or these are some things we can change.”

Major sends a report to Tippett after every practice that details players’ recovery scores from before the workout and what their training loads were on the ice. And coaches save those to look back to see how players reacted to certain drills.

“With a young team it’s easy to say, ‘We need to get on the ice every single day, and we need to be on for an hour-and-a-half because instruction becomes so key and critical,’” Major said. “But when does that become too much and detrimental to their overall training load and how we’re allowing them to recover? So that’s, I think, the best way it’s used, and we’ve been using it pretty efficiently.”

GET THE COYOTES XTRA APP: iPhone | Android

Diet and sleep are also important factors that the Coyotes pay attention to; they brought a dietitian in at the beginning of the season to consult with the players and have tweaked their travel schedule at times to spend the night after a road game instead of boarding a plane – effort that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the players as they attempt to be ready to compete on a regular basis.

“They’re trying to do everything they can to make us fresher and more successful,” forward Jordan Martinook said. “With them being able to monitor the way we are after a day off or the way we are after a day we fly on a road trip, for them to be able to see how we’re kind of reacting to it is beneficial to them. Obviously, they’re taking the data they get and try to twist it and turn it to make it work for us (and) to make us have the most energy and most success.”

Reach the reporter at sarah.mclellan@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8276. Follow her at twitter.com/azc_mclellan.

Monday's game

Coyotes at Penguins

When: 5 p.m.

Where: PPG Paints Arena, Pittsburgh.

TV/radio: Fox Sports Arizona/KTAR-AM (620).

Coyotes update: The Coyotes claimed center Josh Jooris off waivers Sunday from the Rangers. Jooris, 26, is a right shot who can play center and wing and has a goal and an assist in 12 games this season. He was expected to join the team in Pittsburgh Sunday night. “We’re trying to acquire some depth there,” coach Dave Tippett said. “He’s a young player with some decent experience in the league (131 games) that can fill a lot of different roles. So he’s a player that we looked at and decided it was worth the opportunity to bring him in and see what he can do.” The Coyotes assigned center Tyler Gaudet to the American Hockey League Sunday, opening up a roster spot for Jooris. Defenseman Connor Murphy did not accompany the Coyotes on the trip, remaining behind to undergo tests on an upper-body injury suffered Saturday. Murphy is considered day-to-day. "It was just a fluke thing that took him off, and they wanted to make sure he got some test done on it so that’s what he’s doing," Tippett said. Winger Max Domi, who’s out week-to-week with an upper-body injury, also didn’t travel. “We’re still in the early stages here, so he’ll continue to get some work done there and we’ll figure out which direction that’s going to go," Tippett said. "He won’t skate for a few days, then we’ll figure out where that goes in the next week or so.” Both Tippett and General Manager John Chayka declined to comment on a report from Sportsnet’s Nick Kypreos that mentioned surgery being discussed for what Kypreos assumes is a hand injury to Domi that may leave him sidelined as long as six weeks.

Penguins update: With 18 wins and 39 points, the Penguins rank among the NHL’s best so far this season. They’ve won five in a row amid an offensive surge in which the team has scored at least four goals in each win. Last Monday they scored a season-high eight against the Senators and most recently edged the Lightning 4-3 Saturday. Pittsburgh’s 3.39 goals-per-game average ranked second in the league entering Sunday’s action. Captain Sidney Crosby has been at the heart of this offensive prowess. His 20 goals paced the league Sunday, and he’s scored five during this win streak. He’s coming off a two-goal effort against the Lightning. Crosby’s 31 points also lead the team. Center Evgeni Malkin and winger Phil Kessel are tied for the second-most points on the Penguins with 30. Malkin also sits second in goals (12).