Adapting Training Intensity for Sports Performance
Recently sports science has become fixated on trying to answer this question with a variety of ways of measuring how fatigued the body is. Whether that be markers of neuromuscular fatigue such as jump data, biological markers that indicate stress such as cortisol or monitoring changes in heart rate using heart rate variability. All of these come with their pros and cons.
Whilst it is a good thing as we SHOULD be able to mitigate injury risk with this data I think in its current form it is used too much to restrict/control training load. This data should be used in conjunction with other injury risk factors in order to mitigate this risk, these being sleep, hydration and some subjective measures of fatigue.
It should also be there to allow the athlete to train hard! I’ve never understood the use in having a system that’s in place purely to restrict training load, if all markers look good, the athlete feels good and it is far enough away from competition, this is a great situation in which to push hard and apply a meaningful amount of stress. Which is a rare scenario in season for example.
A simple way of combining all of this – simple not perfect – is to have a points system that captures this data, then uses it to dictate a scenario for that days worth of training. This may look like the below;
This is basic and made use of the equipment we had use of at the time, but worked really well. You’ll probably notice that the bar for a ‘high day’ is set pretty high and the athlete won’t access this area much, the same of the low day. I think this makes sense, 80% of our sessions feel average, 10% feel awesome and the final 10% the barbell feels fucking heavy. This is due to fatigue and also the natural 14% variance in day to day strength levels.
A nice by product of this method is that we reward the athlete for recovering well, especially pertinent for the athletes that like to train hard as we give them something to recovery for (aside from the sport)!
In a perfect world we would probably have this data everyday, get the means and standard deviations from a rolling average and use these to prescribe training intensity. But anywhere outside of full time professional sport this is likely to time consuming and relies on the athlete too heavily. So this is just my pragmatic way of administering an easy to use, evidence based approach to training intensity.
The specific set up above was used for a player in semi professional Rugby Union and was based on his training schedule and available data. If you have questions or would like to set up something similar for yourself, get in touch!
