Building a More Dynamic Training System
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” - Viktor Frankl
There’s been a shift in endurance training among elite athletes towards a more dynamic approach. The reason is simple: if you give 100 athletes the same training, you’ll get 100 different responses. The responses might be similar, but they are unique enough that, especially over time, the resulting performances will be drastically different.
For example: take two individuals with the same exact personal bests and thresholds even.
Athlete 1 does his workout in the morning after a great night of sleep and proper performance fueling.
Athlete 2 does his workout later in the day after a tough day at work, didn’t sleep well, and went out to an lunch of fried foods with a client.
They might have the same exact splits for the workout, but chances are Athlete 2 will take longer to recover from this effort. This isn’t an extreme example; even two athletes who did EXACTLY the same thing from a sleep, nutrition, workout perspective would have varying results. Understanding how you respond as an individual is key.
Training doesn’t need to be rocket science, but it should at least be data informed.
Thankfully, these days we not only have performance metrics like heart rate, power, and pace, but we also have recovery metrics like resting heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV). By using these data points combined with a subjective approach monitoring mood and motivation, we can track trends over time. We can even go deeper into blood testing and blood lactate levels to see what’s happening beneath the surface and train and fuel more appropriately for each individual.
During times where life stress starts to accumulate or sleep is impaired, we can choose to alter the training downward or postpone a hard day.
During times where life stress clears up and we’re fueling really well, perhaps we can push the envelope a little farther.
For a long time, we’ve held onto training as a formula: if I do X then I’ll get Y result. But our lives are always changing so the resulting training response does as well. We can use wearables like Whoop or even an app like HRV4Training to make informed decisions on how to scale our training appropriately. This isn’t a perfect science yet, but by doing so we can notice even larger patterns in our lives:
What are the things that are working in my favor
How am I self-sabotaging
By becoming aware of how our habits are affecting us, slowly we start to shift the lifestyle outside of training to stack more and more good days together. We will always have bad days, but ultimately as our good days become more frequent, our bad days become better than the good days used to be!
Small changes in habits compound to big changes in performance over time.
Happy Training,
Coach Griffin