THE NEWS
I’m not sure if I care what your whoop score is. In my experience most of the time none of that matters and all that matters is you can get the work done when it needs to be done.
Strong first statement, I know. I came from the video game generation. I understand what it means to want to score high on any monitor that’s put in front of my face. Not only do I want a good score I want to score higher than my friends or anyone in my family.
But should we really be leaving all of our training up to a wearable?
In all honesty the answer is yes and and some no, and most of it depends on the circumstance.
If you’re training for a particular test, they can give a lot of insight as to how you should approach your training training week or day. If you’re training for just fitness in general, it can sometimes wind up robbing you of your training day when you really didn’t need to take a break.
I was turned on the technology by a coworker, who explained an anecdotal story, where, despite taking many rest days in the midst of a training cycle because of low or poor HRV he could not get the data to say he was ready to train.
This initiated a visit to the doctor which eventually led to a cancer screening where the individual caught cancer early and was able to treat an eliminate it.
The earliest I used HRV (heart rate variability) to guide my training was 2014. Back in my day I had to wake up at the same time every day sit on the edge of my bed and take the measurement, using a specific app and a heart rate monitor, which was far more cumbersome than the high-tech wearables that we have today.
As I gathererd this data, it became very obvious that sometimes it seemed to be spot on if I got little sleep, and or had a hard training day and signaled me to take a different approach to the days activities.
They were also several days where I felt great, knew it was time to hit it hard, but the measurements told me I needed to take a break.
This is where I think last weeks article measuring your physical readiness through different means comes into play.
It’s important not to use just one metric to guide our fitness in terms of readiness for training. This is no different than using your bodyweight to potentially encapsulate your overall health. bodyweight is just one metric. It’s not the full story.
Which is why coming up with a few protocols for workload management in your training can be important. If you find yourself at a 10 out of 10 four to five days in a row in terms of your workout intensity, no matter what score a fitness tracker gives you, it’s most likely beneficial to incorporate a rest day or a moderate to easy day.
Several variables, you could look at on a weekly basis that could dictate your readiness outside of a wearable include:
-Previous nights sleep in hours with 7-8 being optimal
-Previous days training load/difficutly on a scale of 1-10
-Previous days total training time (warmup workout cool down)
Gathering this data on a week week basis, along with the subjective measurement of how you feel can start to show how these variables get altered a way that causes you to need to take some rest.
The reverse is also true. It can be a great value to learn how to operate when your body may not be in 100% optimal condition. I’m definitely not saying push yourself to an injured state but physical toughness follows mental toughness, and there may be days where you’re wearable says it’s not a training day or to take it easy, and you don’t feel 100% perfect but you can absolutely still go hit the gym.
After all it can be hard to hit your goals if you are constantly taking breaks from physical activity because you missed one hour of sleep.
Life will also, without a doubt demand you perform when you don’t feel like it. And learning to perform in these scenarios is a skill like any other. It can be trained and developed.
#AlwaysTrain
and then