I’ve blogged about HRV devices in the past and how great of a tool they are to manage training loads. But sometimes it’s not always possible to use such devices. Not everyone can afford a HRV device, and from a training facility perspective it’s not very realistic to provide such devices to accommodate all of your athletes. There are alternatives when the HRV option is not possible, though.
Taking your daily resting heart rate is one of the options. Taking it only once probably won’t give you much information about fatigue or recovery, but taking it consistently every day you’ll start to see a trend and you should be able to establish what is “normal” for you. Based on that number, you can see if your body is recovering well. A heart rate that’s 5 beats per minute above or below your normal heart rate is usually sign that something is going on. It might be because of a rough training session the day before, lack of sleep, too much partying and abusing alcohol the night before, etc.
Everything is lining up for a great training session the next morning…
You see the idea. An elevated resting heart rate is usually a good sign that you’re body is still in recovery mode and you should adjust your training load for that day (assuming everything else being equal). I also recommend taking your resting heart rate first thing in the morning even before getting out of bed, as there are less chances of outside factors influencing your heart rate (activities, stress, caffeine, etc).
Another option is to rate how you feel before a training sessions. Simply rate how ready to train you are on a scale from 1 to 10. Easy enough, right? Although there are many factors to take into account and it is a pretty subjective method, you will still have a general idea of how you feel. I recommend doing it after your soft-tissue work and your warm-up because it’s sometimes hard to truly know how ready to train you are without starting to move around a little bit. It’s not unusual to feel tired or “not into it” to lift before you even get started and end up feeling great after the warm up is over. If you’ve been sitting around for hours, or working at a desk for 6 hours, chances are you won’t feel like getting after it too much. But once you get moving it might change.
These are just 2 simple ways to monitor your fatigue, recovery and readiness to train when you don’t have access to a HRV device. It might not be as accurate to predict your readiness to train, but it can definitely guide you in the right direction.
Don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter; it’s FREE and you’ll get my 3 reports on sports performance training!
When dealing with high level athletes, you need to make sure they get the right amount of training stimulus. Too little will end up not producing any significant training effect, and too much will overtrain your athletes.
When you’re dealing with high school athletes or athletes with very little lifting experience, you can get away with pretty much anything and overtraining them is virtually impossible.
It’s a whole different story for college, junior and pro athletes who have a significant training background. This is where periodization, volume and load management, and recovery strategies come into play. When planning a training year, an off-season or an in-season plan, it’s always very difficult to know exactly how much volume your athletes need.
The truth is that there is simply too many variables that come into play:
training experience
individual recovery capacity
stress (physical and psychological)
sleep
nutrition
hormones
genetics
etc
Writing down a periodization, planning for deload weeks and trying to stay on top of how athletes feel have been the best ways to make sure the training stimulus we’re giving them is in that fine zone between undertraining and overtraining.
I blogged about heart rate variability (HRV)a couple months ago. I believe that the use of HRV and the devices available to track that will drastically change our industry in the next few years.
For the last decades, the only tool available to measure HRV was the OmegaWave, which is a 35,000$ machine, which basically means that it wasn’t accessible to most people.
But in the last couple of years, we’ve seen some smaller, more affordable devices make their appearance on the market. If you’re interested in using HRV with your athletes (which you should) to manage training stress I would strongly encourage you to consider of those devices. Here’s an overview of some of the devices used to measure HRV:
OmegaWave
Like I just mentioned earlier, this is the original heart rate variability system. I had the chance to try it once and it gives you tremendous information about your recovery, your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, your anaerobic threshold and a lot more. The only problem? Well, the cost! So unless you’re in a pro sports organization, I doubt that you can justify (or even afford) such an expense.
Bioforce HRV
This is Joel Jamieson’s product that he created after over 10 years of training MMA athletes and making experiments with the OmegaWave system. All you need is a Polar heart rate monitor and an I-Phone or an Android because it comes in the form of an app on these 2 smart phones. I’ve tried it a couple times and it’s very simple and easy to use. The price is extremely cheap compared to the OmegaWave; you can get it for $200.
Polar Heart Rate Monitor RS800CX
Polar makes a bunch of different heart rate monitors with different functions. The RS800CX offers a HRV measuring system with the watch. Although I have never tried it myself I heard that’s it’s not the most user friendly HRV system. It’s still pretty affordable compared to the OmegaWave; you can get it for just a little over $400.
Ithlete
Similar to the Bioforce HRV, it’s an app you can get on your smart phone. Although I’ve never used this one either I have heard mixed feedback on it. I’ve heard that’s it’s not the most accurate, but the price is extremely cheap. You can get it for a little over 50$.
This is really just the beginning as I think HRV monitoring devices are literally the future of strength and conditioning for high level athletes. Most of the smaller, more affordable devices are still in an early developmental stage and they will only become better as time goes by, and we will use a lot more companies come out with their own HRV device.
I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years HRV monitors become a staple in any training program. The information it provides is invaluable and couldn’t be obtained any other way.
Don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter, I’ll send you my 3 FREE reports on speed training, soft-tissue work and injury prevention for the shoulder!
Everybody makes mistakes. And if you think you’re any different and you don’t make any, you’re really kidding yourself and it’s probably time for a reality check.
We all make mistakes, whether we like to admit it or not; this is human nature. It’s part of the learning process. Strength and conditioning coaches are not different. I’m no different.
This is the time of year where everybody makes resolution for the new year or highlights what they learned or changed in the last year. I’ll give my 2011 review a different flavor by giving you my top 5 mistakes I made in the last year (or the ones that have lasted up to this past year).
1. Recommending minimalist footwear for everyone. I wrote a whole blog post on the subject not too long ago (if you missed it you can check it out HERE). The idea is that for too long we have restrained our feet in footwear with a lot of cushioning, big heel lifts and support all around. That made the feet become lazy, and they stopped doing their job because they didn’t have to anymore. But the thing is that the problem can originate somewhere else; in other words, the feet are not always the source of the problem, but rather the result from a problem originating somewhere else. In our lifestyle in 2012, there is more than just our footwear that’s wrong. Sedentary lifestyles, prolonged sitting, poor posture, long commute in cars, and early development in young athletes who do too much too young are all factors that can wreak havoc on our bodies. Any of these factors (or a combination of) can lead to permanent structural changes on our bodies. Femoroacetabular impingement (FAI), femoral anteversion and retroversion and other hip problems can lead to different feet position and structural variations.
Probably wouldn’t be a good idea to have this guy run in Vibrams…
Before I digress too much, it simply means that not everyone can get away with wearing Vibram Five Fingers or New Balance Minimus all day. I used to blindly recommend those type of shoes without assessing the person. Let’s just say that I’m a lot more careful about it now. As a side note, overweight and poor running mechanics are 2 other factors that would lead me to not recommend a minimalist type of shoes for physical activity.
2. Minimizing the importance of breathing. If you’ve followed my blog for some time, you should know by now the importance I pay to breathing patterns. I’ve blogged about that many times during the last year, and I must say that the more I learn about it, the more I realize how crucial it is with any movement pattern and for proper alignment (as a side note, I can improve your range of motion just by teaching you how to breathe; that’s how powerful it is). The diaphragm muscles (yes, there are 2 of them) have fascial connections with the thoraco-lumbar fascia which in turn connects with the psoas (that attaches on the spine) and the hips.
Because of that, proper diaphragm function and proficient breathing patterns are essential for optimal posture and positioning through various movement patterns. Ineffective use of the diaphragm muscles could lead to hyperextension of the thoraco-lumbar region, faulty positioning of the hips and plenty of other problems all the way up and down the chain. This is something I coach a lot now, and it has made a huge difference on our athletes at Endeavor. If you’re not familiar with proper breathing patterns and diaphragm function, I suggest you take a look at the PRI stuff (Postural Restoration Institute).
3. Mismanaging training volumes and intensities. Whether it is in my own training or the ones of my athletes, I think I have not always been good at managing fatigue and recovery. On paper, training volumes always look well managed, but the reality is that it goes far bey0nd that. For one, if you always go balls to the walls when you train and push yourself the the very limit every training session lifting maximal weights and pushing lactic conditioning ’til you puke, chances are you won’t recover properly even if the planned training volume for the week is moderate. The other thing is that there are a lot of other factors that factors in the equation (quantity and quality of sleep, nutrition, other sports and activities outside of the gym, the party factor, etc). Whether you like it or not, there aren’t that many athletes that won’t take some time to enjoy life during their off-season, which usually means spending a day at the beach not eating too well (or enough) or have a late night and a couple of beers once in a while. In their off-season, athletes not only need a physical break from their sport, but a mental one as well. Nothing wrong with that, as long as they keep it in check and don’t overdo it. It struck me this past summer when we had one of our pro hockey player return to Endeavor after a very long season in which his team ended up winning the Stanley Cup. First of all he came back from his team mid to late June, almost 2 months later than all the other guys, but he was also way more beat up physically and mentally. It was apparent that even after almost 10 days completely off, he just didn’t have the wheels he had the previous off-season (which started in April the year before- that’s a big difference). He took more days off from training than the previous off-season and the number of days he showed up hungry to get after it were definitely not as frequent. The off-season is not only about getting ready for the upcoming season, but also recovering from the previous one, especially if it was a very long and excruciating one. This is where HRV measurement tools are gonna come in handy; it allows you to measure physical and nervous system fatigue and you can manage fatigue and recovery so much better. And that technology is becoming available to us. I blogged about this before.
4. Aerobic training is not the evil I thought it was. I always stood up against aerobic training for team sports because it’s simply not the way most sports are played. After trying to prove my point for years, and I am starting to realize certain things. I still don’t think I was wrong about the fact that long slow pace aerobic training is not specific to sports, but I’m starting to realize that the pendulum may just have swung too far.
The aerobic system plays a huge role in recovery for the lactic and alactic systems and a decent amount of the energy produced in a team sports setting will come from the aerobic system. It still doesn’t mean that you should go for hour long jogs 4-5 times a week to get ready for your hockey season, but there just might be a place for steady state aerobics in a yearly training plan after all.
5. Not enough external rotation based rotator cuff exercises for my baseball players. With the importance of scapular stability, t-spine mobility, breathing patterns and working the rotator cuff in a stability role, I will admit that I neglected external rotation based exercises a little bit last off-season with my baseball players.
Shoulder injury prevention is about much more than just external rotation exercises, but it might have been another pendulum that swung too far for me because I haven’t done much of it with my baseball pitchers last off-season. The reality is that the external rotators of the shoulder still need to decelerate the crazy velocity of internal rotation that occurs at the shoulder in a pitching motion (over 7,000°/sec), so it’s still specific to do direct external rotation work with baseball pitchers, so these muscles become better at decelerating the internal rotation.
Those are the mistakes I’ve made this past year. What are the mistakes you’ve made during the last year?
And don’t forget to sign up for my FREE newsletter!
Believe it or not, Christmas is already less than 2 week away! Crazy isn’t it?! But that doesn’t mean I’m not happy about it; au contraire! Christmas is by far my favorite time of year because I usually get some time off from work and that allows me to spend some time with my family and friends. The only problem with Christmas is that I always end up being late on Christmas shopping and finding presents for my loved ones. That being said, if you have a fitness or strength and conditioning enthusiast in your life, here’s a couple of gift ideas that are well worth it if you ask me!
Hearte Rate Monitor
With what the research tells us about heart rate variability (HRV) and the feedback our heart rate can give us about our training, intensity, recovery, etc. it only makes sense to keep track of your heart rate. Most monitors are very convenient to use and not very expensive (you can get a really good one for less than 100$!). I recommend the Polar RS-100. If you’re looking for the best quality/price ratio, you can’t get much better than that one. Also, with Joel Jamieson’s new HRV product coming out soon, it will be 100% compatible with the RS-100, so you’re killing 2 birds with one stone! Ultimate Hockey Training
Kevin Neeld’s new book is a great gift idea for any hockey player, parent or coach. It highlights every component of a hockey player development from the youth level to the professional level as well as going into details on the training program itself and all that should be included (foam rolling, warm up, strength and power work, conditioning, etc). It really is the most complete hockey development resource out there, and very up-to-date as well (compared to other hockey training resources I’ve read before). I’ve been spreading the word about Kevin’s book for the last 2 months for a reason. And for less than 30$, it makes for a very cheap gift idea! You can get Ultimate Hockey Training HERE.
Metabolic Cooking Cookbook
It’s no big news that nutrition is a HUGE part of the results you get from your training. Who says nutrition also says planning. If you don’t plan your meals ahead you’re setting yourself up for failure. Period. Metabolic Cooking is a great, healthy cookbook with over 250 delicious recipes that will help you achieve your health and performance goals. You’ll be taking a huge step toward planning your meals better with this resource, as there is also different sections for breakfast, lunch, dinner and even snacks! For less than 50$, it was way worth it to me, and I’m sure it’ll be for you as well!
Show and Go
If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know that I’m a big fan of Show and Go, as I tried it myself and gained almost 15 pounds of muscle while boosting my Deadlift and my Bench Press by 20-30 pounds; all of this in less than 4 months! It’s the best system out there of any non-athlete gym enthusiast who wants to pack on muscle, gain strength and lose bodyfat. You get a 16-week program based on your goals and the number of times per week you hit the gym. And on top of that you have full video support for all the exercises that are included in the program and Eric throws a bunch of cool bonuses with it. It takes the guess work out of writing your own program and quite frankly, the results speak for themselves. It’s the perfect gift for the fitness enthusiast in your life!
TheraCane Massager
Doing soft-tissue work is now widely accepted as part of a complete training program. I’ve raved about the benefits of foam rolling and other similar tools to promote tissue quality. A foam roller doesn’t work quite as well on the upper body as it does on the lower body, though. The theracane massager is probably the best “upper body” tool I’ve come across for soft-tissue work. I own one and I have to say that it works wonders on areas like the pecs, upper traps, rhomboids as well as the posterior neck muscles. It’s the next best thing to getting a massage! Training = Rehab, Rehab = Training
This last gift idea might be more for people who are serious about strength and conditioning and are looking for a great continuing education resource. Charlie Weingroff has a way of explaining things and giving people a different perspective on things that will make every penny you spend on this DVD set worth it. I’m not going to lie though, it’s not for everyone. The material on the DVDs is pretty advanced stuff, and I’ll even admit that I was scratching my head a couple of times while watching Charlie speaks. But it makes for a great Christmas present for any up-and-comer strength and conditioning coach; and trust me, they will appreciate it (it was my Christmas present last year, and I certainly did!). You ca get Training = Rehab, Rehab = Training on Charlie’s website HERE.
Buuuuuut, the best Christmas present of them all remains a subscription to DavidLasnier.com’s newsletter! And the best part is that it’s totally FREE!!! All you have to do is enter the contact info below, and you’ll even get 3 FREE reports on sports performance training!
As I’ve said many times before, random thoughts posts are probably my favorite type of posts to write and also my favorite types of posts to read on other people’s websites. So here we go again! …I obviously just made up the number 137.
Whatever Pam.
1. As much as I’ve written about breathing patterns in the past and the importance it has on your whole body, I never really posted anything about breathing drills or exercises specifically. My colleague Patrick Ward, from Optimum Sports Performance did a great job of explaining a simple, yet extremely effective breathing drill you can use with your clients and athletes. Check it out:
2. I have bashed aerobic training in previous blog posts and articles, and guess what? I’m starting to think that I was wrong. As I’m learning more about how to manage training stress and training loads, I’m realizing that doing high intensity strength and power work on top of high intensity conditioning sessions that are strictly interval-based might be too taxing on the nervous system. Also, aerobic training improves your recovery rate between bouts of effort as well as between sessions, so I’m starting to think that aerobic work might actually have its place in a training program. I’m still not a fan of repetitive low amplitude movements for people who are already pretty restricted mobility-wise, and I still don’t think it’s sports-specific AT ALL (unless you’re a marathon runner), but I’m gonna have to play around with it a little bit in my own training and the ones of my athlete because I’m starting to believe there are some benefits to it. Keep an eye open for an entire blog post or article on the subject in the next couple of months.
3. My friend and colleague Kevin Neeld wrote a very interesting blog post on Femoroacetabular Impingement (FAI) yesterday. If you’re not already familiar with FAI and you’re training high level athletes (especially hockey players) you NEED to get that piece of the puzzle figured out, as FAI should be taken into consideration when writing programs for your athletes. And according to Kevin, there is about 1 in 3-4 male in the general population that has some sort of hip abnormality and probably even more among high level hockey players! Kevin is so freakin’ smart, you need to check out his stuff; this particular blog post on FAI highlights the most recent research on the subject and Kevin makes it sooo easy for anyone to understand. His blog is a valuable resource for me on a weekly basis.
Different types of FAI
4. Speaking of Kevin; if you’re training hockey players or are a hockey player yourself you NEED to pick up a copy of his book Ultimate Hockey Training. It’s the best hockey training resource I’ve ever read and it’s under 35$! If you don’t read it you’re missing out big time. Enough said.
5. I talked about HRV in Tuesday’s blog post, and I mentioned that I think the future of periodization and managing training loads resides there. Monday morning, a fellow strength coach from the area came in to Endeavor to run our training staff through the Omega Wave, a HRV measuring tool. I was really impressed with that tool and all the information it gives you on CNS fatigue, sympathetic and parasympathetic state, and your overall readiness to train. We are really fortunate at Endeavor that the guy took time from his schedule to come over, explain to us the way the OmegaWave works and put all of us through it. A big thanks to him!
The OmegaWave. That’s pretty much how it goes.
6. Today is December 1st, which means one thing: Christmas is right around the corner! To say that I’m really excited would be an understatement. Christmas is probably my favorite time of year for a couple of reasons, especially to spend some time with my family. This year I’m especially excited for a couple of reasons:
I get a full week off!
I get to go back home to Montreal to spend the Holidays with my family and see my friends (I couldn’t make it last year)
I’m flying there, which means that I won’t have to spend a whole day in my car to get there, and another full day to come back
My girlfriend will meet my family for the first time!
Recently I’ve been introduced to the concept of heart rate variability (HRV). For those who don’t know anything about HRV, it’s basically a measure of the variation in beat-to-beat interval of your heart rate. Methods to measure HRV include ECG, blood pressure and specific devices (which I’ll talk about a little later). HRV has been shown to be a pretty accurate predictor of heart diseases. But more specifically to training and performance, HRV can give you information about the CNS, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems activity, and overall fatigue and recovery.
What that means is that HRV measurement could be an invaluable tool to monitor fatigue and recovery in athletes. Think about the implications of this. We all periodize our athletes’ training programs and adjust the training loads in order to give them the biggest benefits from training and we try to follow some sort of supercompensation model, in the hopes of getting the desired results.
But how do you know if you’re training loads and recovery times are perfectly adjusted so your athletes reach optimal supercompensation? There is no way to know without measuring it! It doesn’t matter how much experience you have in training high level athletes and writing training programs; the fact is that you can’t know EXACTLY how much training load and recovery is optimal for every individual athlete. Because let’s face it, every athlete is different; they all handle stress (physical and psychological) differently, they eat and sleep differently and their bodies have different recovery abilities.
This is where HRV measures come very handy. By getting those measures you can write programs and adjust training loads accordingly. HRV measures give you all you need to plan your training, recovery and supercompensation optimally. HRV is probably the future for most high level athletes and their training regimen. But with the finding of HRV comes a bad news, and a good news…
Bad news first: there aren’t that many good devices out there that are user friendly to use HRV with yourself and your clients. And most of them are worth thousands of dollars; OmegaWave, which is probably the most popular one is worth well over 10,000$! And in terms of practicality it’s not better as you can run only one person at a time (takes around 5-7 minutes to run someone through); that’s pretty inconvenient from a team’s or small group perspective.
But here’s the good news: Joel Jamieson is about to launch is own HRV product called BioForce HRV and it’s going to be available for less than 200$! From what I heard, Joel has been working to develop this product for the past 10 years, and it’s been tested on hundreds of athletes. It should be similar to the OmegaWave, but much more available to anyone who wants to use HRV.
If you have any interest in that type of product, I recommend you check out Joel Jamieson’s website as we’re getting really close to the launch date of his product, from what I heard. Check it out HERE.
I’ve only been introduced to the HRV concept a couple weeks ago, and all I’ve been thinking about ever since is: with all the implications of this tool, it could very well change the future of periodization training for sports -and the one of every high level athlete, for that matter. If you realize how much managing training loads and volumes matter with high level athletes (especially in-season to manage fatigue), you’ll probably think like me that this tool could revolutionize our industry forever.
To get more scoops on sports performance training, enter your info below to be subscribed to my FREE newsletter!
