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.

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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!

It’s usually easier for the girl…

7. Sign up for my newsletter!  Period.

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.

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