In 2008, I can vividly remember going to the local cycling shop in Madison, Wisconsin and buying my first sports watch. It was the Polar S625X. A gargantuan beauty, it took up nearly half of my forearm. The foot pod sensor was also huge, but all I cared about is that I would finally be able to determine my speed and distance on runs and bike rides. The data didn’t download anywhere, and I didn’t share my workouts on social media which was in its infancy anyway (facebook albums were all the rage).
For better or worse, technology has come a long way in the last 16 years. However, a lot of the technology you may spend money on is not all that accurate. A research study in 2022 highlighted that devices including Oura Ring Generation 2, Whoop 3.0, Somfit, Apple Watch, Garmin Forerunner 245, and the Polar Vantage V only had 50 – 65% agreement with a gold standard laboratory measure of assessing the various modes of sleep (Miller 2022). There are also metrics that aren’t ideal when assessing an athlete’s readiness because it’s not clear what the metric is actually measuring. For example, Garmin’s body battery metric is a proprietary measure. As a coach and scientist, if I don’t understand exactly how the algorithm is created – I don’t use it to adjust training load in an athlete.
Complications aside, here are five technology tools that will help improve your performance and recovery:
1. HRV4Training App
A brainchild of scientist, Marco Altini PhD, HRV4Training uses the technology from your cell phone’s camera to assess resting heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV). Some of the key reasons why I like this app are:
- When completed daily, the app provides an ideal range for your HRV. When I am below that range, it recommends that I take a rest day or change what was planned for that day’s workout.
- The app prompts you to complete subjective metrics before a HRV measurement is saved. I LOVE this. The secret sauce is in combining subjective and objective metrics and the app got this one right. I like having to check in daily to report on metrics such as sleep quality, muscle soreness, fatigue, etc.
- You can look at correlations between HRV and metrics such as alcohol intake, sleep, training, etc.
2. Tracking subjective daily metrics
There are a lot of apps that can track subjective daily metrics. The main point being that doing so provides useful information to track your recovery from workouts. It also provides insight into when you should adjust training load due to poor metrics. HRV4Training is one app that includes subjective metrics. TrainingPeaks also provides a huge range of subjective metrics and you can customize it to the ones you would like to fill out. Some of my favorites include:
- Overall Feeling: how is your overall feeling today? This is a powerful and useful question as it encourages the athlete to take into account the impact of multiple factors such as stress, soreness, and mood on their overall feeling.
- Stress: This provides useful context to factors outside of training that may impact stress. Often times, when athletes are experiencing a busy time at work the stress metric is high.
- Sleep quality: Sleep is crucial to recovery from workouts.
- Soreness: If muscle soreness is trending high consistently, this could be an indicator that the athlete is not adequately recovering from workouts.
An example of an athlete’s daily metrics log in the TrainingPeaks app.
3. Running form metrics
I would place this in the category of provides good context. I have seen runners with a huge range of running styles all have outstanding performances. Each body is unique, and we shouldn’t force one particular running style across a wide range of athletes. However, a couple tools I like to add context to better understanding an athlete are:
- Cadence: I want to understand what each athlete’s baseline cadence is. That way, I am aware when there are significant increases or decreases in cadence.
- Ochy running form analysis using Artificial Intelligence. There are few athletes that will go to a lab for a running form analysis (both for cost and feasibility reasons). Ochy is a downloadable app for mobile phones that can provide a running form analysis from a short video taken with your phone.
4. Heart Rate Monitors
Again, I would place this in the category of provides good context. I don’t have any athletes regularly train by heart rate zones but it does provide great context.
- If heart rate is unusually high on a run it can provide good information. Was it a very hot day? Is the athlete getting sick? Were they running much faster than the workout intended?
- Beware of the differences between wrist, chest, and arm heart rate straps. This could be an entire blog on its own, but if you are wanting the most accurate heart rate data I would encourage the use of a chest strap.
- In trail running it can help an athlete tune into what an easy, moderate, and hard effort are. Eventually, experienced trail runners will be in tune with how hard they are breathing to assess effort and pacing. However, it can be useful to have heart rate alongside the perceived effort especially at first to help assess how hard you are running.
5. Jack Daniels Training Tables
I use this excel spreadsheet near daily for road runners or trail runners who train on quite a bit of road. There are a whole host of features but three of my favorites are:
- Predicting race times. You can punch in someone’s 5 km race time and see predicted race times for other distances. For more novice runners, it takes time to develop aerobic capacity to reach the predicted times at the longer distances.
- Setting up accurate training zones. Zone 1 – Zone 5 can mean different things to different athletes and coaches. I like being able to name the zones based on the system we are working such as easy aerobic, lactate threshold, Vo2 max, etc.
- Determining target interval paces for anywhere from 100m repeats to 20 – 60 minute tempo runs.
References:
Miller, D. J., Sargent, C., & Roach, G. D. (2022). A validation of six wearable devices for estimating sleep, heart rate and heart rate variability in healthy adults. Sensors, 22(16), 6317.