Monitoring Athletes: 5 Key Metrics to Track

Monitoring athletes training and making necessary adjustments is far more important than the training plan.  There are key metrics to track daily as well as listening to subjective feedback from the athletes.  Having a professional coach monitor your training and provide adjustments based on feedback is one of the main benefits of having a coach.  Self-monitoring is really hard to do.  The mind can play tricks on us and we think we aren’t as sore and tired as we feel.  We may push the training up a notch when we really should take a recovery week.  Subjective feedback from an athlete on how their session went is the most important!  Taken together with subjective feedback, there are 5 key metrics I track when monitoring athlete training.  Numbers one through four are easy for me to track with the TrainingPeaks app providing these metrics in an easy to fill out box for athletes with a drop-down menu for ranking.

1. Overall Feeling

This is such an important metric as it encompasses everything that is going on in an athlete’s life and training.   Imagine a good friend you see every day asking you, “So how do you feel today?”.  You have a good rapport with that friend and know you can be totally honest.  In the TrainingPeaks metrics, the replies can range from horrible to best and includes a possibility of ten feelings.  When there is a trend of 2 – 3 consecutive bad overall feelings, it is a sign that the training load – recovery balance needs to be addressed.  Some athletes may be able to continue with planned training if they can improve recovery through sleep, diet, and stress.  Other athletes will need to decrease training load for 3 – 5 days until they feel better.

2. Fatigue

High fatigue can be attributed to a number of factors such as a higher than average training load, poor quality of sleep, or increased life stressors/demands.  If an athlete trains with high fatigue for too long, this can increase risk of injury and reduce their ability to adequately recover from training sessions.  In the TrainingPeaks metrics, the replies can range from none to extreme with a possibility of seven options.  Again, we are looking for trends.  One isolated day of high fatigue is not a cause for concern, but if this continues for two – three consecutive days training load may need to be decreased to allow for more recovery.

3. Soreness

Muscle soreness can be tricky to interpret particularly when athletes first begin a new training regimen.  The key with interpreting muscle soreness is how long it lingers. As an athlete adapts to a given training stimulus, muscles should not get as sore and when they do – soreness should resolve within 1 – 2 days.  The exception here would be after a big race it is expected that muscle soreness would be high for a number of days and adequate recovery is important.

Does an athlete have high muscle soreness that does not seem to go away?  This could potentially be a sign of low energy availability and may require the expertise of a registered sports dietician.  It may require decreasing training load to allow for adequate recovery.

I must admit after 32 years of endurance training, I wake up most days feeling rather stiff and sore.  I rank my muscle soreness mid-way through a run after a dynamic warm up and running easy for about 10 – 15 minutes.

4. Sleep Quality

Our bodies do so much to repair, regenerate, process waste, and more while sleeping.  Poor sleep quality will hinder your ability to recover from training.  This is why ranking sleep quality can provide insight into how to adjust future training.  Sleep quality can be negatively impacted for a number of reasons.  Some of these reasons may include travel, temperature, stress, or sickness.  Adequate sleep and good quality sleep is essential to recovery from training.  If sleep quality is negatively impacted for a number of days,  training load will likely need to be adjusted.

5. 7-day rolling average of HRV

Heart rate variability provides insight into the regulation of our autonomic nervous system.  We wrote about HRV in a previous blog.  When we aren’t training, it is important for the parasympathic nervous system to help us ‘rest and digest’.  A higher HRV value is associated with more dominance of the parasympathetic nervous system and a lower HRV value is associated with more dominance of the sympathetic nervous system.  The downside to daily readings of HRV is that the measurement is not as sensitive as resting heart rate.  Relatively speaking there is more variability or noise in the reading which can make it difficult to interpret.  It is for this reason that I prefer to look at a 7-day rolling average of HRV readings for better interpretation of results.  A few anecdotal insights from coaching include:

• After a big race, HRV values will decrease indicating a stressor to the autonomic nervous system. Depending on the race distance and the athlete, the rebound in HRV is unique to each individual.  If a very long recovery time is needed (two weeks or more) the rebound in HRV may not reach pre-race values as detraining may decrease HRV as well.

• Sometimes HRV values look great, yet athletes will report poor subjective metrics. I always prioritize subjective feedback over physiological metrics.