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Recovery by Feel.
3.8k Plays3 years ago
Training will never produce the desired results if you don't allow sufficient recovery between training bouts for the desired adaptations to occur. Uphill Athlete coach Scott Johnston discusses how to understand the feedback your body is giving you on your recovery status. With the proliferation of devises that can easily overwhelm us with data many athletes over-rely on these metrics. Do they work as well what your own body is telling you? Not if you pay attention. Listen and learn to Scott's preferred tools for managing training load and recovery by tuning into your bodies subtle language.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Purpose
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Uphill Athlete Podcast. These programs are just one of several free services we provide to disseminate information about training for mountain sports. If you like what you hear and want more, please check out our website, uphillathlete.com, where you'll find many articles and our extensive video library on all aspects of training for and accomplishing a variety of mountain goals.
Engagement and Community Resources
00:00:24
Speaker
You'll also find our forum, where you can ask questions of our experts and the community at large.
00:00:30
Speaker
Our email is coach at uphillathlete.com and we'd love to hear from you. We've been very pleased and of course gratified that our podcasts are being received so enthusiastically. We've had requests to enable a way for listeners to have a conversation about episodes.
00:00:49
Speaker
We certainly welcome this idea and want to encourage those of you who do want to do that to do so on our forum so that the whole uphill athlete community can join in and benefit from this exchange. To do so, please start a new thread on the forum using the title of the podcast under the most appropriate category. Thanks for being part of this community.
Training Talks with Scott
00:01:16
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Uphill Athlete podcast. I'm your host, Scott Johnston, co-founder of Uphill Athlete. And I'd like to start doing something a little different with these podcasts. For lack of a better term, I'm going to call them training talks with Scott. And I think what I'd like to do is be able to do some deep dives into subjects that
00:01:41
Speaker
I hear from our listeners and our users of the website that are of specific interest to them or that there's some that I perceive that there's some confusion about how to understand some of these ideas.
Assessing Training and Recovery
00:01:57
Speaker
because I want to convey and hopefully we've done this through our books and on the website that the most important thing to make sure you're doing a good job with your training or whether you're or someone is doing a good job coaching you is
00:02:14
Speaker
Are you improving? Of course, that's number one. And then how do you perceive your training load? How do you perceive your fatigue? How do you perceive recovery? How does it all feel to you? Because I think it's very easy for us to get
00:02:32
Speaker
too much into our heads. Our bodies are amazingly adept at giving us really good feedback if we can learn how to analyze it. So some of the things I want to talk about in the next couple of podcasts are related to that specific issue because I do see kind of what I would say is kind of an over-reliance on collecting data.
00:02:56
Speaker
No, make no mistake. I like data. I think it's a good thing, but it's only really useful for us if we can take advantage of, let's say, use it as an objective measure that we compare against our subjective feelings about how things are going. In one way, we're going to be going with our head and the other side is going to be going with our gut.
00:03:21
Speaker
Well, my experience over a lifetime of doing this and over 30 years of coaching this kind of thing is, it's amazing how good our gut works. And if we can learn, and for many people this is going to be a challenge, and I think especially today in our data-driven society where we have incredible technology,
00:03:42
Speaker
And if we can learn to understand that feedback we're getting, we're going to end up with better results because then we can combine it with some of the data that we get and parse out, I think, much more interesting and effective ways to train. So I'm going to start today with some methods to assess recovery status. In other words, how prepared are you to train?
00:04:08
Speaker
Are you really fatigued? Are you really fresh? Because the reason this is important, and I've said this numerous times before, but the reason this is so important is that the training is not just what you do. I mean, that's only part of it. It's really how what you do affects your body. How does it change your capacities in your fitness?
00:04:31
Speaker
And so, just sort of blindly stumbling along with a training plan that you're not paying attention to, just acting as if it was handed down from God, regardless of the feedback your body's giving you, or regardless, or without analyzing your recovery status.
00:04:51
Speaker
is probably a pretty good recipe to a disaster. I've seen it happen many, many times over and I'd like to help people prevent that from happening. So I'm going to talk about sort of what I don't like about the technology for monitoring recovery that's out there right now and why and what my experience has been using it.
00:05:13
Speaker
And also what some of my favorite tools are for analyzing recovery status, because this is really the key to getting better. I mean, if you apply too much training load before you have adapted and recovered from whatever the previous training load was, then you're not going to adapt to that. Your body just can't handle it. You know, given a long enough time and a gradual enough approach, we can adapt to incredible training loads.
00:05:40
Speaker
But if we try to ramp it up too fast, we can't fool mother nature. We can only adapt at a certain rate. And I don't care who you are. I don't care how much intensity you add or how badly you need to be in shape in four weeks. That doesn't matter to your body. And so really being able to get a good handle and an assessment on your recovery status, I think is the most critical part of doing a good job of managing your training or
00:06:08
Speaker
if you're coaching someone managing their training. So I'm going to start with the most common method that's out there today that has received a tremendous amount of publicity press, I guess, and a lot of marketing push. Then that is the measurement of heart rate variability.
Heart Rate Variability and Stress
00:06:30
Speaker
Let me start by explaining what heart rate variability is. By the way, there is an extensive article with references and studies and all that on heart rate variability on the website already, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes so you can go to read that if you'd like some more information. I think I can hit on certainly most of the high points of that today.
00:06:54
Speaker
So heart rate variability is it sounds like it's a variation in your heart rate. So let's take for example someone and you look at your watch you've got your heart rate monitor on and it says your heart rate is 60 beats per minute.
00:07:09
Speaker
That doesn't mean that it beats exactly once every second. There is a variation in that beat. Sometimes it's going to be, you know, a few maybe thousands or tenths of a second longer than one second. Sometimes it will be a similar amount shorter.
00:07:25
Speaker
So that the variation averages out to 60 beats per minute. But if you took, if you measured, if you had the capability of measuring the interbeat distance, time or interval, I would say, time interval, you'd see that it varies a bit.
00:07:42
Speaker
Now that used to only be doable in a doctor's office on an EKG machine. And now it's baked into almost any watch that's selling for probably over $300. I'm sure it has some kind of heart rate variability app built into it.
00:08:02
Speaker
Now, this is an incredible technological breakthrough that we can have almost an EKG machine at our disposal in real time when we're out training or when you're checking your heart rate in the mornings. The problem is, I've found, that it's not as reliable as it needs to be to accurately help you
00:08:24
Speaker
predict how you should be assessing your training and what I would call your preparedness to train.
00:08:34
Speaker
Now, and I'll go on to dive into that, why I think that is. I'm certainly not an expert on this field, but I have had extensive experience with many athletes using heart rate variability. And I have to say, I was one of the earliest adopters, I would say, certainly that I know of, and in my world, I started using heart rate variability 15 years ago with some of the athletes.
00:09:03
Speaker
Initially, it was only available in the very high-end Polar watches. I don't even remember the number now.
00:09:13
Speaker
And they called the app the Own Optimizer, which is a clever name because it would help each person optimize their own training. And I was, as a coach, I'm always looking for a way to get a read on the athlete's recovery. And having another source of recovery monitoring, I thought, wow, what an incredible tool this could be.
00:09:40
Speaker
and I immediately started having athletes I was coaching train that I was training use that and and I bought in hook line and sinker when I was convinced while this is and I abandoned just to a large extent at that time my reliance on the subjective feeling that I've been talking about
00:10:00
Speaker
And that was, it came back to bite me really hard. It was actually a really demoralizing time in my life because I over trained some athletes and I've never forgiven myself for it. And I can't count the number of sleepless nights that went along with that mistake.
00:10:17
Speaker
But it did open my eyes to the fact that there can be a disconnect between that amazing technological development and the data that's collected with it and the actual preparedness of the athlete to train. And that's the disconnect I want to talk about next.
00:10:36
Speaker
the basic principle. And again, I'm no expert on this. I'm certainly no cardiologist and I'm not an app developer, but I'm a guy who's been in the trenches with this stuff for a long time playing around with it. And I've tried a bunch of new apps on myself and had other athletes try them in the last few years. And I kind of came to the same conclusion. So here's my take on why this is a bit of a problem.
00:11:02
Speaker
So your heart rate and by association, your heart rate variability is directly controlled by the autonomic nervous system. So this is a system you really don't have any control over.
00:11:17
Speaker
And it's automatic, so obviously when you go to sleep, you don't have to think about your heart rate, it just happens, the same with your breathing, same with your digestion. There are two components to the autonomic nervous system, primarily is the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system. And you can think of these as the sympathetic nervous system is what we might call the fight or flight nervous system.
00:11:42
Speaker
response. So it would be when the saber-toothed tiger jumps out of the woods at you, you know immediately to run. It's going to elevate your heart rate. It's going to release adrenaline. You're going to be prepared to sprint away for your life. The other end of that autonomic nervous system is the parasympathetic nervous system. And that's what is often referred to as the rest and digest system. It kind of turns down
00:12:08
Speaker
the volume on the nervous system. It's what happens at night for people. We tend to, our autonomic nervous systems, the parasympathetic nervous system begins to take over and we get sleepy and that's to help us fall asleep. Now,
00:12:23
Speaker
you've all had experiences where your sympathetic nervous system didn't turn down enough during the night or maybe you couldn't fall asleep. And that's exactly what's going on in those cases. Your sympathetic nervous system is overstimulated and the parasympathetic nervous system can't calm it down. So that's just a really quick, not even neurology 101, but that's kind of how this system works. So what heart rate variability apps look at
00:12:52
Speaker
obviously is this variability in the heart rate. So they're essentially taking the pulse of or measuring your autonomic nervous systems status at any time. And it would seem like that would be a really great window into a person's recovery status. And that's why I bought in Hookline and Sinker almost 20 years ago with this stuff.
00:13:21
Speaker
was I thought, wow, because we know that the nervous system is one of the most affected components. I mean, so one of the things that drives fatigue more than anything else in the body. Obviously, there's different types of fatigue. And maybe at some point, we can have a talk about all those different types of fatigue, because there are, there's metabolic fatigue and others. But the nervous system is one that, you know,
00:13:45
Speaker
because our nervous system is used so much in these high output activities that we tend to use, it takes a beating and it needs a recovery. So it would seem like if you measure the autonomic nervous system with this heart rate variability, you'd be getting a really good picture of what's going on in there and it would be an indicator
00:14:09
Speaker
that if your heart rate variability was, and I'll talk about what's good and what's bad with heart rate variability, I mean, in terms of what you should be looking for, but if it indicates that you are not recovered, you would think, and I would like to believe that it was really truly indicating that and that you are actually ready for arrest and you shouldn't be going out and doing your training.
00:14:33
Speaker
Now, for a bunch of reasons and probably most of which I couldn't even begin to explain, that doesn't happen reliably enough so that you or your coach can blindly use heart rate variability as a predictor of your preparedness to train. Why does that happen? I'm only speculating, but my hunch is that
00:14:59
Speaker
because we are such an incredibly complex organism and we have various mechanisms that result in fatigue.
00:15:08
Speaker
that just measuring one of those systems, the autonomic nervous system, often doesn't give us the cleanest picture that it is, especially that it's presented as. And unfortunately, I think, I mean, as with anything, there's a lot of marketing behind this and the watchmakers want to put more and more stuff into their watch because they're in a marketing battle with other companies.
00:15:35
Speaker
And this is something that has now, you know, the little chips that they can use to measure this have suddenly come way down in price or not suddenly in the last few years. So they just stick it in there. So it's like a battle to who can provide the most stuff in their watch. I'm sure you've seen all this stuff.
00:15:51
Speaker
And in some cases, they even tell you, oh, you need 18 hours to recover from this, or they're going to tell you the next day, oh, you're recovered, ready to go. They give you like a plus one or plus two or negative one, whatever, as a measure of your preparedness to train. Now,
00:16:08
Speaker
I found in collecting a lot of data and then looking at studies that have been done on real athletes in real world situations for long periods of time, that heart rate variability is remarkably accurate in what we would call backcasting. In other words, if you looked back over the last two months and you correlated the heart rate variability readings you got in the morning when you woke up,
00:16:39
Speaker
with your perception of your fatigue and how that training that day went, you would see a correlation of probably 90%. And anybody that knows anything about statistics, an R squared of 0.9 is as good as gold. I mean, that basically says, wow, there's almost a perfect correlation between these two sets of data. The problem is 90% isn't good enough for us. We need 100% accuracy because we want to use it for forecasting.
00:17:08
Speaker
We don't want to look at what happened. We need to know is are you ready today to do this training? and that's where it has stumbled in my my experience because 90% isn't good enough if it tells you you are tired and You know, you should rest but you actually say well actually feel pretty darn good then that's gonna screw up your your the training for the day or could very well be and
00:17:34
Speaker
And the opposite is true. I mean, if it might tell you you're just doing fine, and that's what happened with me and the athletes that I overtrained, was that it told me I was doing great and they were doing great. And I was feeling like a hero coach. Oh man, they're just getting stronger and stronger and the heart rate variability is really good and blah, blah, blah. And then the wheels came off because it didn't help me. It didn't provide that forecasting capability that I needed.
00:17:59
Speaker
And so I got lulled into believing that all I had to do is look at the heart rate variability every day and say, okay, you're ready to go without really assessing the athlete's feelings or feeling of how prepared they were to handle whatever the training load we had scheduled for the day was. So what should have been a coach's dream
00:18:20
Speaker
turned into a coach's nightmare, at least for me. And I can only, I take the blame fully. This was not the vault fault of polar watches by any means. I think I just was too easily swayed that the data collection would solve all my problems and take away some of the challenging decisions that needed to be made on a day-to-day basis with regards to training them. Now,
00:18:47
Speaker
The fact that the heart rate variability can be measured in real time, can be measured any time during the day, and the fact that the autonomic nervous system is remarkably responsive to stress, you would think again that it would paint this really cool picture, very accurate picture of how stressed you are. And so that's its feature, but it's also what I think is a bug
00:19:17
Speaker
And because it responds so rapidly, what I have seen many times over now is that the athletes agitation state at the time of the test.
00:19:32
Speaker
has a dramatic effect on the test results. And in my case, as soon as these athletes began to realize, hey, I'm getting tired, I'm getting overtrained, I'm not recovering, then every time I insisted, I kept pushing them to take these tests, but every time they take one of these tests, they would take the test in a rather stressed state because they knew that the readings were probably gonna come back bad.
00:20:00
Speaker
And of course, then they got worse. The result of the heart rate variability test would be worse. By the way, in a fit, rested athlete, the variability between beats in the heart rate is larger than it is in a tired or unfit individual. And that might sound like the opposite of what you would expect, but that is what happens.
00:20:27
Speaker
What you would see is that a high heart rate variability score would say, oh, this athlete's prepared to handle a big training load. Whereas a low heart rate variability score would say this person needs to take a rest day. That's essentially how this stuff works.
00:20:44
Speaker
So again, what I found was that this was causing anxiety on the part of the athletes. And I've experienced this exact same thing when I've tested the heart rate variability apps on myself. And I've heard this story from hundreds of athletes who've had to try it and then rejected the
00:21:02
Speaker
the use of them because it made them anxious. They lie down there and think they've got a big workout today. They know that they need to get a good test and they're supposed to lie down for a couple of minutes, three minutes, up to five, some of these tests. And they're supposed to relax and see how low they can get their heart rate. But what if you're anxious about that workout that, oh man, this is a super demanding or important workout.
00:21:26
Speaker
And I know it's going to be tough and I need to be ready. Well, that's only going to screw up the heart rate variability reading. Excuse me, so much so that I think it pretty much invalidates it. And I'll give an example here in a few minutes of that, but that's my supposition as to why these things don't work quite as well as they should. I'm excited by the technology.
00:21:52
Speaker
I'd give almost anything to see this work because it would make my life and my job and the job of all the coaches I know much, much easier if all we had to do was look at one number and then assign a training load for the day. Unfortunately, that doesn't exist. One of the places where I think heart rate variability does have a role is for non-athletes, people who are not engaged in heavy training. Because it's so good at measuring autonomic stress,
00:22:23
Speaker
then, and we all carry some stress, of course, I think it can paint quite a good picture for someone who's not undertaking a lot of physical stress, but maybe is under a lot of psychological or mental, emotional type stress. And that, because that will dramatically affect your heart rate variability, but you're not gonna be dealing with some of these overlaying factors like metabolic fatigue, for instance.
00:22:51
Speaker
And so there's where I see it really useful. And I think for the average heart rate variability app user, that would be a great market and a great tool, I think. I mean, I've not had a lot of experience with it, but it makes sense to me that that would be a great place to use it so that if you have a really stressful job, stressful life situation, it might tell you, hey, you really need to do some meditation the next day or so. And that's where I think it's pretty cool.
00:23:20
Speaker
So you hear why I've come down on this, of course. I think I've made that really clear and I've got other examples that are in that article that I wrote about.
Using Perceived Fatigue for Readiness
00:23:32
Speaker
But how do I like to assess an athlete's preparedness to train?
00:23:39
Speaker
And so with a highly trained, very experienced athlete, especially one that I have a lot of experience working with, we can rely almost entirely on their perceived fatigue level or perceived preparedness to train. How do they feel when they wake up in the morning? Do they feel energetic? Are they feeling good?
00:24:01
Speaker
And, and we can base a lot of our training decisions on that. And we also have a history knowing that, okay, when they do this type of training, that's going to stay in their body for two or three days. So we better respect that and we need to go light for two or three days to allow them to absorb that training load before we start applying another heavy training load.
00:24:22
Speaker
And so that's ideal, but that's not going to work for most people. And I'll explain why. First of all, you may not have a coach that you've worked with for six or eight years and who's gotten to know you really intimately and can help you make those kinds of decisions. The other thing is you may be kind of just getting started in systematic structured training and you may not really understand that feedback that your body is giving you about how tired you are.
00:24:50
Speaker
And are you ready to train? And there can be some false negatives, I think, or even false positives with this. I'm going back to the high-level athlete, and I think this is a tool that every athlete can use themselves, is
00:25:06
Speaker
If you have any doubt whatsoever about how you're feeling in terms of that preparedness, do a warmup and start your warmup slowly. Let your aerobic system kind of come online slowly, build up in it and give yourself 10, 15 minutes and see how you feel.
00:25:24
Speaker
And usually during that time, it's gonna become much more clear as to how your body is responding to this stress of training. And then you can make the decision to say, okay, it said I was supposed to go do these hill repeats today or this muscular endurance workout, man, I just don't feel I have the energy for it. And that feeling could be coming from a bunch of things. Maybe you are stressed about work, maybe you're carrying physical fatigue from the training load,
00:25:52
Speaker
There's a lot of ways that this stress could be manifesting itself. And as you've probably heard me say before, stress is stress. Our body's response to emotional or mental stress is the same as it is to physical stress. So it's pretty hard to parse those two things out. And it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter whether it's a result of physical stress or mental stress. What matters is your body is telling you, hey, I'm not really ready to absorb this training.
00:26:19
Speaker
Now, most of us who are involved in almost every athlete I've ever met who's involved in an endurance sport, and I think especially with these mountain sports that we deal so much with, they're kind of a type A overachiever. So not a kind of, they pretty much are type A overachievers, I would say. And the last thing they're going to want to do is not do the training that was prescribed for that day.
00:26:44
Speaker
I tell folks who have that personality event, which I have, and like most of the people I've ever worked with do have that. I've only met one or two lazy endurance athletes in my life. They were incredibly talented and rose to very high levels, but remarkable in their laziness about training. So they're the exception, not the rule. But the problem that we're going to have is that
00:27:11
Speaker
if you disregard that, or if you let your ego or your compulsion tell you, oh, I need to get out there and train today, and you become sort of a slave to that training plan without being flexible enough to change on a dime,
00:27:31
Speaker
then you're probably going to end up with some problems. So a really simple tool for this assessment is during that warmup or even before that if you have even any doubt about whether you're ready to do the training that day, that's probably your body sending a really as good a message as it can other than hitting you between the eyes with a two by four to say, hey,
00:27:54
Speaker
you're not, I'm not ready, not ready to handle that training. And so you should be very cautious when that happens. You should, when, when you have some doubts, like low and the biggest way to measure that doubt is low motivation. Most people who do the kinds of things we do are highly motivated, driven, somewhat compulsive in their behaviors with stuff like this. And if you feel low motivation and you're that kind of personality, then you should say, Hmm, this is feedback. I need to honor that feedback. I need to listen to it and see how it goes.
00:28:24
Speaker
Now, the beauty of this type of an assessment is if you're wrong and you take it easy on that day that you're doubtful, the worst that can happen is you miss a day of training, but you're going to feel so good the next day that you can probably hop back into training. On the other side of the balance, what can happen is
00:28:45
Speaker
your you see this workout that your coach has written or that's in a training plan that you're using or a training plan that you have built and it says you're supposed to do x y and z today and you have this doubt and you think hmm okay i'm tough i can do this i go out and do it and if you're not prepared for it you know and if you assessed
00:29:05
Speaker
properly, but you disregarded the signals you're receiving, there's a really good chance that that workout that you hoped was going to be making you fitter is actually going to make you less fit. Just going out and getting tired is not the same as getting fit. Now that's a little bit of a misstatement because in our endurance sport world,
00:29:26
Speaker
the way we get fitter is by getting tired. Um, it's very, it's different than let's say a high skill sport. Uh, let's say like golf or tennis or rock climbing. I mean, you do need to get tired and some of those sports are certainly in rock climbing, but if you want to learn high skills and you want to function at a really high level in your, let's say climbing training, rock climbing training,
00:29:47
Speaker
then you can't do every workout fatigued or you just won't get any better. But with training for let's say a mountaineering event or ultra distance trail run, then yeah, you're kind of carrying fatigue with you a lot and you need to, but that's why understanding how to assess how much fatigue is
00:30:07
Speaker
How much can you handle? How much? When is too much? And when should you back off? So, aside from using, that's my first go-to is, do you have any doubts about whether you should train today? If so, take a very gradual warm-up, apply the stress, the physical stress kind of slowly, and then make a decision out there. Maybe you can still go for a nice, easy run that day.
00:30:32
Speaker
instead of doing the hill repeats that you had it planned or the intervals or whatever they are. You can still get a value out of that session. This is what I used to do with athletes that I coach when I was with them every single day is I would assess them
00:30:47
Speaker
before I got hooked on the heart rate variability. And then after I abandoned the heart rate variability, I would look in their eyes. I would watch their body language. I would see how talkative are they, how chipper are they. That can tell you a lot. And I could then make this assessment, and especially during the warmup, I could then say, hey, we're not doing that workout today. We're changed. We're doing something different. Because I would notice that that person does not look like they're ready to handle what I had planned for them.
00:31:15
Speaker
So anyway, that's my first rule that I like to apply. Then the other one that I think, there's a couple of others, but the next two are basically the same. And these are ones that were shown to me.
00:31:33
Speaker
I guess probably, I don't know, gosh, I'm 40 some years ago. And they were shown to me by a very high level physiologist and was a US ski team doctor and I had access to him when I was skiing racing.
Simple Tests for Recovery Assessment
00:31:50
Speaker
And he developed these really low stress tests that would help us decide how prepared we were for training. And I'll tell you both the tests. Well, I'll tell you the first test he gave us because it's really the one he gave us and then I kind of have modified it a little bit to make it even simpler.
00:32:11
Speaker
So the first test he did was we would, you know, get up in the morning. We would, and this was in the early eighties was when portable heart rate monitors were just coming out. In fact, so everybody on the ski team had these big clunky polar heart rate monitors. I mean, they were the size of cell phones really tap strapped to your wrist and you know, they, they didn't re they didn't record data and they didn't have a screen that recorded data. They recorded the data, but then you had to hook it to a computer to actually see what was going on.
00:32:43
Speaker
That didn't take long before they changed it, of course. We were all into using these heart rate monitors because it was so cool that you could watch your heart rate out training. We would put our heart rate monitor on with a chest strap back then. They didn't have any of these optical wrist-based heart monitors. Then we would step up and down on a small step.
00:33:05
Speaker
It didn't really matter how big the step was, you needed to elevate your heart rate and hold it there for maybe a minute. So it's a very low stress test. So even if you're tired, this is something that shouldn't cause too much of a sympathetic nervous response.
00:33:24
Speaker
um so your heart rate would elevate but maybe you know your your risk for people like us um our resting heart rate would be you know sometimes in the low 40s even or lower and then we'd step up and down on this step for a minute or so
00:33:41
Speaker
and elevate the heart rate to over 100, so quite a significant bump, but with quite low stress. And you might have to step faster or slower to see this gain, but you kind of need to get it up there where it's starting to cause your breathing to increase a little bit. And then when we got it there, and we would turn around and immediately sit down and then measure what our heart rate had recovered to one minute later.
00:34:11
Speaker
And we began to collect this data for all of us and we could definitely see trends. I mean, it was remarkably accurate that just this tiny little stress for a couple of minutes was enough to indicate how fatigued we were. So if your heart rate goes up to a hundred and normally in a minute it would drop back down to 50, but on that day it drops down to 70, you know you're tired because that means your sympathetic nervous system is overactive.
00:34:41
Speaker
and something is jacked up. And usually it's jacked up. If it's not because you drank too much coffee or it's not because you had an argument with your spouse, it's probably jacked up because of the training you did the day before that has still got your sympathetic nervous system kind of in overdrive trying to catch up. So that was a really simple test. And I would give that a score of much better than heart rate variability for accuracy.
00:35:07
Speaker
It isn't as simple as putting your heart rate monitor on, lying down on the bed for a few minutes. You have to actually do something, but it's portable. You can do it pretty much anywhere. The size of the step, obviously, you don't want to be one day using a two foot step, another day using a six inch step. That's going to probably not work quite as well.
00:35:26
Speaker
So I took that idea that Jim had showed me and I Created another test that I and other coaches I know have used and I call it the stairs test or the stair test and maybe I think I've written about it Perhaps on the website. I'm getting old and I've written a lot of stuff. So I kind of forget where where and what I've written but
00:35:50
Speaker
This one is, most of us are, in our daily routine, at some point, gonna have some stairs that we can climb or do climb. I mean, maybe you climb them multiple times in a day. And what I ask my athletes to do, and this doesn't even require a heart monitor, and that's why it's so easy to apply, and you can do it almost anywhere, is climb a set of stairs, and then see what your legs feel like at the top of those stairs.
00:36:19
Speaker
Now, there are going to be days when you feel weightless and you can bound up a set of stairs, two or three stairs at a time. You get to the top and you just feel fresh as a daisy. Okay. That's what we might call an A day. I mean, you're fully recovered. You're ready to handle a really significant training load.
00:36:36
Speaker
And that's great. And that's what we'd like to see, of course, every day. It usually doesn't happen. At the other end of the scale, we're going to call it an F, where you plot up the stairs one at a time. By the time you get to the top, your breathing has increased and your legs are feeling kind of heavy and flushed. And that would be a day when you'd say, oof, I need a recovery. I need some recovery. Whether it's, you know, maybe today all I'm going to do is some foam rolling on my legs or some yoga or I'm going to get a massage.
00:37:03
Speaker
I'm gonna go for a really easy swim or maybe a spin on a bicycle, but I don't need to go out and do intervals today or I would be a really bad mistake to do that. So the way that you will need personally to take some ownership in this, which is why it's different than the heart rate variability test because the heart rate variability device is just telling you what you should think. This requires, both of these tests requires some interpretation.
00:37:31
Speaker
The first one, the step test, is a little more data-driven. But during that one minute of stepping in up and down on the box, maybe it's two minutes, it doesn't really matter how long it is, you want to be consistent, do the same test on a daily basis. But during that two minutes, you may very well get the same sort of feeling that you would get climbing a set of stairs in terms of being able to subjectively determine how your legs feel.
00:37:55
Speaker
But this stairs test is almost entirely subjective. And I'm going to get into why I think that's such a great thing for you, for all of the athletes. Any endurance athlete should have that ability to assess things subjectively.
00:38:11
Speaker
But when you do this subjective assessment by climbing these stairs, chances are you're going to be somewhere in the middle between the A and the F. Your legs are going to be a little tired, and so the trick for you then is to determine how tired is too tired, and when should you pay attention to that.
00:38:31
Speaker
And the only way to do that is with experience is to, you know, on a day when you kind of would give it a C, my legs are kind of tired, but they don't feel that bad. So go do the training that day and see what happens, you know, and if you feel terrible and you're, you know, kind of a crummy workout, you had to cut it short or whatever, then you go, Oh, okay. I need to pay attention to this on a day like that. I should plan on something fairly light. Maybe it's going to be, you know, a one hour, easy recovery run, um, or,
00:39:01
Speaker
I might just say okay I'm not doing the intervals that day I'm doing something lighter but the only way you can get that is with your bike bike sort of collect you can you can I like to keep a training log I hope most of you have learned to keep a training log.
00:39:17
Speaker
You put your notes in there, rate that scale. If you rate the stair test scale, A through F, and you rate the workout quality, A through F, pretty soon you're going to see a very strong correlation between those two. And in fact, in my experience, it is 100% accurate. I've never really seen false feedback coming this way.
00:39:40
Speaker
Now, the problem is this does require you to be sensitive. You're not just looking at some number on a watch dial. You have to determine how much is too much and how tired you are.
Subjective Feedback and Athlete Improvement
00:39:53
Speaker
And this comes around to my final point that I want to make is that, and I started with this, where when I'm working with a very advanced athlete, and especially someone I've been coaching for years and years, we can go a lot off of their perception.
00:40:08
Speaker
And they may not even need to do the stairs test. They might be able to get this feeling just from walking around or during their warm up. Although I do, when I suspect someone's tired, I'll ask them to do the stairs test. If we do an especially demanding workout, like a big muscular endurance workout, I'm going to ask them to do the stairs test for a couple of days afterwards so I can see if and how they're recovering.
00:40:35
Speaker
So this requires you to take ownership in this and understand how your body is responding. And I'm going to get into this in my next little chat with you. I think that's the most important thing that you need to learn as an athlete is how to judge
00:40:57
Speaker
whether you're tired or not. Because we are caught up in, you know, a very fast world and people are super busy and we tend to be this type A overachievers and we have an ego and we have some compulsions probably around training and exercise. And I'm not speaking, I'm not talking negatively about compulsions. I mean, I think, you know, anybody who wants to go out and run a hundred mile race has to be pretty compulsive. So I think you get what I'm saying. I'm not being derogatory here.
00:41:27
Speaker
But when we have those kind of compulsions and we have an ego, all of us do, it's so easy for these, you know, whether it's FOMO, you know, the fear of missing out thing. My friends are going to go do this today. I mean, man, my legs feel really heavy and dead, but I don't want to miss out on this ski tour. I'm going to go do it.
00:41:46
Speaker
We all have those challenges built into our life and being able to assess like, okay, go for that ski tour, but just understand that if your legs feel as crummy as you think they do right now, this probably isn't the best training decision. Maybe it's a great social decision and there's nothing wrong with that, but maybe you should think, okay, I'm going to need like three days off after this ski tour because I'm pretty tired going into it. I know this is going to put me under a bit. I better be ready to rest.
00:42:16
Speaker
you
00:42:17
Speaker
But that sort of feedback that is not data-driven, that is very subjective is, I believe, like I said in the beginning about the high-level athletes, I think it's the most important tool that an athlete has at their disposal. So I'm advocating for you to take the time to learn how to assess this, learn how to listen to your body. I mean, I know that's a hackneyed phrase, but I really think it's true.
00:42:46
Speaker
Learn that those skills and it will make you a much better athlete in the in the long run And this is to wrap things up there. That is why we have spent so much ink Talking about the theory and methodologies of training and then then how to assess fatigue. I know it's in the books. It's
00:43:05
Speaker
and we put a huge weight on that kind of stuff. We don't just talk about, oh, you need to go to the track and run eight, eight hundreds at this pace to get this fast. I mean, that's cool if you could do it. I mean, that is a training method, but only if you're ready to do that training.
00:43:21
Speaker
And I think that's what often gets left aside in training discussions is, are you ready to handle it? And these are the two best tools I have come up with. And I know I'm gonna catch flack from the heart rate variability industry over this. I've already, when I wrote that article a few years ago, I have caught a lot of flack from the heart rate variability industry over that. And I have shown them published data
00:43:49
Speaker
from real world athletic one of them you can read about will put it in the show notes but it's in that article where the these researchers in france study the french by atlanta for those who don't know by atlanta skiing and shooting.
00:44:05
Speaker
They did over 1,000 tests with these athletes, with heart rate variability tests during a normal or training period. The result of the test, the correlation was so bad that their conclusion was, this is kind of worthless. Of course, the people that are selling this heart rate variability apps don't want to hear that.
00:44:28
Speaker
So, when the heart rate variability apps get as good as I hope they do, I'm going to be full in
Conclusion and Future Topics
00:44:34
Speaker
on them. But until then, I encourage you to use these kind of methods that I've been talking about and not only for the assessment of your fatigue, but I think just becoming aware of your body will be a helpful thing.
00:44:49
Speaker
I'm going to wrap that up for tonight and we'll talk some more soon. I've got some other ideas I would like to pass on. I hope that you found this useful. I know for some people will want to go down in the weeds like this with me. Other people might just scan through this and decide, Oh, not so, it's not so sexy stuff to talk about, but I'm trying to fill a need here that I think might exist. So I hope that you found it enjoyable. Thanks.
00:45:18
Speaker
Thanks for joining us today. For more information about what we do, please go to our website uphillathlete.com.