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Here's the classic scenario.
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Your aura, whoop, or garmin says, go easy today, but you feel great.
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You've got a hard workout queued up, and you don't know if you should listen to the device or go with the training program.
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So, what should you do?
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That's the million-dollar question, at least in the wearable industry, anyway.
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In today's video, I'll go over what great coaches actually care about when assessing recovery and readiness for training.
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I'll help you make sense of all the recovery data streaming in from your devices and help you make better decisions about how to proceed on training or race days.
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And if you don't have a device to measure everything while you sleep, don't worry.
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I've got some simple advice for you as well.
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I'm Adam Pulford, head coach of cycling at CTS.
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Recovery is just as important as train when it comes to hitting your goals, which is why I've done several videos on that topic alone and mention it as an important aspect of everything in almost every video that you watch from me on the CTS channel.
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I work alongside 70 professional coaches in our network to help find that proper balance between training and recovery in every athlete's life so that they can achieve their goals.
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And more data is not always the answer.
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The best answer to the million dollar wearable question as of today is that you should capture and analyze qualitative data, so the subjective stuff from the athlete, alongside quantitative data, which is the stuff you measure from the power meter, heart rate monitor, wearables, and breathable devices.
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All that to make an informed decision about your training.
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And that's assuming that you're actually following a good enough program.
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So let me first make a plug for proper training.
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Then we'll get into the qualitative versus quantitative data debate for recovery and improved training outcomes.
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First, when we're talking about what coaches actually care about, it is the training.
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Before anything else, a well-designed training program appropriate for the volume, intensity, and ability of the athlete is the most important part of the equation.
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If I design a good program, I solve 90% of the problems out there associated with fatigue, recovery, or lack thereof.
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When I have athletes come to me from another coach looking for another option in the whole coaching process, oftentimes they say they are tired and they're not getting the results that they want.
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I go back through their training only to find a lot of intensity, not a lot of rest, and the structure of the program is just a little much.
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So if you build the training right at the beginning for the athlete, the rest usually falls into place.
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However, gathering feedback from the athlete is the next layer of knowing the readiness of the athlete or yourself if you're a self-coached athlete.
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Readiness just means are you ready to do the intended training for the day?
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Okay.
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So just frame that up accordingly.
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And that's an important thing to figure out.
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As coaches, we want a mix of measurable numbers and subjective human information to do this.
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So here's a list, not in any particular order, that good coaches look for in the way of data collection from their athletes.
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First is subjective feelings.
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So questions like, how do the legs feel today?
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How's the energy today?
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I ask my athletes, what's the real feel over there?
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Okay.
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And all of these I ask on a regular basis, essentially prying into how they feel overall on the day.
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Oftentimes this is in dialogue with them on uh kind of a daily or weekly basis.
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So I get to know their bodies and their habits so that I can learn and become aware of certain cues from their feelings to decide on the training.
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And likewise, they learn about their bodies as well.
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Sometimes I even get them to log this on training peaks, but I will admit I am usually talking or texting to them to get this information and teaching them how to assess things like this for themselves to determine go or no go.
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This is part of how I do it in my coaching process.
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And I would say that it's not perfectly streamlined into a data format all the time, but the main point is having a dialogue or assessment of feelings, especially early on with the coach athlete relationship to get a true feeling of what the body is telling you.
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Now, when I'm more organized, I have the athlete record the feelings and perceptions as best they can on training peaks.
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So let's take a look at an example of that.
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So with this athlete, you can see that we have automatic syncing going on with their aura ring here.
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As we click on it, you can see
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the metrics that are automatically populating, in particular sleep hours, HRV, resting heart rate, uh steps taken throughout the day, time in deep sleep, light sleep, things like this.
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When they are recording how they feel, they are recording the fatigue of how they feel.
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They're recording how yesterday's session went, normal or not normal.
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And we'll get into that here in a second.
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Um, an overall feeling, either uh above average, superior, or something like this.
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How you do this, because these are mood is also something that they rank.
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The resting heart rate, time in deep sleep, light sleep, that that's all sinking from the aura ring itself.
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When the athlete is putting in a mood, okay, a mood feeling over here, which there it is, way up there.
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All you do is you have to go into training peaks and put in worse than normal, normal, or better than normal.
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I'm not going to change this right now because I would change the data.
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But the same thing with yesterday's training, overall feeling.
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And as you see, it just takes a couple clicks, okay.
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And you can do this on the app as well.
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This is on the desktop version.
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But overall, the athlete or yourself, if you're a self-coached athlete, you you do need to go in here and just push a couple buttons.
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Okay, it doesn't take long, but gathering this subjective feeling is really important.
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Okay.
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Qualitative information.
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That means the quality of what is being done or felt or perceived is just as important, if not more important, than the data itself.
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Okay.
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We'll we'll talk about like time and zone for sleep and um some of the measurables that are coming in like this because it's not bad, but this subjective feeling, the qualitative information is really, really helpful.
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Additionally, if you know somebody is injured, you want to know that, right?
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And in particular, it's like if I've got an athlete that's that is injured, they're gonna text me direct and say, okay, crashed and broke my arm today.
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Of course, then we don't do training, right?
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But also recording it, that's a good history of what happened when, or, or maybe it's an overuse injury, something more mild.
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Uh, but recording it is always really helpful, especially when they feel sick, okay, just like slightly sick or something like this, that cues the coach in particular, if somebody's looking at the data, in and it color codes it in in red, okay, because see up here, there's not too much other than the mood state going on uh in in this particular week.
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But then all of a sudden this week we see fatigue is high, feeling is below average.
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Okay, and this is where if you start to see that a couple days in a row, now you might want to intervene, obviously reach out, check in, see how things were going for this athlete.
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And in particular, when you have enough data kind of streaming in over several months, you can get a snapshot of the trends that are going on, especially HRV and sleep hours in particular.
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That's really what I'm looking at there, as well as a resting heart rate.
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That's a pretty good one, too, which we'll talk about more overall.
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But these trends, very good to look at over time.
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But I really want everybody to be encouraged to start doing more subjective things, such as sleep quality, fatigue, soreness, stress, all these things.
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But you do have to go in and you have to click on the particular metrics in order to get that into training because that's not going to automatically sink as of right now, anyway, without a neural link planted in your brain.
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Okay, so now what I'll show you is the same athlete's data streaming into WKO5.
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It's a it gets to be a little bit more granular and you can do uh a few other things with it, especially in terms of kind of a better way of looking at uh trends over time.
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Like are they stable?
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Are they baseline?
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You know, is the stress changing rapidly?
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Are the sleep hours steady or are they all over the place?
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Okay, and here's where some of the noise can come into play too.
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You see these streaks of sleep hours.
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This is just some bad data coming down into there.
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It's not like the athlete is, you know, sleeping zero hours per night, but they they've got times awoken and things like this.
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So again, what you're doing right now, anyway, with the data as it is, you still need to kind of like visually look at things and make sure that you can understand this over time.
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But again, I'm not using any of this to necessarily change the training because what we do is we look at when things are a little bit more volatile.
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For example, that athlete where things were more volatile over here, right?
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The the kind of more recent data where the sleep quality overall is changing quite a bit, right?
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And the mood and motivation and stress levels were were ticking up a little bit.
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You can go to the training side of things and see has the performance changed.
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And in particular, I'm looking at five minute, 20 minute, 60-minute normalized power here, and a ton of other things actually.
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But it's like the performance, at least on a few data points, this isn't suffering necessarily.
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And then there's a ton of other things that I check on the back end in terms of just how they're feeling.
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But are they able to do the training?
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Yes.
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Okay, well, let's just add in a bit more recovery, right?
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Um, checking in on what's going on with sleep in terms of getting in the way of a good night's sleep or something like this.
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So you check in with the athlete, but overall, when things are a little bit wobbly, you can see it in the data.
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Do you see it in the performance data?
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And if so, you can do a massive intervention.
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If not, usually it's just a matter of adding in more recovery, getting more sleep, and taking care of yourself.
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Okay, so now let's look at uh an athlete who doesn't have a wearable device streaming in all the sleep data and and other metrics too.
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If this is you, what you can do, and this athlete isn't doing it, but what you do is on the day, this is on the laptop version, you can do it, uh, the app as well, just hover over the plus button on both platforms and you go into metrics and you can log mood for my female athletes any menstruation, right?
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And then you look at the sleep hours.
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You you can put in whatever you want, okay?
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But the subjective aspects, the overall feelings, letting the coach know you're sick or tracking that stress, soreness is a huge one, fatigue.
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Just go in there and rank it right there.
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Once you start to do that, it'll populate more data over time.
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And like I said, not every single one of my athletes do this, and not every single one of my athletes have devices, but the power is at your fingertips if you so choose.
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It does take a little bit of effort, maybe you know, 30 to 60 seconds per day.
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If you're just plugging in a couple of them, again, come in, click it, away we go, right in there, right?
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It just takes a little bit of time.
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Now, if you don't care, you don't have that time, uh, it's just not of thought.
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It's not part of the hobby of what you want to do as an athlete.
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Continue to train, get good sleep, move on.
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Okay, let's discuss other important things coaches care about when it comes to readiness and recovery.
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The next one is the context of life and training goals.
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This is life stress versus prescribed workout for the day kind of stuff.
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If both stress levels are high, can you handle it?
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Should you handle it?
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Should you do it?
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Okay.
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Or maybe you just slide that workout to another day if life stress and training stress and perceived stress is all high.
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Now, if life stress is always high, what tools or options do we have that can bring that down to match the goals of your training?
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This is what I'm talking about with the context.
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Next is current quantified training load.
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For this, think about training stress balance or acute training load numbers, or how fresh or unfresh do you feel?
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Also, how hard was yesterday's training, which is a metric that I showed you on how to measure in training peaks alone.
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These are all things to help quantify where you're at right now relative to where you're headed or think that you should head.
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Another one is total amount of sleep from last night.
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Now, with the device or not, you can measure this.
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Do you know roughly the quantity of sleep that you got last night or you usually get per night?
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Another big one, resting heart rate.
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This could be captured overnight or upon waking.
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This is super useful.
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Old school, maybe for some, but super effective to get the insights on readiness status.
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You need to establish baselines first, then track it over time to know what's high, low, or normal for you.
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Knowing the day of and trends are very important with resting heart rate.
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Next is perceived sleep quality.
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This this is a big one too, how you actually perceive your sleep to be versus what the device tells you can have a gap.
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I try to coach my athletes into ranking this either on training peaks or internally for themselves before checking the app first thing in the morning or
making any decisions on the day.
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Okay, tune into yourself before you tune into that app.
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So getting reliant on a device to tell you how you feel is a slippery slope that you don't want to slide down.
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HRV, heart rate variability.
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This could be captured overnight or upon waking as well.
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Based on most of the research I've gone through, experts that I've interviewed on this channel and working with athletes, measuring first thing in the morning gives you a better net outcome alongside these other subjective feedback data.
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This is due to a number of different reasons, including how the autonomic nervous system actually works, how a wearable actually measures HRV overnight, and athlete habits.
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If you want to learn more about how to measure HRV first thing in the morning, I suggest you read anything from Marco Altini and his company HRV for training.
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I've got articles and interviews linked below.
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This is something that I use myself on a very regular basis.
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Overall, it's another tool out there that's not sinking into training peaks.
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It's a separate app to measure some of this readiness and give you insight on the go or no go on the day.
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So this is the majority of stuff that most coaches I know care about when assessing readiness for training and recovery status.
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So let's move on.
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Let's talk about what coaches don't care about.
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I'll just kind of rip through these.
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Okay.
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Number one, supposed time and sleep cycles.
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Number two, proprietary recovery scores.
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Number three, proprietary readiness scores.
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Number four, total times woken.
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Number five, total times awake.
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I pay very little attention to these numbers for myself and my athletes.
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If I see something super strange in the data outside of the normal trends and stuff, I may reach out, but otherwise, I just let the noise be noisy.
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Why don't coaches care about some of these finer details and deeper numbers?
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Well, it's because they are not yet accurate.
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They're not accurate compared to lab-based technologies such as polysomnography or how sleep is actually measured in a controlled setting.
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Wearable devices infer sleep from peripheral signals.
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It's not actually measuring sleep itself.
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Data are consistent night to night, and they're doing a good job of capturing the macros of things, but not the micros.
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That means the trends of the data may be helpful over time, like I've been saying, but not the day of granular information to decide training stays.
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In short, sleep data alone, especially from wearable devices, does not accurately paint the picture of recovery status for any athlete from any device as of now.
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So, what are the training implications?
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Ultimately, most athletes are trying to figure out the answer to my training says X, my whoop or whatever says Y, my body says maybe, I don't know, what should I do?
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This is where the process of logging all that subjective data leads to awareness.
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Reading your body, knowing your body, and making smart decisions about training comes from awareness.
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If you have a daily process of assessing your body and making decisions, you will get better at assessing your body and making decisions.
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You see my point.
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The one golden rule I have with my athletes, though, on the go or no go on the day is I do I call it the warm-up rule.
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What this means is if you're ever in doubt of recovery stays, readiness, and hard training is on the docket.
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Upon waking, do your assessment, log training peaks.
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Don't check the app right away, right?
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But go about your day, your normal routine, and don't make any decisions just yet.
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Proceed as if you were to be doing the hard workout and get into the warm-up.
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My warmups before a hard workout, as you can see in this example here, usually follow a pattern of progressive aerobic overload with cadence drills, openers, hard efforts, and short recovery periods to increase core temperature, activate all energy systems, and get the muscle groups uh where they need to be for a hard workup.
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This usually pulls the veil back of anything masking or confusing the feelings of your body so that it can help you make better decisions.
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So, in summary, you do a hard warm-up, then you evaluate, and here's a couple scenarios.
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If you do the warm-up, still feel tired, legs aren't there, and your body feels worse, don't do the workup.
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Ride endurance or just ride home if you feel bad.
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If you do the warm-up, body feels normal or not any worse, proceed with the workup because sometimes you just have to punch through.
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Now, if you do the warm up and the
legs open up, body feels better than before, definitely proceed with the workup.
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Here I'm giving autonomy to the athlete to read their body and give it what it needs on the day.
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Typically, most athletes want to do the hard work.
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So I'm not afraid of my athletes skipping workouts.
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I never worry about that.
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It's really helping them to determine when it's good to push and when not to.
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Then learning with them what cues to take from their bodies and their minds to say proceed or pull back.
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This is the art of training.
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And I have yet to see a device that does it any better than a highly aware athlete.
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And to get that awareness, you need to teach it and you need to develop it within the athlete if you're a coach.
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Now let's talk about why you would need to use a wearable device at all.
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Well, you don't have to.
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But if you want to, I want you to know what you're getting into, what to expect, and hopefully you're starting to realize that it won't solve all of your recovery problems.
00:20:05.279 --> 00:20:11.839
It could help bring some awareness to your process, but only if you take the longer term approach.
00:20:12.079 --> 00:20:21.920
If you already have or are using a device, make sure that it's automatically syncing to training peaks or whatever platform that you're using so that you're gathering the data all in one place.
00:20:22.160 --> 00:20:23.359
Hot tip on this one, by the way.
00:20:23.599 --> 00:20:31.200
Training peaks or TP and Aura recently-ish uh just allowed syncing of uh Aura devices.
00:20:31.279 --> 00:20:35.440
So for all the Aura ring users out there, you can now sync your stuff.
00:20:35.759 --> 00:20:48.000
Now, the day of data or the readiness score from most of these devices that push it to you is not as powerful as the trends of the data that is provided over time.
00:20:48.240 --> 00:20:58.559
So you need months of this data first to establish these baselines, then overlay it with training and performance outcomes to actually have some reasonable insights.
00:20:58.799 --> 00:21:07.519
Finally, many of these trackers try to do it all movement, training, sleep, readiness, recovery, and more.
00:21:07.920 --> 00:21:11.039
And if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
00:21:11.279 --> 00:21:18.960
Things like HRV, resting heart rate, and total time asleep may be the most important data that's collected from these things.
00:21:19.039 --> 00:21:34.799
But overall, these are small directional arrows when it comes to determining training on the day compared to the bigger directional arrows, such as program design, how an athlete feels, and if something is wrong, like feeling sick, injured, or super low motivation.
00:21:35.039 --> 00:21:42.559
These aspects would influence me to change training more than a suppressed HRV or a slightly elevated resting heart rate.
00:21:42.720 --> 00:21:45.200
In the end, multiple data points are best.
00:21:45.359 --> 00:21:48.559
Devices will probably get better, and so will the data.
00:21:48.640 --> 00:21:54.160
I've had an aura ring since they first launched, I don't know, a thousand years ago.
00:21:54.400 --> 00:21:57.119
But I will admit it wasn't that great at the time.
00:21:57.279 --> 00:21:58.960
It's gotten way better over time.
00:21:59.119 --> 00:22:00.480
And the same thing with the Whoop.
00:22:00.559 --> 00:22:08.640
When I tried that out for the first time, and now a lot of my athletes have it, the data and the device and the software and the insights are much improved.
00:22:08.799 --> 00:22:16.799
It's been fun to see how these devices have evolved and added capacity to what they track, and I only see it potentially improving.
00:22:17.039 --> 00:22:32.480
So there may be something in the future, either better software or hardware improvements that lends itself to better quantitative data tracking for performance and recovery that may give a better answer on should I train hard today or not?
00:22:32.640 --> 00:22:33.440
But we're not there yet.
00:22:33.599 --> 00:22:37.440
In my opinion, if you're a data nerd, you like the numbers, start gathering.
00:22:37.759 --> 00:22:45.440
We may be gathering something that we don't even yet know how to use from these devices, and it may show us something more useful soon.
00:22:45.680 --> 00:22:54.720
However, it's another costly hobby that you'll have to take up, spend time on, money, and have the bandwidth in order to manage the data enough to know how to use it.
00:22:54.799 --> 00:22:56.880
And some people just don't want that.
00:22:57.039 --> 00:23:02.160
So actually, let's discuss a few more low-tech recovery tracking tips and then we'll wrap this thing up.
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I think more than anything, it's helpful for you, the athlete, or if you're a coach listening to this, to start recording subjective things like mood, fatigue, sleep quality, soreness, yesterday's training perceive stress.
00:23:13.839 --> 00:23:28.000
Spending 30 to 60 seconds per day on this, putting it into training peaks in any other training log that you have will help bring awareness to how you feel today and glean insights on what you should do and how you should perceive the training.
00:23:28.160 --> 00:23:45.599
These, alongside the measurable data from devices, may help you bring a fuller picture to the readiness as an athlete and help prevent fatigue, burnout, staleness, or injury and put you in a better place to more appropriately perform well on hard days and race days.
00:23:45.759 --> 00:23:54.720
So, in closing, I really want to make the point that I am not advocating for one device over another or for you to even get a device if you're not already on one.
00:23:54.880 --> 00:23:57.039
More data adds more complexity.
00:23:57.200 --> 00:24:00.559
And on this topic, the complexity may not be worth it right now.
00:24:00.799 --> 00:24:17.119
However, getting into recording qualitative information on yourself, such as how you feel on the day, your mood, and everything else that I talked about, may be very useful for an athlete and definitely for the coach, not only for the day of, but for trends over time.
00:24:17.279 --> 00:24:36.640
So if there's anything you change or adopt from watching this video, it's to evaluate and record more about how you feel and use that information alongside all the fancy data that you can gather to make sense of what works for you, what doesn't, and look for ways to improve your sleep, recovery, training, and performance over time.
00:24:36.880 --> 00:24:39.039
Finally, remember the warmup rule.
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If you're in doubt of how you feel when hard work is prescribed, simply proceed with a good warm-up and evaluate how you feel after that before deciding to pull the plug or to proceed.
00:24:49.920 --> 00:25:00.720
Oftentimes, we'll surprise ourselves and realize that with a lot of good habits behind us, our brain and body just needs a good warm up, clear the head, and go for it.
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That's it for today.
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Hope you liked it.
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Head over to trainwrite.com to explore more about how a coach can help streamline your data and bring more awareness to yourself for better training outcomes.