WHY DOES STRIVE MEASURE ATHLETE LOAD?
In sports and athletic training, the ultimate goal is to apply a stimulus (such as a training session or workout) to elicit a response. All while avoiding the level of stimulus that would cause the athlete to overreach and cause injury.
This means that the trainer/coach’s ultimate job is to decide what level of stimulus is appropriate and control the level of stress on the athlete to maintain their vision for a specific athlete or team. Pushing an athlete too hard can bring quick fitness gains, but also increases the chance of injury. Not pushing them hard enough can restrict fitness gains, but decrease the chance of injury.
This can be a difficult choice for any coach or trainer. What is the appropriate level of stimulus? How do we manipulate and control the stimulus? One of the first steps to making better decisions in these areas is quantifying the workload.
Let’s go ahead and use a comparison to everyday events. For example, let’s say a store owner is trying to price their apples to an appropriate cost. As the owner, they could base this price off of intuition and their experience. The owner remembers they made more money when they priced their apples at $3 rather than $6. So they could confidently say that the appropriate price is $3. This decision is purely based on a feeling.
But if the owner applies more data streams to this process, he may notice that the difference in profit between $3 apples and $4 is a lot smaller.
Now this time they save their receipts. Next they calculate what the profit is after considering the cost of goods sold. They see that selling more apples doesn’t necessarily equate to more gross profit. Adding in data streams allows the owner to add in more variables such as: How much money is made on which days? Why are customers coming to this specific store? And so on.
Each added data stream gives the owner more informed and precise data, leading to better decision making, leading to the best possible outcome.
That is what we want to provide at STRIVE. We want to compile data and insights that provide the coach or athlete with more useful information to make better decisions when it comes to training. Be armed with data so you know when you can push harder, but also know when the risk outweighs the benefit and it’s time to slow down.
Make sure you stay up-to-date with our latest blogs as we will cover what load monitoring really is and why you should use STRIVE during load monitoring.
