Keep a diary, paint a picture
For triathlon and open water swimming training, consistency of training is key. To keep a track of your consistency you should keep a diary of what you did and how you felt. With reference to a detailed health and fitness diary you will more easily spot the things that lead to personal bests or breakthrough performances. You will paint a picture of current status and get a better perspective of your direction.
My aim here is to encourage the habit of keeping a health and fitness diary, expose the rational for keeping a ‘health and fitness diary’ rather than just a ‘training diary’ and also consider the types of things you should include. I also aim to explain how this habit can help you on a day to day basis as well as a longitudinal basis.
How health is different to fitness?
By fitness I mean your ability to perform a given task (3). As you train you are stressing the body. This is known as training stress. By accumulating training stress you directly increase fitness (CTL) and fatigue (ATL). Between training sessions you need to reduce fatigue because too much fatigue will lead to injury, illness or non-functional overtraining whereby you could end up getting slower (see the Overtraining blog)(9). The rate of your recovery is often quantified but there is far more to the rate of recovery than training stress alone.
By health I mean your state of well-being, where your physiological systems work in harmony (3). Think outside the box of training: resting heart rate, heart rate variation, nights sleep (hours and quality), feeling of fatigue on a given day (could be training or exercise induced), illness, injury, mental energy, feeling of motivation.
As a coach I want you to execute every session with best effort. The results may differ for best effort on a given day and that is expected because you are not a robot you are human. Also, by best effort I mean quality rather than quantity. However, often from my outsiders view, I see that athletes tend to follow fitness data very closely - watching to see the gains - but rarely pay much attention to health. Bringing in health data will make a huge improvement to your progress.
For some time endurance exercise has been linked with reduced stress (4). However, the coping strategies for increased stress, brought on by competitive sporting environments and high intensity training may differ (5,6) and the timescale to recover from training stress is dependant on many variables (6). Any stress in addition to your training stress will also impact your training (lots of traveling or confrontation, or if your job involves heavy exercise, or if you had done something very active like trampolining for example). Therefore, setting out to ‘tick off’ training sessions just because they are set is not the best route forward or the best mindset. Recording and logging heart rate variation (HRV) data will measure your stress levels and give an insight to how you are recovering from general stress to guide you on the amount of training stress would be best.
What is heart rate variation (HRV)?
HRV is the variation in time (ms) between heart beats. It has long been known about but up until recently it has not been easy to measure (6). In essence, if your HRV values are well above or below your baseline it is a early sign to rein it in, perhaps before you even feel that way yourself. You can use this data to analysis if you are adapting well to a specific training block, or having issues and at risk of accumulating too much fatigue leading to non-functional overtraining (9).
A quick and easy method of how to keep an effective health and fitness diary with HRV
There are some chest strap watches that can measure HRV and some smart phone apps such as ithlete or elitehrv that can also. An important factor to consider is ease of use. With everything else going on in life most athletes don’t want to spend ages putting on equipment first thing in the morning to measure HRV, then record the results on a separate platform or training log.
I recommend the smart phone app HRV4Training (1). It is easy to use, requires no equipment other than your phone, takes less than 90s from start to finish, and syncs to most other platforms such as Training Peaks. By syncing your sports watch with HRV4Training you can quantify your training stress score (TSS) and track your fitness over time.
The aim of HRV4training is to better understand how different stressors affect the body so that adjustments towards better health and performance can be made (1). You can identify your fitness gains alongside the HRV metrics. Blending objective measures (basically any data/numbers) and subjective measures (feeling and perception of efforts) will paint an honest picture. The app will inform you as to how hard you should train, which will significantly help you avoid injury by avoiding excessive fatigue for prolonged periods or before going into an event (2, 7). With HRV4Training you can track metrics over time and correlate with your training data (1). It is the combination of health and fitness metrics that is needed to paint the best picture of your current status (3, 8).
Conclusion
In conclusion a health and fitness diary rather than a training diary will help you be consistent and adapt with the training. The historical log will highlight to you the good decisions and mistakes you have made so you can improve in the future. A quick, easy and informative way to keep the best type of diary is to use an app like HRV4Training that offers the feedback you need on how you are responding to a training block. Don’t just tick off sessions from a training plan. Own your plan. Use your health and fitness data to be better.
1) https://medium.com/@marco_alt/building-hrv4training-pro-97c9a9d1b37d
2) Plews, Daniel J., et al. “Heart rate variability in elite triathletes, is variation in variability the key to effective training? A case comparison.” European journal of applied physiology 112.11 (2012): 3729-3741.
3) Maffetone, Philip B., and Paul B. Laursen. “Athletes: Fit but unhealthy?.” Sports medicine-open 2.1 (2016): 24.
4) Oztasan, Nuray, et al. “Endurance training attenuates exercise-induced oxidative stress in erythrocytes in rat.” European Journal of Applied Physiology 91.5-6 (2004): 622-627.
5) Gjerdingen, Julie. Is mindfulness a part of the mental capacity in high-level Norwegian individual sport athletes?: An interview study about high-level ultra-distance triathlon athletes self-regulation during training and competition. MS thesis. 2013.
6) Altini, Marco, and Oliver Amft. “Hrv4training: Large-scale longitudinal training load analysis in unconstrained free-living settings using a smartphone application.” Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2016 IEEE 38th Annual International Conference of the. IEEE, 2016.
7) www.hrv4training.com
8) Jackson, Susan A., and Glyn C. Roberts. “Positive performance states of athletes: Toward a conceptual understanding of peak performance.” The Sport Psychologist 6.2 (1992): 156-171.
9) https://www.petewilbytriathlon.co.uk/blogger-feed
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