Episode # 154 Are your numbers holding you back?

So one thing that we were talking about as coaches, so we love, you know, we love technology and especially as being a remote coach technology is so helpful and it's so useful, right? Like we, you, you have an athlete, you determine their zones, um, You watch their data over time, not just like one snapshot test and one snapshot race, but you're always monitoring over time.

So you're comparing, let's take the bike, for example.

So we're always comparing watts to heart rate and cadence and what you're hoping to get out of that session.

So a perfect example might be, You're going to do a two hour ride and we're going to do eight by six minutes at threshold or just slightly maybe start out like sub threshold work into threshold reps.

And this can be done on the trainer or as hill reps.

And, you know, when you're when you're from afar and you're looking at that workout, you know, you know, based on.

you know, looking at the data, okay, were they within their zone four? Did they build nicely through it? Were they able to hold it for all of them? What was the relationship between their heart rate and those zones? And was there no decoupling at the end? In other words, were watts just plummeted and heart rate skyrocketed and they, or like really fade through the set? Were they able to to complete that the recovery heart rate between comes down so these are all things that you're watching for on a session like that from afar and so you know you're when you see those things if it looks like heart rate's getting lower and lower and they're really nailing the watts out of the park you might then go to the athlete and say if they're doing that repeatedly two three times in a row we might lift the effort next time say like let's some achieve a little bit higher watts maybe we need to if we're seeing that consistently the pattern is is that the heart rate's coming down and their ability to hold more is is getting better then we'd say okay well let's let's bump this up a little bit and make it a little bit more difficult so as you're watching data you're regulating someone's effort and the amount of work that they're doing within a session and progressing them along so And it's the same thing for the run.

If you're, you know, you're watching heart rate and pace and recovery heart rate between the intervals and how much they're able to hold across a certain sets, total work over time, all of these things that you're monitoring, right.

Monitoring that intensity load and intensity load over time and relationship to the other workouts.

And, and these are all things that we're doing as coaches behind the scenes, as we're, you know, we're looking at the data and we're programming for you and progressing you forward.

Um, Then, you know, the conversation we're having is that take the same workout.

And the question, I always like to challenge myself as a coach and make sure that I'm doing a better and better job for my athletes.

And so, you know, getting the recent opportunity to be with a bunch of athletes in person just recently, we always get that at camp, but then, you know, you get these snippets of time that you can be with an athlete in person.

And the question I asked myself recently, when I was there in person with them is, is the data sometimes holding an athlete back? And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of ways to look at that.

We are under, you know, you do need to control intensity over the big picture of time, because if you just said, go as hard as you can, every time a person only has so much energy before they start to either get injured or blown up.

And maybe they, they need that intensity regulation over time.

Cause we're looking at like how much fitness can we build over, you know, four weeks eight weeks 12 weeks 20 weeks you know 365 days and then year after year so we don't want to just say like go balls out all the time i've seen programs that do that and the athletes get really burnt out so we don't want to just say go hard every time right but is there room for like just sometimes we hold someone back and the they could just go harder.

And we're not, because we're watching the data so closely, there is room to say, Hey, just even if I wasn't there, like go harder on this and let's see where it lands.

And actually you can do that.

And it didn't take that much out of you.

Cause I was watching this one particular athlete and And it looked like from riding behind them going up this hill, like this is pretty easy for them actually.

And then it's like, okay, well it's rep one.

Let's see by rep three, it still looks pretty darn easy.

I'm like, this is the session looks like too easy for them actually.

And so it was like, Hey, let's go a little harder.