Caveats to Monitoring Fitness

Accurately monitoring fitness and health is important for maximizing performance gains. There are a number of different tools and metrics that are commonly used and help make the process easier.  However, in reading a recent journal article by Ruddy and colleagues, I was reminded of the limitations of many current metrics. For today’s blog post, I’ll highlight some of the key points from the article and how you can better track your own performance (or help your coach track your performance).

First things first, if you clicked on the link you’ll notice the article was about athletes participating in Aussie rules football. While there are of course differences between Aussie rules football and cycling (like uniforms that allow for better tan lines), there’s still a lot in common. For example, both sports involve a significant endurance component and competitions occur regularly. Therefore, lessons can be translated across sports in regards to methods of tracking athletes’ performance and health.

Just like cyclists track their training data, so do the athletes/coaches involved with Aussie rules football. It should come as no surprise then that the most significant predictor of athlete health was training load. In other words, if you’re always training super hard and driving yourself into the ground, then you’re not going to be feeling great.

However, what often gets ignored is that athletes respond differently to similar training loads. For instance, some cyclists can easily handle training over 20hrs/week, while others with similar work/life restraints get over-trained when doing 15hrs/week. This means a couple different things.  First, you’ve got to be careful when comparing your training to others. Just because someone is training more (or less) than you, doesn’t mean you aren’t training optimally. Second, simple metrics that don’t account for individual variability are going to be limited in their ability to track fitness/health.

So how do you get a better feel for fitness/health? Well, you’ve got to ask about how you or the athlete feels. Of course, this comes with the caveat that there’s individual variability in how an athlete will score their fitness/wellness. In the article by Ruddy and colleagues, they found some athletes will always skew their wellness low and others will always skew their wellness high. Developing a sense for this can improve your ability to monitor the effectiveness of training and can be done by recording more than just a score/number. As an athlete, explaining more about how you’re feeling can greatly improve your coach’s ability (and your ability) to track and improve your fitness/health.  

To summarize, a number of different metrics for tracking fitness/health are out there but accounting for individual variability is key. This individual variability can be difficult to assess so a bit of old-fashioned dialogue can go a long way in terms of improving the ability to monitor fitness. And the real motivation here is that the better you can track fitness, the better you can improve it. Thanks for reading!