In my last blog post, I gave you strong reasons why you should be keeping records. In this post, I will give you a slew of ways that you can keep track of records. Hopefully you can use a few of them! Keep in mind this is far from exhaustive. These are but a few of seemingly infinite ways you can track training.
Subjective and Self-Reported Measures:
1. Regular Surveys: (i.e. Ask about sleep duration, sleep quality, soreness, stress, mental state, readiness to train)
2. Regular Tracking of RPE: (My friend Howard is doing something like this with his soccer players).
3. Utilizing RPE to track relative training volume: (i.e. RPE X Minutes= rough workload).
4. Relative Intensity of Movement: Sprints at 100% effort might be a 10 out of 10 difficulty, while sprints at 50% effort might be a 5 out of 10 difficulty. You could also multiply the difficulty rating by reps to get a training volume).
5. Your assessment of their training: (how well they performed, how they looked, how they acted before/during/after training).
Weight Training Measures:
6. Total Volume: Sets X Reps X Intensity (Keep in mind that you can track volume for a single exercise, for a training session, for a week, for a block, etc etc).
7. Volume (Broken into categories): Training session volume for a “class” of exercises (i.e. explosive exercises, compound exercises, single joint exercises, unilateral exercises).
8. Weight Lifted: 1-RM, 3-RM etc.
9. Bar Velocity: An interesting device called a Tendo Unit will track bar speed. I am told that the device is not very good for much beyond that, but I don’t know for sure.
10. Force Plate Analysis: Movements on force plates can give a multitude of information about the training state of the athlete, such as Peak Force, Peak Power, Rate of Force Development and others.
Stay Tuned for Part 2!