Day 36 \ Need to get on top of things, Big Science 1st up monitoring....

Saturday marked a step forward with 90mins spent on the bike, 34km in total and 1150kcaland 6.5/10. The first 17km being covered in 40mins. Oddly when i turned round to come home the wind seemed to also change? Also i did manage to overtake a man on a racer, he was about 70 and using the lowest gear he had, it also didn't last long as he got me back a couple of km later. After about 50 mins the changes to the saddle were making no difference whatsoever and my barse was hurting also a little later i wasn't sure if it was just my inappropriate footware allowing my feet to get clod or in fact pins and needles from aforementioned barse ache. Time will tell.


Monitoring


Monitoring provides essential information for Athletes, Coaches and support teams regarding:

• Response to training load
• Impact of environmental conditions
• Effect of lifestyle factors
• Effects of travel and jet lag

In other words it provides us with a means by which to understand if we are getting what we want out of our training and preparations. Body weight and skinfolds represent the minimum for athlete follow up (Lac & Maso, 2004) and given the importance of body composition/power to weight in all sports, are therefore vital. Given the critical importance hydration and nutrition play in recovery and performance (Murray, 1998; Maughn et al., 2007) hydration will be added to this and the occasional food diary to keep my cake intake in check or as the geeks say, 'to provide qualitative information regarding calorie intake, food skews and bad habits (Lac & Maso, 2004). Hydration should be monitored and noted daily ideally at the same time each day with the aim of initiating exercise in euhydrated status (Galloway, 1999). This can be done on rising and pre-training if possible using a visual chart (Opptiger & Bartok, 2002). It's not definitive but is convenient.

Given the role of stress in the development of Overeaching and Unexplained Underperformance Syndrome, plus the need to balance stress and recovery for appropriate training adaptations to training (Selye, 1936) it would seem prudent to measure it. Therefore allowing heavy training yet minimizing the risks of OR and UPS and optimising adaptations

Foster (1998) provides a simple behavioural method for monitoring stress, strain and monotony. Training load is calculated as the product of session duration and Global RPE (In other words how hard was the session between 1-10). This takes into account the different effects of duration and intensity (Fry & Kraemer, 1997) and indices of Monotony (daily mean load/ standard deviation) and Strain (weekly load/monotony) can be calculated. It was found 84% of illnesses were found by a spike in training load, 77% through a spike in monotony and 89% in strain. This system has been utilised in Overreaching studies in both Rugby League and triathlon (Coutts et al., 2007a; Coutts et al., 2007b). Information can be calculated using Microsoft Excel (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond) and compared with the incidence of illness, subjective feelings, mood states and Morning Heart Rate to assess tolerable training loads (Foster, 1998).

Right so now you know why i'm puting down how hard everything is......