Stress and Quantification
In response to Monday’s blog post, Stress!!, the following question was asked
Getting into some of our conversation from yesterday, is there any way we can quantify this stuff without extreme ends? Have you used anything like the Profile of Mood States?
Regards,
Carson Boddicker
Carson, great question. Quantifying whether or not the athlete is under high amounts of stress and ready for intense/high quality work that day can be done several ways.
First, on my general intake form there is a question regarding the clients own subjective stress levels. This is something that I further enquire about when talking with the individual, as I want to try and determine where they are at before I start adding more stress. I’ll ask them about their sleep, their overall daily mood, and times when they feel the most stress.
Having a stress profile as you suggested can be helpful. Having the individual jot down and/or rate how well they slept the night before, how they feel today, are they sore, how hard would they rate the last workout, etc, can provide you with valuable information to plan training on a specific day. Additionally, resting heart rate and blood pressure can be taken and compared to previous tests to determine if they are at or around their general norm.
If you don’t want to have the athletes fill out paper work every time, you can also just talk to them and observe them during the warm up. Being a good observer is an important aspect of being a good coach. Notice how the athlete(s) look when walking into the gym. Are they looking sluggish? Do they look down? What is their overall posture like (this can tell a lot about a persons general mood)? From there, during the warm up, you may notice the athlete(s) moving in a slower or uncharacteristic manner. When I see things like this, I immediately start asking more questions. If I feel that the athlete is not prepared for intense/high quality training that day, based on what I see and the feedback I am getting, then we go ahead and do a back off day or we just do some soft tissue work and mobility exercises. I have also sent people home on certain occasions when I felt that taking a full day of rest would be the best thing for them. Additionally, knowing when stressful periods of the year are coming up can help you plan training. For example, you work with several collegiate athletes. Midterms and finals time would be a good time to turn down the training stress as the athletes are usually staying up late to study or write papers, and under high amounts of stress from taking tests all week.
Finally, performance measures can be used if you have a base to measure them against. A vertical jump or a broad jump (following a good warm up of course) can help to determine if the athlete is ready for strength or power work on a given day. I believe in Fleck and Kraemer’s Optimizing Strength Training, they recommend taking the average of three jumps. That number should be roughly 90% or greater than their normal vertical or broad jump if you are going to train power or strength that day. If it is below 90%, then the athlete is not prepared for high quality work that day and should take a back off day to allow for more recovery to ensure they are ready for the next intense workout.
Those are a few “low-tech” ways of evaluating the athlete, others may have additional ideas, so hopefully they leave the in the comments section. Of course you can also try and go more “high-tech” with things like the Omega Wave (which I confess I don’t know much about at this time) or even a Polar watch/heart rate monitor that can take your heart rate variability (HRV).
10 comments
Hi Patrick,
Stress is of great interest to me.
In college (12 years ago) I tested hundreds of students on DHEA / cortisol levels (through saliva). I was convinced that stress caused overweight and hart dissease and cortisol levels would show it. I try to correlate these tests with a validated questionnaire (MHI-5) and found nothing.
When I started to practice, I did notice people getting overweight when stressed, but only half of them. The other half got real skinny. It was not the stress causing overweight, it was the way of coping that was a deciding factor.
After a while I really got into the HRV. From a sports performance side and from a psychological / emotion management side. I followed some workshops from Henk Kraaienhof (former elite coach), who is a big promoter of the omegawave. Henk and I also taught on the same course on mental coaching (2007), where he explained the omegawave and HRV in general and I taught HRV and emotional coping. Although it’s a great device (OmegaWave), it’s expensive. As I went through the records, I found the predictive value is minimal, but significant (not published, so don’t take it as an advice, but as my personal experience). But in my view not enough to justify the costs.
From a psychological / emotion view, I experimented with emWave (former FreezeFrame) and that’s my tool of choice . It’s cheap (couple of hunderd dollars), it’s easy and it correlates well with the MHI-5 questionaire. It has a more medical / holistic approach to the matter, but I use it on athletes as well. The emWave is not a advanced tool, you can hardly monitor any specifics. A green, blue and red bar will give you some clues.
The follow-up study on Whitehall II 2008, showed no correlation between stresslevels and cortisol. There was a significant correlation between stress and HRV.
That’s my 2 cts.
~ Chi
Ps. I’m not affiliated with any of these companies.
Patrick,
Very interesting topic and certainly not well understood esp. in the athletic performance world. But learning more about it can only help with training your clients/athletes better. BTW ordered “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers”
Patrick,
Great posts and replies thus far. As far as stress, I am old fashion and only judge by personal experience and performance. I have used the 90% rule from Kraemer’s Optimizing Strength Training, but have found simple subjective questions do nearly as well.
In PT, we use a variety of tools to assess quality of life and pain perceptions, like the visual analog scale or wong-baker scale for children. I find both of these scales hard for patients/clients to understand and quantify, for this reason I stick with subjective information. I have not used the omega wave or even the MHI-5 questionnaire, but will look into it!
Great replies guys!
@Chi – Cool stuff! I have heard of the freeze framer as my friend Willem Kramer told me to check it out. I have yet to get my hands on one, but it seems very interesting.
@Bruce – Yes, this is an incredibly interesting topic and one that I think we (as a profression) can do a better job of monitoring, as many have moved towards non-step intense metabolic training sessions because they are “hard” without taking into consideration the overall readiness of the athlete on any given day. For the past year or so I have been reading about stress, fear, anxiet, pain, and the brain. It is something that interests me very much and hopefully I can shed some light on this stuff when I speak at the NSCA Regional.
@John – Excellent stuff! Doing this stuff in therapy is critical in my opinion. People in therapy are often stressed and have a lot of fear/anxiety accompanying their pain. This affects movement, stress levels, and healing. I am interested to hear more about how you are applying this in your setting.
Thanks guys!
Patrick
http://www.myithlete.com is a great app for the iphone. I suggest more coaches use it for an HRV score.
Thanks for mentioning this, Carl. I’ll check it out when I get home later. Do you know if this is only an app for iPhone? Or can I get this on my blackberry?
Patrick
You can use an ipod touch….no apps I know for blackberry phones. Good tool!
I would think that HRV is one of the ways to go, especially given that RHR alone may be somewhat misleading, as it can sometimes be difficult to tell if a decrease in HR was due to training adaptations or what they used to refer to as Addisonic overtraining. HRV would let you have a clearer picture, as I would expect it to be higher in situations where gains from training are the factor responsible for the lower HR and lower in situations where the client/athlete may be trending towards a potential overtraining situation.
Carl,
Great tip and cheap! Just received an email that he will develop an Android version as well. Nothing on BlackBerry though, Patrick.
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