It seems like energy system training is a hot topic these days and one of the debates currently undertaking the profession is centered around the idea of programming workouts based on internal or external training factors.

For those that are unfamiliar with those terms, for the most part, external training loads are things that the athlete does in training (running/cycling pace, loads/intensities, sets, reps, GPS Data, etc) while internal training loads are the athletes response to training (HR response, session Rating of Perceived Exertion, subjective reporting of how they feel, etc).

The Argument

The argument stems from people basically taking sides as to which is more important when it comes to programming training:

• Internal Monitoring – Programming based off of HR response or HR zones as a means of prescribing intensity.
• External Monitoring – Programming based off of pace/velocity/Watts as a means prescribing intensity.

I believe there is value in both arguments.

On the one hand, prescribing based on pace/velocity/Watts is helpful because it is specific to a percentage of the athlete’s max output during the race/test they are being asked to perform. To improve that output it makes sense to train at certain percentages and slowly build up the capacity to set a new PR. This is similar to lifting weights based on a percentage of your 1RM as a means of attempting to increase your capacity to handle greater loads.

On the other hand, prescribing based on HR response can be helpful because it allows you to understand how that athlete is tolerating training “under the hood”. There is always a cost of doing business when we train. Some athletes can pay back that cost and recover faster than others. One thing internal training monitoring, in this case HR response, does is help us understand what that potential cost is and dial down the workout (or dial it up) based on how the individual is responding.

Why Not Both?

Why does it have to be an either or discussion? Like most disagreements in our profession topics tend to get polarized very fast and people chose sides. I think the true answer probably lies somewhere in the middle – most of the time.

I try and think about energy system training from both sides of the equation as both can be informative. I find great value in programming running or cycling workouts based on velocity or Watts as it is very specific to what the athlete is supposed to accomplish for a given time frame or workload. However, I find a huge benefit in also evaluating the internal response the athlete has to that training session.

For example, prescribing interval runs at 85% allows me to dictate the intensity of the session from an output side of things. Evaluating HR response lets me know a few things:

1. The individuals response to the workout – 85% may produce very different HR responses from different athletes.
2. Any atypical response the athlete may have – If I start to understand what a normal response is for that athlete to certain workouts I can then begin to understand (a) how much to load the athlete to get a certain result and (b) when the athlete may be fatigued or producing an atypical HR response to an intensity that should not be as challenging to them.
3. Potential Aerobic Improvements – Sort of piggybacking off of point 2, if the athlete begins to have a favorable physiological response to the prescribed intensity (IE, it is less difficult or the cost of performing that given workout is decreased while performance has increased) this may signal time for a change or perhaps a re-test of the athletes fitness level.

Final Thoughts

There are many ways to monitor an athlete’s training session. While people tend to chose sides I believe their is a benefit to looking at both external and internal variables when prescribing energy system training. As technology begins to offer us the ability to capture just about anything and everything I still contend that a good, detailed training log is one of the most valuable things an athlete can keep (it is also relatively free save for the cost of a pen and notebook). Charting simple things like training intensity and physiological response overtime can provide the coach with a quick understanding of how the athlete is tolerating the stress of training and whether or not changes to the program need to be made.

This past weekend I had the pleasure of heading up to Vancouver, Canada to lecture at the NSCA Vancouver Seminar with a great group of presenters. On Sunday, my friend and colleague, Nick Winkelman, and I stayed an extra day to do a few lectures to a group of University students up there who are all aspiring strength coaches, physical therapists, personal trainers, etc. Both days were great and it is always good to be a part of an event where other greater presenters are talking about things they are passionate about.

In lecturing to the students on Day 2 one of the main things I wanted to convey to them, before getting into my topic, was the importance of going on the journey of finding what they are passionate about. Nick discussed similar things and we actually talked about this over dinner one night with another friend/colleague, Dr. Greg DuManoir, professor of Exercise Physiology and University of British Columbia – Kelowna. Nick and I started in the field around the same time and I lived in Phoenix while he was developing his approach to training at, what was then, called Athletes’ Performance now called Exos. He said over dinner that he thought it was interesting to see the paths that both of us took from trying to start out as strength coaches and figure what is important in the field and in our respective systems to ultimately finding the topic(s) we are most passionate about and then doing a deep dive into those topic. I couldn’t agree more. Nick’s comment was, “In this field, I believe it is important that people go through the process of obtaining knowledge and being generalists in all things general – exercise physiology, biomechanics, coaching, nutrition, etc – and then, as they grow, find out what they are most interested in and become specifically focused on that.”

I got many questions from students that weekend centered around, “What should I do when I graduate?” Most were unsure if they wanted to go to more school, go to physiotherapy school, try and be a strength coach, go to massage school, etc. My answer is always the same, “I don’t know what you want to do or what you love to do so I can’t answer that for you.”

The statement I always make is:

1. Know what you know.
2. Be great at what you know.
3. Know what you don’t know.
4. Know enough about what you don’t know that you can surround yourself with people that can help you fill in the blanks.

Find that thing you are passionate about and be great at it. Know about all the other stuff (be a generalist) and then get people in the room and form a team that can help each other out and fill in the blanks. As my friend Charlie Weingroff recently wrote, “A legitimate High Performance Staff. Everybody can be the Head at one point, but everybody is always everybody’s assistant.”

It isn’t about trying to master everything under the sun. It is about trying to be great at whatever you are passionate about. What do you want your legacy to be? How would you like people to remember you? Whatever it is, if you want to be a great strength coach, researcher, physical therapist, chiropractor, doctor, nutritionist, massage therapist, etc. It doesn’t matter! Find that thing that wakes you up in the morning and spend your life trying to get better at that. Chances are you will have a lot more fun that way.

This morning I read a nice article, 5 Ways to Use Data to Recover From Injury, which did a great job taking the reader through some simple applications of data we may collect as coaches, strength coaches, or rehabilitation professionals.

In today’s sports world of data collection and player monitoring it seems like many coaches in North America are chasing technology and trying to monitor everything without having a good system for making sense of it all. Which leads me to the title of today’s article, “Doing Simple Things Well.”

Like training, it is typically more effective to do a few simple things really well than try and do a number of things poorly (or mediocre).  I always say, in training, try and pick just a few exercises that you want your athletes to get good at and hammer those. Really learn to do them well before you start adding more exercises and making things more complex. With data collection it is the same thing. Do a few things really well before adding more things to collect and potentially overwhelming yourself with more information and excel spreadsheets that you can’t seem to make sense of.

One of the easiest things to collect is questionnaire data. Questionnaire data has been found to be a valid marker of internal training load, it costs pretty much nothing, and it is easy to set up and create a process around.

The questionnaire that we use comes from the research of McClean & Coutts (Int J Sports Phys Perf 2010):

The athlete will take the questionnaire in the morning upon waking (typically after taking their Omegawave reading if they are doing that as well) and the information comes back to me in a spreadsheet that allows me to make adjustments, if needed, to training on that day. The sheet looks something like this:

The color coding allows us to quickly evaluate how the athlete is doing and offer the athlete immediate feedback or ask more questions and dig a little deeper into what may be going on. This sheet extends to the right for several columns and includes many of the factors we frequently track. By centralizing the data in one sheet it allows us to evaluate the different parameters against each other and be more descriptive with the athlete or coach regarding what is going on.

Additionally, following training/practice we use a BORG-CR10 Scale to determine how difficult the athlete rated the session (session Rating of Perceived Exertion or sRPE, for short). We take this sRPE number and multiply it by the session duration, in minutes, to achieve a simple training load (in arbitrary units) for that session.

While it may not sound like much and certainly isn’t as exciting as GPS read outs and things like that (we get those as well) this simple approach can be very meaningful and impactful to the athlete, coach, and the training program. Best of all, it costs nothing to implement so there really shouldn’t be an excuse of, “Our team doesn’t have the money to monitor players”.

We need to do the simple things first and we need to do the simple things well.

This final piece of this four part series will discuss how I plug resistance training into the training cycle example given in the Part 3. For those that are interested, here are the three previous pieces in the series:

• High Intensity Training Part 1: “Shock Training Cycle”
• High Intensity Training Part 2: Concentrated Loading for Conditioning
• High Intensity Training Part 3: Training Approach to Conditioning

To recap part 3, I discussed some ideas regarding a 4 week training approach (week 3 being the highest week in terms of training volume) and reviewed some of the points maybe by sports scientist, Inigo Mujika, in his lecture at the 2011World Congress on Science and Football. The 4 week training example I gave was as follows:

Week 1 = 1 aerobic power session & 1 short interval session
Week 2 = 1 aerobic power session & 2 short interval sessions
Week 3 = 2 aerobic power sessions & 2 short interval sessions
Week 4 = Recovery

*Note: If you are unsure of what I mean by aerobic power session or short interval session please review the part 3 of this series.*

One of the hardest things for a strength coach is to give up some resistance training time because they always feel like the athletes may get weaker or they wont improve. Rather than obsessing over the fact that guys may not be lifting 4x/wk in this phase of training I think you can look at it another way and say that, “Guys are doing work that is necessary for them to see improvements in their given sport.” I encourage strength coaches to analyze what the established goals are for the particular training phase, evaluate what you are trying to achieve from a fitness standpoint, and then feel good about the fact that most of the training in that phase is reflective of these goals. Finally, dropping from 4x/wk lifting to 2-3x/wk lifting is not a huge deal and wont have as much of a negative impact as you think. What is most important is that you manage lifting volume and intensity.

Example Resistance Training Workouts

In this phase, because of the intensity that is emphasized in the conditioning sessions each week, we actually lower the volume and frequency of resistance training to 2-3 days of lifting. Each day is a total body workout. The workouts can be broken up in this fashion:

• 1-2 moderate intensity training sessions per week – 3 exercises (Ex., Squat, Bench Press, Chin Up) x 3-4 sets x 3-4 reps @ 70-80%.
• 1 lactate based lifting session – 4 exercises x 3-4 sets x 8-12 reps with increased time under tension (slower rep tempos, higher reps per set, sets near muscle failure, short rest breaks, etc). It has been found that resistance training which produces a high metabolic load has some benefit to repeated sprint ability (Bishop et al, 2011). This specific workout is more supportive of the goals within this phase of training (increased metabolic demand) while the other 1-2 workouts (moderate intensity training sessions) are more used to maintain strength levels during this 4 week phase.

Example Training Phase

To put it all together, here would be one potential way to organize this four week phase taking the energy system training outline from part 3 of this series and the resistance training examples explained above:

Week 1

• Monday – Aerobic Power Session + Moderate Lifting (3 x 4 @70-75%)
• Tuesday – Aerobic restoration work
• Wednesday – Lactate based lifting session
• Thursday – Same as Tuesday
• Friday – Short Interval Session

Week 2

• Monday – Aerobic Power Session + Moderate Lifting (3 x 4 @75%)
• Tuesday – Aerobic restoration work
• Wednesday – Lactate Based Lifting Session + Short Interval Work
• Thursday – Same as Tuesday
• Friday – Short Interval Session (Moderate Lifting Session – 3×4 @ 75% – optional)

Week 3

• Monday – Aerobic Power Session + Moderate Lifting (3 x 4 @ 80%)
• Tuesday – Short Interval Session
• Wednesday – Aerobic restoration work
• Thursday – Aerobic Power Session + Lactate Based Lifting Session
• Friday – Aerobic Restoration Work
• Saturday – Short Interval Session

Week 4

• Monday – Aerobic Restoration + Moderate Lifting (3×4 @ 75-80%)
• Tuesday – Aerobic Restoration
• Wednesday – Aerobic Restoration + Moderate Lifting(3×4 @ 75-80%)
• Thursday – Aerobic Power Session
• Friday – Aerobic Restoration

Conclusions & Wrapping Up

That is just one example of what a four week phase would look like with conditioning and lifting. This phase is very difficult and the athlete needs to be fit enough to tolerate the training and fit enough to recover from the training. If it looks like a lot of work, IT IS! Remember, the whole goal was to create a phase of training that provided the athlete with a huge whack of stimulus in an effort to increase their potential for adaptation and fitness improvement once a recovery phase was undertaken and the residual fatigue had dissipated. The four week phase has a high intensity of work right from the start and slowly builds training frequency until week 3 where the greatest concentration of work occurs. Resistance training in this phase serves two purposes: 1-2 sessions of lifting that maintain previous strength training adaptations and do not interfere with the main goal/objective of this phase and 1 session of lifting that is supporting the training goal of this phase and is used to create further training stress. It is important to remember that no training program is etched in stone and the training should be adjusted, if needed, based on how the athlete is tolerating the workouts. If need be, training volume or training frequency may need to be adjusted for certain athletes (although if you are embarking on this sort of 4 week training program the athlete should be fit enough to tolerate it and the previous training phases should be setting the athlete up for success in this phase). Finally, while it probably goes without saying, this type of training would not be appropriate during the in-season period as this sort of training intensity and frequency would be too much for an athlete to perform along with practice and competition, which is the main goal/objective during the competitive season. This phase of training would be more appropriate as part of the off-season conditioning program to prepare the athletes for the pre-season period.

In this next installment of this series I’d like to discuss some approaches to using the high intensity training to improve conditioning.

If you are interested in the first two articles in the series, please check them out here:

• High Intensity Training Part 1: “Shock Training Cycle”
• High Intensity Training Part 2: Concentrated Loading for Conditioning

In the previous article I discussed the concept of concentrated loading, basically performing a huge whack of training in a short period of time aimed at one targeted objective in order to obtain a large increase in fitness once the training stimulus is removed. How you approach this phase of training or sequence your way into it is key. A great video lecture on this concept comes from one of the top sports scientists in the world, Inigo Mujika. Below is his three part lecture from the 2011 World Congress on Science and Football. The portion most specific to this discussion begins at 7:45 in part 1. Following the lecture I’ll add some of my own comments.

My Comments

I really enjoyed this lecture and the methodical approach that was taken to using high intensity interval training. Some key things that stood out to me:

• The coaching staff recognized a problem/limitation with the athlete and the athlete was allowed to be removed from regular soccer practice 2x/week for specific conditioning. I don’t know if most team sport coaches, particularly in the US, are in a position were they feel comfortable taking a player out of practice to do specific conditioning should the player need that. It is unfortunate because I believe that most of the team sport athletes at the elite level posses a large amount of skill and knowledge of the game yet they may sometimes lack the physical qualities to go out and display this skill night after night in competition.
• Testing was used to individualize the approach for the athlete. This is a perfect case of using the test to help determine what the athlete needs. In this case they felt that aerobic power was the limitation of this athlete based on how his test results compared with those of athletes within his sport and within his position.
• A test > train > re-test approach was used and following the re-test it was determined that the athlete still had room for improvement, despite seeing improvement from the first approach, which allowed the coaches to develop a program that targeted the athletes limitations.
• Only two sessions per week of this high intensity approach were used along with regular soccer training. As I discussed in the previous articles in this series, oftentimes coaches will do a high amount of intense interval training year round or for weeks on end and, aside from this potentially leading to a fatigued athlete, it limits the novelty of that training stimuli that you may otherwise get when it is used in a more systematic manner. Interestingly, a study by Burgomaster, et al (2007) looked at the response of metabolite transport proteins to sprint interval training and de-training. During the 6-week training phase subjects performed three sessions per week (Mon/Wed/Fri) consisting of 4 sets x 30sec Wingate with 4min rest in weeks 1-2; 5 sets in weeks 3-4; and 6 sets in weeks 5-6. This was followed by a 6-week de-training phase, which consisted of no planned sprint interval training although the subjects were active individuals so they remained active during this period. Interestingly, several transport proteins (Ex., GLUT4, COX4) were increased after just one week of the interval training and even remained elevated even throughout the de-training period. Thus, a huge amount of volume is typically not needed and I have found 2-3x/week of this sort of work to be a good place to start with individuals when implementing intense interval training in a concentrated block of training (keeping in mind that as athletes develop they may require 4 or 5 sessions of this sort of work, as I discussed in Part 2 of this series).

Application & Approach

Following Mujika’s discussion of the individual athlete he then goes into a short talk on how he implemented this approach with a few soccer teams, using individualized intensities (based on physiological testing) to program the athletes with one high intensity interval training session per week. As I discussed in Part 2, I typically have one high intensity session every 7-10 days (or 4 or 5th conditioning workout) in the initial phases of training with other conditioning sessions being lower in intensity (tempo runs, aerobic interval training, 5-10min continuous intervals just below AnT, or cardiac output sessions). This would precede the concentrated loading phase I discussed in Part 2, which would then precede the phase that is most specific to the athlete’s sport (IE, performing more of the conditioning work with the ball or running drills specific to that sport). In Mujika’s example he discussed Aerobic Power work for the athletes. I have talked about Aerobic Power previously in the article on the Power-Capacity Continuum. Generally, I think of Aerobic Power as being work that is too intense to do for a long-slow duration but not so intense that you burn out in 60sec. The typical interval combinations I use are:

5x3min @ > 85% maxHR; Rest = 3min

4x4min @ > 85% maxHR; Rest = 3min

4x5min @ > 85% maxHR; Rest = 3min

Note: Of course this is a very internal way of looking at Aerobic Power. Mujika’s example is more focused on output as the intervals are based on speed rather than HR response. But that is a blog article for a different time as I have some ideas on how I look at this stuff and determine training.

As I get into the concentrated loading phase I use these Aerobic Power sessions 1x/week as well as 1-2x/week of short duration interval work (generally 2-4 series x [5 min of 20-30sec work : 20-30sec rest] Rest = 2.5min). We typically will do this for 3 weeks before unloading the athlete in week four. The concentrated loading, highest weekly volume/frequency, of the intense interval training comes in week 2 and 3. For example:

Week 1 = 1 aerobic power session & 1 short interval session

Week 2 = 1 aerobic power session & 2 short interval sessions

Week 3 = 2 aerobic power sessions & 2 short interval sessions

Week 4 = Recovery

The other sessions during this week are set up to provide the body with some restoration and are very aerobic in nature, keeping the athlete away from work that is very lactate producing.

Hopefully that provides some ideas to play with. There are a number of combinations and things to try and I haven’t even discussed resistance training or how I fit resistance training within this sort of program yet. At the end of the day the goal is to understand the athlete, their needs, the demands of the sport, and apply the test > train > re-test model to ensure you are getting what you want.