TrainHeroic's Athlete Readiness tools allow you to get to know your whole self and max out your productivity in the gym by becoming more aware of your habits.
Based on a pre-training survey consisting of questions relating to sleep, mood, energy, stress, and soreness, responses are are averaged into a score that can be between 1 and 5, which is your overall readiness score.
What is “readiness?”
“Readiness” is about tracking your wellness over time to understand how you’re dealing with the stressors in your life. Training is one obvious stressor, but your psychological stress from training, work, family, and other sources can all compound each other. Your training may be the stressor you’ve chosen, but it’s still stress and still taps into the same recovery resources as all the others.
Readiness is a measure of your behaviors and response to stress. This is valuable because your training is not the only variable in life, and it’s unwise to pretend it is. You do other things, and you have other sources of stress and variability. Some, like sleep, play a big role in training and are controllable to some degree.
TrainHeroic’s Readiness Analytics starts with a short pre-training survey. These five questions ask you to rate your overall wellness based on five subscores: sleep, mood, energy, stress, and soreness. These are averaged into a score that can be between 1 and 5, which is your overall readiness score.
We chose the five subscores in our survey for several reasons:
- They are backed by evidence as factors you can assess well enough to detect changes in them. It’s not important to be overly precise. It’s important to know when something has changed.
- They are backed by evidence as factors that are sensitive to changes in training stress. This means they can help you track your recovery from training. If you decide to overload yourself with training, you can expect these scores to decline.
- They readily reflect behavioral changes, which are often within your control to improve.
How is readiness valuable to me?
Readiness is about awareness, and about controlling the things you can.
The first step to solving any problem is realizing there’s a problem in the first place. If you’re not paying attention, this can creep up on you in the form of missed training targets and decreased motivation. A lot of people get lost on their training journey because their program doesn’t work out like they’d hoped.
The thing is: something led you to that point. You probably could have prevented it, had you been paying attention.
Tracking your readiness over time will heighten your awareness of yourself and your stressors, and help you manage them better. Once you understand them, there’s plenty you can do to make adjustments and keep you on the path you’ve chosen.
How does it work?
The easiest way to explain is by looking at an example chart
- Dots: these are your individual readiness scores. You can scroll through them to see comments you made on these sessions.
- Long-Term Average: this is your average overall readiness score. This represents what is “normal” for you.
- Recent Average: this is a moving average that represents your recent readiness. This is mostly made up of your last 5 scores, and is weighted so that more recent scores count for more. Your Recent Average changes quickly, so it can identify patterns before they’ve been happening for a long time.
- Subscore trend arrows: these show you, at a glance, if there is any clear trend for your subscores, relative to your average.
- Dotted line: this is your trend line. It is your Recent Average, graphed over time.
- Blue band: this is your “normal range.” When your trend line is inside this band, your trend is pretty close to your average. Different people will have bands of different widths because it depends on how variable your scores are.
What is “balance”?
Balance zooms out and smooths out the day-to-day ups and downs to give you an understanding of where your scores have been, on average. If Balance is above or below your normal range, this means that overall, your scores are showing this pattern.
Patterns identified by Balance have been occurring for long enough to consider them “more” than a short-term trend.
FAQ:
How do you know something is “significantly” different from normal?
We use your average and standard deviation to see how far your trend is from “normal” for you. This lets us tell you how notable a change is for you.
Why doesn’t the trend look at my last 4 days vs my last 4 sessions?
This allows Readiness Analytics to provide you with feedback regardless of how often you train with TrainHeroic. It also doesn’t matter whether a pattern has emerged over the past 4 days, or 2 weeks - it can still be measured and is still a pattern of some kind.
I logged two scores today, but I only see one in the chart and my numbers didn’t change after the second was logged. Why?
With tracking readiness, we’re interested in daily patterns. We use the first complete readiness survey logged on a given day as your score for that day.
Why does TrainHeroic give me my readiness feedback after my session instead of before?
We’re not trying to tell you how to change your training today. You ought to have a plan for days when you “just don’t have it.” There are also times you don’t feel your best, and you’ll still get quality work done. It becomes a more notable issue when there’s a pattern to how you feel, so we focus on those.
There’s also a big potential downside to getting a lot of feedback before you train. It can disrupt your focus and reduce the quality of your training if you’re too concerned about it.
We’re also asking you to reflect on your readiness to get the most benefit from it. The right time for this is after the session, not when you’re racing to the squat rack.
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