Each of my coached athletes get a weekly review where I look at the previous week’s training and give actionable advice on how to train better. Last week a newer athlete asked for a deeper explanation of what I look for and why. I realized that breaking down how I review an athlete’s training is helpful, even for those I’m not coaching, because it highlights some key points on how we increase our capacity or speed.
Before I start the review, I make sure that the data is as accurate and homogenous as possible. This means going through all the data for the week, whether objective (HR/GPS/power/etc. files) or subjective (comments), to ensure it can be correctly summarized. If a workout is missing a key piece of data, or an athlete forgot their watch on a run, or if two of the workouts used a wrist HR but the rest used a chest strap, or any number of other reasons, then I may need to manually adjust some of the data to make sure I’m comparing apples to apples.
Next, I ask myself whether this athlete is trying to increase capacity (the ability to go farther/do more), or whether they are trying to increase speed. Note: even speed athletes sometimes need to increase capacity, and sometimes capacity athletes need to increase speed, so this analysis isn’t based on their overall goal, but rather the goal of the week in review.
Once I know the week’s goal, I perform a review by looking at three essential pieces of information.
- Overall workload – How much work did the athlete do compared to what was planned? Note: workload doesn’t equal volume (hours or miles), but factors in volume AND intensity. In TrainingPeaks (the coaching software I use) this is called Training Stress Score, or TSS.
- Intensity distribution – How much time did the athlete spend in each of their training zones? How much of it was high intensity? How much of it was low intensity? I tend to look for slightly different intensity distributions for different weeks.
- Individual workout execution – Did they execute the workout properly? Did they reach the prescribed intensities for the prescribed amounts of time?
In a capacity building week, I examine things in the order listed above (overall workload, intensity distribution, and then individual workout execution). Focus is mostly on the overall work done in the week. Was the amount of workload optimal? And then I look at the overall intensity distribution. Was it mostly easy work with some moderate to high intensity work in there? And lastly, I look at the hard workouts themselves and see how they went. The reason for this order is that when building capacity we know that the amount of workload correlates with the desired increase in capacity. This is slightly different from a speed week, where the closest correlation to increased speed is the speed and intensity of the individual workouts, and less so the overall workload.
Thus, in a speed building week, I flip the order of the review (individual workout execution, intensity distribution, and then overall workload). To build speed, the athlete needs to hit high speeds and high intensities in the workouts. First, I look to see if they hit truly high speeds and intensities in the 2-3 key workouts. Second, I look at the overall intensity distribution. The best way to hit high speeds and intensities in the key sessions is to make sure that all other sessions are low intensity. Any session that pushes moderate intensity in a speed week is counter-productive. And finally, only after I look at the workouts and distribution will I look at how much work was done.
I spend the rest of the review on what outside factors might have led to NOT hitting optimal workload, intensity distribution, or individual workout execution. Did the week’s structure lead to poor workouts? Did life stress lead to too-high workloads? Did a lack of sleep lead to poor intensity distribution?
And finally, I try to be very conscious of how much feedback I provide. It’s not very productive or sustainable to give a laundry list of recommendations. So instead, I use the three essential pieces of information discussed above to prioritize what changes I suggest and focus on advice that will have the largest impact on the most important factors for the goal of the upcoming week.
Thanks for reading. I hope this was helpful, please reach out if you have questions!
-Coach Joe
