COACHING
Measuring training performance with a heart rate monitor Nigel Davies The aim of this article is to assist the orienteer in achieving maximum athletic performance from available training time. The reader is assumed to be in good health and familiar with basic training principles such as warm up, stretching and cool down. Part Two in a series. Also see “Measuring performance with a heart rate monitor”, June 2004. THE goal of every competitive orienteer is to optimise training so that maximum athletic performance potential is achieved. This is difficult enough for the full-time athlete with unlimited training time and a professional coach and harder still for the amateur, who has to fit limited training time around family and work responsibilities. OK – you are in your running gear, the weather is clement and you have an hour in which to train. Where are you going to run? How far and how fast will you run? Will you run at a constant pace or vary your pace? Will you run hills or flat and fast? Somewhere in this infinite range of possibilities is the right combination of training sessions for your athletic goals, but which is it, and what guidelines can we use to identify it? There are two common errors in planning training, either of which can prevent athletes from reaching their potential:
increases in intensity so that, over time, we are able to work harder for longer. There are several guidelines for optimising training intensity by using periodicity (and it should be noted that these are only guidelines, and may not apply equally to every athlete): • Increases in total exertion from week to week should be in the 5% range (see below for a discussion of exertion). However if we increased exertion by 5% every week then by the 52nd week we would be completing eight times more work than in the first week – if we survived that long. To avoid overtraining, schedule an easy week every three weeks – three steps forwards and one step backwards. Your ability to assimilate substantial increases in exertion will also depend on current proximity to your personal limits. Someone starting from a low base may be able to achieve an increase in weekly exertion of 100% or more over one year while an increase of this magnitude may not be achievable by someone who is already training at a high level. • Schedule an easy day every week, an easy week every month and an easy month every year. As we age, the frequency of easy sessions should be increased as recovery becomes slower. At age 54 I find that performance seems to benefit more from two easy days a week and an easy week every second week. • The same type of high intensity training session should not be repeated on successive days. You have just broken the one hour mark for 1,000 metres of ascent up Mt Wellington – congratulations! Flushed with success, do you attempt to repeat the achievement on the following day? No, take a weak cup of tea with an aspirin and enjoy a rest day instead. • Don’t do too much training at a high intensity – heart rate should not exceed anaerobic threshold for more than 20% of total training time over an extended period. Build a training pyramid with a wide base of aerobic exercise at the beginning of the year and later in the year you will be able to complete longer and harder anaerobic sessions as you prepare for championship events. The best way to track periodicity is to keep a training diary. The writer has done this for several years – for the last 12 months by using the Polar training diary software. A heart rate monitor is worn for each training session and the results downloaded to a computer. The diary for a typical month is shown in Figure 1.
1. Training is performed at the wrong intensity. We either train with insufficient intensity to improve performance or we train with too much intensity and become sick, and; 2. We do the same type of training every session and fail to develop one or more of the essential physical qualities required for orienteering – endurance, speed, hill climbing ability and so on. This article describes how a heart rate monitor can be used to assist in training at the optimum intensity and with the right mix of sessions.
Training at optimum intensity Periodicity
Periodicity describes the process of exercising at an appropriate intensity to stress the system a little beyond previous limits and then allowing sufficient recovery time for the body to adapt to the stress and achieve an improvement in performance. This process is repeated with gradual 26 THE AUSTRALIAN ORIENTEER SEPTEMBER 2004
Figure 1: Training diary: Training diary software makes it easier to monitor the frequency of sessions. Different sports and types of training session are automatically colour coded and performance statistics maintained. In the right margin is a summary of each week, showing number of sessions, total training time and total distance. A histogram showing the proportion of training time spent in different heart rate ranges helps maintain the right balance of intensity.
