HOW TO EVALUATE YOUR OWN TRAINING

From: Laute Peter (Beijing)
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2009
Subject: HOW TO EVALUATE YOUR OWN TRAINING

HOW TO EVALUATE YOUR OWN TRAINING

When there is no coach in the picture to help you train, make various training decisions and evaluate your training and your progress, it is important that you yourself know what's going on and how to keep an eye on everything you do and how things pan out.

The best part is that you really don't need to know all the details. By following the basic guidelines you can successfully conduct your own training sessions, avoid over-training and achieve good results.

There is a "Golden Rule of Norm", formulated by Professor Anokhin in the 50-60s in Russia, that goes along the lines of: there is your individual "initial state" that you start from and have to return to. If that does not happen, it signifies a direction towards health problems. It doesn't matter what your initial state is, all of us are so different, there are so many individual variables that define our individual "initial state". For example, your heart rate could be higher or lower than the guy next to you. You might've had some stress at work and the other guy didn't, so you two are on different mental and emotional levels at the time you start your training session, and so on. What matters is that you mark/record/note your initial state and then compare it to your state after recovery, they should match. If they don't - you got a problem, a level of which is determined by the recovery time frame.

The time frame of return to initial state is significant, for it indicates the state of your body's "current affairs", but that could also vary vastly, for example, you cannot expect to have as quick a recovery as an elite athlete would have. The recovery time of regular people as opposed to professional athletes, could be and is commonly much longer. Elites count recovery time in minutes, sport enthusiasts could be counting in hours and days. Obviously, the longer it takes, the less fit you are.

The most important aspects of training are your ability to progress and to recover and do so within your individually appropriate time frame.

Evaluating your own progress is also an interesting subject. There is lots of confusion in regards to what should be considered true progress. As an old saying goes - your true success is determined by the price you had to pay for it. So if you shaved off a couple seconds off your run, but got shin splints in the process, you probably shouldn't walk around with a victory flag, mistakenly thinking "you've done it!" What exactly have you done? Set yourself back a couple of weeks due to injury?

Progress is not achievement of a goal at the price of sacrificing something else. Progress is your overall "step up". Taking your time, focusing on improvement of technique by drilling and performing strength conditioning exercises will get you farther, rather than loading on miles and number of repetitions during mindless and thus pointless training sessions.

To sum up, the evaluation of your training should be based on progress and your state of health. If your training is negatively affecting both or either one - time to change some things. Simply paying attention to above mentioned signs will help you ensure a productive training season.

Article by Dr. Nicholas Romanov
Composed by L. Romanov