You're a Strength and Conditioning coach. You know you are coaching your athletes the correct technique and you know if they are getting fitter, stronger, and faster. However, do you know the impact training is having on them? Do you know how they are doing in everyday life? Do you know how much they are actually doing, or what isis a tolerable/manageable for them, their average work capacity, whether you could push them a little more?
I imagine, you could probably answer yes for these and provide subjective answers and anecdotal notes about certain athletes. What I am really asking, is do you have any evidence, historical data or objective measures? Are you to able to compare subjective and objective data to see the bigger picture and ensure you programming decisions are made through informed decisions and not just "I reckon this is about the right thing for them".
The problem is a fear of data. A fear of the science. Don't worry, I'm not saying that data should rule the roost (it most certainly should not). I am saying that there should be a bridge between the science and the art of coaching and programming.
In my opinion, the problem with relying on the art is that you can't be sure as the to the what, how, why, and when. You may be able to assume an athlete is tired or run down. You may be able guesstimate as to how much volume they have completed or what an "average" week looks like for them but it's always a rough number.
While this can work, you are always going to hit a point where it is/would have been very useful to know a bit more detail about what was going on, in order to get the best outcome. The answer can come in the form of two very simple monitoring tools.
Simple Monitoring For Strength Coaches
The two tools I want to focus on for this post are Wellness Questionnaires and Volume Load. Both of these methods are not only simple to apply but simple to analyse and present to other coaches. They also provide an internal, subjective measure recorded by the athlete, with an external, objective matter in the form of kg's.
For wellness questionnaires, the more they are filled out the more accurate they become for adjusting training day to day and establishing a baseline for an athlete. unfortunately, it can be quite difficult to get athletes to remember to regularly fill them out. I can't recommend a number as it will change from coach to coach and team to team. What I will say is to keep it regular and standardised. Whether this is beginning, middle and end of week, start or end only, keep it the same.
In terms of what they look like, I find the easiest thing to do is pick 5 lifestyle markers and have the athlete score them from 1-5 (1 being poor, 5 being good). This then gives you a wellness score out of a possible 25. From here, you can set thresholds or red flags for when an athletes goes below a certain number. You can go further with this and work of individual norms and rolling averages, but for this post we will keep to a score from 25.
The delivery of the form and collection of data is then done through a Google Form that links straight to a Google Sheet so I can easily analyse and assess the athlete scores.
Method number two is to track volume load (VL). VL is essentially the total amount of external weight put on the athlete within a lift. You can calculate it by multiplying
Sets x Reps x Load
This is a very simple and arbitrary method of tracking load and can be less useful as the experience of the lifter or the strength specific focus of the sessions increase. Despite this, I think it is a great tool to use with gen pop, team sports, and youth athletes. You probably know I love Google Drive by now, so it's no surprise I track this very simply via Google Sheets. Below are two examples of how I may calculate VL using simple SUM formula.
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