One of the main goals for any coach, is to make sure their athletes are progressing. What that progression looks like depends on multiple factors. For today, we are going to look a progressing in weight (on the bar), whether that be working weight or estimated 1 Rep Max.
You may want to be progressing in weight for strength (max force) reasons, you may want to be gradually increasing the total load put upon the system, again, it doesn't matter for this post. When it comes to managing a large number of athletes it keeping track on who is where and how they are performing can become a bit of a daunting task. who do you push and who do you pull? When do you push certain athletes, when do you pull them back? As with many things I post about, this can become time consuming a stressful.
One way of getting over this is to block programme for every with prebuilt set and rep schemes. This is a great way of saving time. However, what happens when an athlete cannot achieve the prescribed sets, reps or load? You will have to adapt the session, you will then have to adapt and restructure upcoming sessions. What happens if they hit the prescribed set, reps and weight but are way too high on their RPE? Again, you will have to adapt the session and then change and following sessions. Once again, a relatively simple task has become time consuming and stressful.
So, you know you want to be able to plug and play different set and rep schemes. You also know where you want your athletes to progress (load on the bar in this case). You more than likely also know how you want them to progress. The most basic form is to add 5% to their working weight from session to session. Personally, I believe that is is more likely to be around 2.5% for upper body lifts and 5% for lower body. This will of course depend on so many factors including; the athletes genetic make up, their training history, adherence to the programme, stage of season (in, off, pre) and much more. Anyway, this is beside the point. You know how, what and when you want them to progress. You just need a way to do it for each individual that doesn't take forever!
Enter autoregulation and automation. The next part of your system solves the problem of trying to manually manage each and every athletes progression. The technical definition of autoregulation is "the continual automatic adjustment or self-regulation of a biochemical, physiological, or ecological system to maintain a stable state." In terms of training, this relates to the continual adjustment of working load/prescribed load/ percentage/ RPE to the state and recent history of the athlete. Thus, keeping them on a steady progression, pushing and pulling when needs be to avoid over or under training.
2 Working Examples
I am going to highlight two examples of how I have used automation and autoregualtion with the templates created with Strength Ratio. The first progresses the working weight of an athletes lifts based on the reps they achieved in the previous session. It does this on a set by set basis. Without going into too much details of the formula, the process works like this.
Week 1 of the programme may be set at 4 sets of 8-12 reps at 70%
The athlete completes their sets and records how many reps they achieved
As they do this, week 2 for that exercise and set responds accordingly
If they hit 12 or more reps - the load increases by 2.5%
If they hit less than 12 the load stays the same
You could set this up to have a failsafe, in which a score of less than 8 actually reduces the load for the next week. We didn't include it as directly in this template, as we had a larger monitoring system that would take reps under the prescribed into account.
Example 2 is based off RPE and its relation to an athletes estimated 1RM. For this template, the process is similar, however the athlete has strict set, rep and loads set from their estimated 1RM in that lift. They will then record their RPE for each set. The programme will take the average RPE for that exercise and adapt their estimated 1RM accordingly, from which the following weeks loadings are calculated.
Week 1 - 3x6x65% of e1RM
Week 2 - 5x6x70% of e1RM
Week 3 - 5x5x75% of e1RM
The athlete scores an avg RPE of less than 5 = 2.5% increase in e1RM
Week 1 - 3x6x65% 100kg (65kg)
Week 2 - 5x6x70% 102.5kg (72kg)
Week 3 - 5x5x75% of 105kg (78kg)
The athlete scores an avg RPE of 5-7 = e1RM stays the same
Week 1 - 3x6x65% 100kg (65kg)
Week 2 - 5x6x70% 100kg (70kg)
Week 3 - 5x5x75% of 100kg (75kg)
The athlete scores an avg RPE more than 7 = 5% decrease in e1RM
Week 1 - 3x6x65% 100kg (65kg)
Week 2 - 5x6x70% 95kg (66kg)
Week 3 - 5x5x75% of 90kg (67kg)
There is also a failsafe built in every 4 weeks. at the end of each block, the athlete completes and AMRAP at 90-95% of current e1RM to establish a "true" up to date estimate.
ความคิดเห็น