What Information Should You Record From Your Biathlon Training?
The difference between subjective and objective measurements of a biathlon workout can often be confusing when trying to determine what information is important to record. Currently, a limited amount of biathlon training-logs on the market allow you to track all your biathlon workouts. This might be one of the reasons why so many biathletes continue to write their training information into a journal book or electronic spreadsheet.The common trends amongst training software’s on the market today are that they have an over emphasis on one aspect of training, this can give a biathlete an inaccurate portrait of their training. No two biathletes are the same in the sports they play or the types of training they do. The most important step of recording your biathlon training is to record all biathlon activities you have done in a day.
For each biathlon workout you do in a day you should record the volume of time you did that biathlon workout for. Once you are done that biathlon workout, rate your perceived effort using a psychological scale, such as the Borg RPE. A 0-10 or 0-20 scale with psychological meanings of how you felt during that biathlon workout and this will allow you to analyse the Volume and Intensity of all your biathlon workouts over time. Best practices should be to combine your volume of time and psychological intensity with a heart-rate monitor at a minimum during training. A majority of biathlon training-logs on the market today either over-emphasize on the physiological measurements and under-emphasize on the psychological measurements of the biathletes workout or in some cases are missing both. It’s the combination of both of these measurements that will advance their biathlon performance.
Tracking the types of biathlon workouts, volume of time and psychological/physiological intensities from each workout will allow you to advance to the next step in the cycle and measure the stress response of the previous days workout.
When you sleep at night your body has a chance to recover from that biathlon workout. By taking two assessments each day prior to the new days biathlon workout you can rate the stress responses from all the biathlon workouts combined from the previous day. There are different ways to measure the stress responses from your biathlon workouts, but one thing you should never do is compromise the types of stress response assessments you will take. To have an accurate portrait of your stress responses, you need to take a physiological and psychological stress response test. Physiologically can be done easily enough by measuring your waking heart rate each day and comparing it to your past 14-day average baseline. Psychologically there are two gold-standard test used at the professional and Olympic level. One is the POMS (Profile of Mood States) and the DALDA (Daily Analysis of Lifes Demands for Biathletes). The DALDA is considered to be more accurate of the two and most preferred as it has been peer-reviewed since 1978 and is the only stress test of the two that identifies the symptoms and sources of the stress in the biathletes life.
By recording all types of workouts, the volume and intensities and measuring the stress responses you are getting an objective way to measure your workout. Adding notes for each entry will allow you to build a story over time and noting injuries will also allow you to compare it against your volume and intensity of the biathlon workout.
| Try This: | I recommend using a Free Biathlon Training-Log to track your biathlon workouts. |
