Measuring Training Load and Maturation - Why and How?
If you’re interested in training load and maturation monitoring (who isn’t?!), then this Research in Coaching and Human Performance Podcast with Jay Salter, gets the Statera seal of approval.
If listening isn’t for you we’ve put together a really short summary of some of the key points and a sprinkling of our own thoughts below. It’s a brilliant chat because if focuses specifically on the context of monitoring training during the process of maturation, the inherent challenges and opportunities that this context brings.
Monitoring training load and maturation
Understanding what training someone does and how they respond to it is kind of the point in any type of sports coaching. If we’re not doing this in some manner, how can we know if our intervention is effective? Specifically with regards to youth athletes, there is the added complexity monitoring training against the backdrop of maturation.
The process of maturation brings about rapid and highly significant changes in the biological, biomechanical, physiological and psychosocial characteristics of an athlete. We know it to be a time that is sensitive to injury, due in part to the rate of growth some individuals undergo. Understanding how much training, and what type of training is appropriate during this time is the golden question. We don’t have much hope of developing insight without some form of measurement.
Ultimately, the process of maturation occurs at different rates and at different times in different people. Monitoring training load, how an athlete responds and tracking the maturation process are all vital in being able to individualise the training that we prescribe.
How should it be delivered
Although the case for monitoring training load and maturation is well established, across the broad range of circumstances in youth sport, there are numerous challenges to its effective implementation.
Time and resources. Most of us don’t work in elite coaching set ups with numerous staff members to help perform high quality monitoring. Not only does the data need to be gathered, but it needs to be distributed. If it just sits on someone’s computer without interpretation and dissemination, it holds no value. We want this data to inform practice. We want to move to a place where the decisions we make about how much and what type of training we prescribe are at least in part proactive as opposed to being entirely reactive.
At the end of the day however, it's not the sport scientist who designs, plans and delivers training. Athletes choose what they do or don’t do. Parents have a huge role in what they permit. PE teachers and sports coaches are the ones that actually deliver the training. Education of all these stakeholders is essential. Education of these stakeholders is also problematic. Data can be mis-interpreted and distorted just as much as it can be applied effectively to inform upon an athlete-centred decision making process. A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing! In any monitoring process, there must be a method of effective and practical transmission of information.
Concluding remarks
Expecting the monitoring of training load and maturation to provide a singular output value that tells you what to do is a red herring. No matter what you measure, how you measure it, who you tell or what you tell them, athletes will still get injured and respond in ways that are not expected or predicted.
Perhaps most importantly, youth athletes are all on a journey. To maximise the chances of enjoyment and engagement in being physically active and to minimise the chances of a potentially catastrophic outcome, we need a long-term and holistic view. Resources need to be integrated and decision-making processes aligned.
Would you like to know more?
Find out about Jay’s research on research gate. Or follow Jay on twitter here.
If you get a chance and are interested, also follow and share the Research in Coaching and Human (RICH) Performance Podcast.