An Interview with Simon Hoadley
Recently, some of the CrewLAB team sat down to chat about what’s new in the world of training zones, load management and how athletes and coaches can use those tools to gain better insight on performance.
Training zones vs other models
There are a lot of performance measurement tools being used at the moment. Rate of perceived exertion, lactate testing and VO2 max are all options that have distinct benefits, but the standard five-zone model is the focus here, especially Zone 3. The thresholds on either side can be useful benchmarks to differentiate between endurance and high intensity training. On the lower side is lactate threshold one, where endurance is the focus, and the lactate threshold two, which is the baseline of speed, power and interval work. But is lactate, or even heart rate, the best option?
Knowing When to Use Heart Rate
“I have a distinct view on those two anchor points on either side of zone three. I think when you’re doing endurance stuff, then the heart rate zones is about as good as a measure as you can get. Heart rate takes 30 seconds to stabilize. So if you’re doing sprints that are less than 30 seconds, heart rate’s pretty useless in terms of trying to use that to grade the impact, outcome or adaptation from the training, because it’s just too delayed. When you go to the other side of zone three, the load is really now critical and as mentioned, the heart rate’s no good. So I think dialing in on the loads—that can be pace, that can be the watts if you’ve got a power meter. I think now that becomes the anchor,” said Simon Hoadley. “Sure, measure heart rate, that’s great. But I think the other key way of prescribing and identifying what kind of loads people are doing is RPE, which is great because it’s free and everyone can do it.”
Enter RPE
RPE, or rate of perceived exertion, is another tool that allows athletes to assign a subjective rating to a workout’s difficulty. Where every person’s heart rate ranges may vary, assigning a target RPE can be a way to better make sure that everyone is on the same page, and can let athletes fine-tune whether they need to go harder or lighter in their next session.
“You can be a 13 year old who just started sport a week ago, and you understand when the coach says ‘how hard was that,’ ‘how much of yourself did you give on a scale of one to ten?’ The 13 year old can say that was about seven out of 10 and that gives you a starting point. The coach can use that to prescribe and you can get people dialed in a little bit.”
Measuring effort this way, you can separate out the “muddle of the middle” or “junk miles” often attributed to Zone 3 work.
“If you focus on endurance, you don’t want to make it so that you’re less likely to be able to train tomorrow. And if you go out there and everything’s as hard as you can for an hour and then the next day is as hard as you can for 40 minutes, then eventually you’re going to just accumulate enough fatigue that you can’t do it,” continued Hoadley. “Whereas if you pull it back a little bit and you make it more true zone one, zone two, activating that parasympathetic nervous system and really staying true to low lactate levels, it’s very likely you can train again that day and certainly tomorrow. And now you can start to really accumulate a lot of the volume that we know is really beneficial.”
Not max effort all the time
It’s often tempting to treat every piece or every workout as an opportunity to test limits and compete not only against opponents, but ourselves, our teammates and past results. While there’s a place for max effort performances, it’s not every session.
“I think a mistake that it’s easy for a coach to make is to turn everything up to 10,” said Hoadley. “In rowing it’s like, ‘okay, we’re going to do a 2k at rate 24.’ And then an athlete might say, ‘what intensity?’ and the coach is like, ‘as hard as you can.’ The team thinks ‘we’re going to win this at rate 24.’ Whereas probably you’re better off to think about the idea of [suggesting] nine out of 10 effort. I want it to be sustainable for 4K, but we’re only gonna do it for 2K. So we can take a short rest and go back the other way. And then you’re probably gonna be closer to race pace, which I think is a key sort of concept to keep in mind.”
Load Management
Framing RPE like this makes the goal of each session clear to both coaches and athletes, and keeps athletes from burning out by making every workout a hard one. By doing so, every workout has a purpose—no junk miles here.
“I really, really like RPE as the measure for load management because it does bring in some of those things that make you human. It’s a real weakness of the heart rate led load management, which is 99 % of everything out there.” Not every training session is ideal, and there are life circumstances that impact a workout that may not appear in heart rate charts. “People aren’t robots and sometimes it’s raining and all those other things are going on. You don’t want to go and do it and the training session is just hard, and it sucks and then you check your heart rate at the end of it and your watch tells you that you didn’t go very hard. [It says] that was a bad session and now tomorrow we’re going to dial it up. I think leaning away from that’s really important. [With CrewLAB’s load management tools] we’ve leaned into the idea that RPE is the key currency of it and not the heart rate data. That’s a really good job of measuring your cardiovascular fatigue and load, but not your mental, emotional load or the social load of what kind of team environment you’re in.”
Dialing back can be just as important as training tool as making workouts harder
“I’ve got this concept that when people quit a sport, it’s an injury of the psychology of being an athlete. At some stage, they’ve made a decision that they can’t maintain the load anymore and the value of doing what they’re doing is not high enough. When they decide they’re going to quit the sport, it’s nothing to do with the heart rate training plan, but the clues are absolutely there in terms of the RPE,” noted Hoadley. “People telling you they want to take a break or they want to do less training, they’re really telling you that the load management of the mental emotional load is broken and they’ve gone too hard. Because that’s harder to measure, most people don’t measure it, but tons of people quit sport all the time, right? So yeah, definitely use RPE as the leading indicator and bring in those human elements because it’s just really beneficial to keeping people involved in sport and retaining your athletes and keeping them inspired to go have a great season.”
Additional data – sleep and social
In addition to heart rate and RPE, one of the most valuable tools at our disposal is an increase in sleep data available. As CrewLAB has explored in a few prior projects, the impact sleep can have on physical and mental wellbeing is enormous. CrewLAB’s daily mood and sleep checkins allow coaches to see whether their athletes are feeling energized and ready to take on more work, or whether they’re lagging and need to ease off. Poor quality or too few hours of sleep don’t create ideal training conditions, but that can be offset by a supportive training environment where athletes want to show up, feel like their teammates are invested, and are willing to push themselves. That too shows up in CrewLAB checkins, and can provide invaluable insight to coaches.
“We’ve got this fantastic massive data source which gets bigger every day and it tracks all these things and so we can get a sense of the interplay between the social dynamics of a team and the mood and the sleep and the training load and then the performance that people get. We’re enabling not just coaches to make better decisions but we’re gonna really influence whole programs.” Said Hoadley. “Wednesdays and Thursdays are when everyone’s accumulated some sleep debt and also some fatigue. That’s a great way to go and injure someone. They arrive with three or four bad sleeps in a row, carrying all the fatigue from a good week’s training. What we can see is that Wednesday and Thursday are days where coaches are also pushing a bit more. So maybe don’t push so much. That’s the day to do the tech and recovery and let some people get some sleep before you push again.”
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