10 Reasons Everybody must Track Strength Training
Let us give you 10 main reasons why everybody should track their Strength Training Sessions:
1 - Objective Quantification
While we're on a journey to explore ourselves, what we can do, what we can accomplish, the way we feel is only a partial assessment to understand where we really are. Objective Metrics are the best value to judge and to base our training decisions and plans upon and with long term analysis we can learn how to associate our feelings to numbers.
“Without Data, you’re just another person with an opinion”
W.Edwards Deming
2 - Live Feedback and Motivation
Among factors influencing our energy and motivation during a lifting session, Live Feedback is definetly among the most powerful tools to enhance performance. We're not talking about getting you to the gym, we're talking about giving your best in those short and very intense moments under the bar, when you have to push as hard as you can to make the difference.
As soon as we receive quantification for our efforts and we see a number displayed on the screen, competitive people want to grow that number or raise that bar higher... just improve the performance.
Past studies investigating feedback by Randell et al. showed how Training Performance is highly affected by Instant Live Feedback, in particular how the part of a team of highly motivated and skilled athletes who had access to Instant Live Feedback could make the best of the remaining of the team when this was left blind.
Source : Effect of instantaneous performance feedback during 6 weeks of velocity-based resistance training on sport-specific performance tests. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 25(1), 87-93.
3 - Competition and Gameification
Lifting is more fun, effective and challenging when we're able to challenge our friends or teammates. It is just like the old game of High Striker.
4 - Move and Train with Intention and #knowyourbeast
Training without a goal simply can not exist. We want to help increase your awareness in Strength Training means in order to meet that goal as fast as possible. We like you to know WHAT and WHY for any exercise, any choice in our training program.
Physics and Mathematics are just two of the most powerful scientific disciplines to support us.
5 - Promote Autoregulation
Games, competitions, exams, school, class, family, issues with interpersonal relationships, too much time at work... Stressl Life is full of unpredictables and variables inputs of stress that alters our ability to daily perform and we must account for these both when we're building our training program but also when we are executing it in an optimal way. Have you ever heard of optimisation? Well, Autoregulation is the perfect strategy to manage training intensity and volume, adjusting loads, reps, sets, rest times depending on our body's daily conditions. Autoregulation is the tools we have to use to avoid overtraining or undertraining. Velocity Based Training and Bar Speed Trackers like Beast Sensor keep us on the optimal path.
6 - Easy and Fun
Accelerometers have lab like capabilities ,only they weight 40 grams and you can wear them on your wrist.
7 - No more testing sessions
Testing sessions are unreliable for most parts simply because they heavily depend on your daily conditions and it may become a huge waste of time to plan an entire month of training based on how you feel one specific day. With Tracking and monitoring you can continuously collect informations about your fitness state and then base your decisions over a longer span of time.
Finally, the last 3 points of this list are our favourites and most important, providing the most effective improvements in your training routine:
8 - Strength by Speed
Traditional Approach to Strength Programming might be understable by its efficacy is definetly poor.
How complicated it is to prescribe training instructions with Percentage based Training ?
How complicated it is to adjust those instructions to the conditions you are training to?
3-4 set x 3-5 reps @ 80 - 85% 1RM
What ?
Why and when 3 instead of 5 reps ? How to choose ?
This same training session might carry a low of 9 to a top of 20 repetitions, having training volume changing up to 100%... is this common sense?
How different it is to use 80 or 85% ?
Anyway, how can I test my 1RM today?
Why not going with this approach:
30 total reps @ 1 m/s
Find the heaviest weight you can lift between 1 and 1.1 m/s for each reps in your set and rest when you're bar speed is not enough. Your exercise ends when you've accumulated 30 total reps.
Spanish researchers González-Badillo and Sanchez-Medina proved how average bar speed is the best way to measure and prescribe Training Intensity and Volume. With Velocity Based Training it is easy to target different and specific types of special strengths: simply try to hit a specific velocity target zone.
9 - AI, Big Data and Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques applied to your Training Diary will help you find connections and optimisations in your training plans. By Tracking you can almost effortlessly keep a Training Diary with all the relevant informations being available to a Strength Guru finding hidden connections and correlations between exercises and your performances.
This will improve the speed and the ability to plan training sessions. long and short term periodization, ultimately on spot cues during your training sessions.
Legendary tales about one of the most influential Strength Gurus today, Westside Barbell's Louie Simmons, tell there is a Statistic and Math expert in the gym working with the same effort of an MLB or NBA guy to keep track of what is happening there to retrieve the most informations.
10 - Training from a Distance and Scouting
Strength Trackers makes training data available on a Cloud Platform so they can easily be accessed online, anywhere, everywhere. You've already heard this story before. If you are a Strength and Conditioning coach this will allow you to followo your athletes everywhere in the world, even when you're not beside them. ON another level you can plan and optimize your training programs, send them and regulate to your athletes event when they are on the opposite side of the Globe.