Heuristics (aka rules of thumb) that come from years of experience in a narrow domain are reliable. Most of my favorite rules of thumb about training come from Dan John and Pavel Tsatsouline’s writings, especially Easy Strength. I draw a few more from the late Charlie Francis’s books on speed. Those 3 coaches are masters of making the complex simple, which makes for digestible reading. They have an insatiable appetite for new knowledge, which makes for diverse stories. And the results they produced are widely praised by former athletes, which makes for reliable expertise.

By the way, the sum total of my rules of thumb for becoming faster?

1. Lift heavy weights quickly to get stronger
2. Run as fast as you can over short distances
3. Rest more than you think you need to
4. “Little and often over the long haul” (lifted directly from Dan John)

Dan John, Pavel Tsatsouline, Charlie Francis, and Jan Olbrecht in the endurance space form the foundation of my coaching ideas. They have all presented useful rules of thumb to guide long-term training. Those rules of thumb nearly always work. But my engineer’s brain wants to analyze training more granularly. And most measures of training stimulus (aka load) are just too narrow. I want to understand how every aspect of an athlete’s program affect their fatigue and adaptation. No single training metric is either easy enough to measure or comprehensive enough to cross activities.

Fast-forward to the conclusion: I think heart rate variability (aka HRV) has a lot of promise here. I worry it is still a lagging metric – meaning it reacts to the load rather than measures the load – but it at least represents the state of the entire body after training. More info as I study it more deeply.

Here are examples of some shortcomings of particular load measures:

• pounds lifted – great for the single-sport lifter, like a deadlift specialist, but how do you accurately determine what impact heavy bench presses have on the Olympic weightlifting snatch?
• yards swum – a fair proxy for total volume, but how do you account for the speed at which those yards were accrued and how difficult maintaining that speed was?
• hours ridden – again, a fair proxy for total volume, but how do I distinguish between hard efforts in hilly terrain, easy efforts on flat terrain, and a race-winning breakaway in the wind?
• power output in watts [W] or work done in kilojoules [kJ] – excellent metrics, but very difficult (or prohibitively expensive) to measure in locomotive exercises like loaded carries, lunges, and running.

As a lifter and a cyclist, I can track performance in each of these disciplines separately. I track weight lifted without regard to which exercise in which they were lifted. I track work done without strict regard to the type of ride in which it was done. When I choose my units selectively (pounds and watt-minutes), the absolute numbers are even roughly similar.

This is a nice way, week after week and month after month, to see how my training load waxes and wanes. But these numbers don’t tell me anything about how Tuesday’s heavy deadlifts affect Wednesday’s threshold intervals. They don’t tell me anything about how Friday’s high-volume kettlebell swings affect Saturday’s VO2 max efforts.

This is why coaches keep coming back to certain “laws” of training:

• you can only compare performance to yourself
• how you feel during and after the session and how you actually performed are not strongly correlated
• you have to keep increasing the load to force adaptation … but how you increase the load optimally depends

Those are pretty fuzzy laws compared to other sciences. Take thermodynamics, for example.

Three Laws Of Thermodynamics

1. Work and heat are energy and energy is conserved in a closed system.
2. Entropy (disorder) exists and always increases globally, though work done can reduce it in a closed system.
3. Entropy of a closed system approaches its base value as temperature approaches absolute zero.

Whether or not you’re into thermo or even physics (gasp!), understand that those three laws are well-defined mathematically, they are inviolable, and they apply to every situation involving energy (so…everything in the known universe). The “laws” of training don’t meet those standards.

I find my 10 years of training journals littered with mostly failed attempts at measuring training load holistically. The good news is I’ve used some metrics consistently and they do a pretty good job of representing my fitness – at the season and possibly month levels at least. The bad news is I haven’t found any metric that is (1) easy to measure; (2) comprehensive; *and* (3) meaningful to others.

If performance coaching is a subset of sport science, then I as a coach am a lot like the hack doctors of yesteryear – I have a lot of ideas drawn from experience and observation about things that might work yet little more than anecdotal evidence that they actually do. Don’t let that deter you from seeking help with your athletic performance. Whatever my level of uncertainty (in the scientific sense; for better or worse I’m completely confident!) about how to make you better, as the saying goes:

“Trust me, I’m a professional.”