The Use of Technology and Knowing It's Value

As anyone who has followed my blogposts or weekly newsletter for a while knows, I am a big fan of heart rate monitors.
I think it is the only way you can truly gauge the training effect of a training session or even a particular part of a training session and determine whether the session is on track with what you're trying to accomplish that day.
Now if you have no clue what that day's objectives are then you're really not training but merely working out but that is a discussion for another day.
So there are endless ways to condition and sometimes playing the sport is the best and certainly the most specific form of conditioning work you can do.
Today was a case in point as I played some squash with some buddies and mine as we train for the US Masters Nationals in about 6 weeks.
Now I do sprint and other conditioning work as well but there is no better prep than actually playing squash, of course.
I wore my heart rate monitor today while playing just to see what kind of heart rate response the session was giving me.
While playing my heart rate was consistently 85-90% of theoretical heart rate max and sometimes exceeded my theoretical heart rate max. Even when I took a rest between games (there were 3 of us and we played two games on, 1 game off)my heart rate was over 60% of THRM.
Now this shows two things:
1. How demanding an intermittent power sport like squash truly is. And also what a great "cardio"/metabolic workout it really is.
2. My heart rate max is much higher than the theoretical max as based on the common formulas so I will probably test shortly to establish a better base line number.
So always have an objective in your training on a daily, weekly and monthly basis and as far as conditioning/metabolic work is concerned you are merely guessing at what type of work you are really doing if you aren't using heart rate monitor technology. Come into the 21st century, my friends.
Looking at the big picture, training wise, your conditioning work should either be easy/recovery days (heart rate 60% or less of HRM) or very intense (80-85%+ of HRM).
The problem is most people do their conditioning work in "no man's land" i.e. 60-80% of HRM which isn't easy enough to truly recover nor hard/intense enough to truly create long term training adaptations.
So get on board with technology and use a HR monitor to train smarter, safer and more efficiently!

Train hard and train smart!
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