Some is good, more is probably better, and too much is bad. That’s really what it comes down to in the long run. The question is, how does that curve vary for each of us?

In his second lecture provided at The Seminar, Joel Jamieson breaks down how he manages the training of his athletes. Joel’s starts out by sharing how and why he started looking at daily readiness, and how Val Nasedkin impacted that process. This whole system is based upon the adaptation reaction, which he breaks down, and how overtraining and allostatic load is the driving force behind his programming. Allostatic load is a very important concept to understand when looking at the handling stress we place upon athletes. Joel’s analogy of “the bank account” breaks this down simply and precisely and ties directly into the overtraining continuum.

After this breakdown, he leads right into an overview of how he manages the training process. The reason behind managing the process is to push them as far as they can go without running them into the ground. This is all revolved around stress and its impact in performance. This stress isn’t just “training” it’s all stress in life, and how all the factors outside of training impact the results from training. Therefor finding out how much is right, and how much is too much is of upmost importance. He uses four tools to manage athletes: HRV, RPE, Training Load, and Performance Measures. He breaks down why he uses each, the importance of them, and how he implements the four.

Once these have been established he goes over his daily model. His model has 3 levels: rest, simulative, and developmental loads. Readiness indicators (he gives a list of 7) provide insight into the level he selects to make sure he’s building his athletes up not breaking them down. He shares specific examples of what these alterations could be in specific situations. All of this, obviously, is based upon what the actual plan is, both daily and weekly. Joel shares with us multiple examples on how he evaluates and monitors weekly training in the forms of readiness monitoring, training load, and RPE. He finishes off by giving us visual examples of how he tracks each and guidelines that he follows when it comes program management.