Training and nutrition, taken to a whole new level?

Written by Adelina Chelniciuc on September 19, 2013. Posted in Articles, Personal performance

What is measured, gets improved. But how can this principle be applied in the sports/fitness industry? The answer would be by using a special software meant to help you monitor, analyze and plan your training and nutrition. But would it be efficient or just ‘something extra on your mind’? Let us take a look at it.

In order to understand how this works, the features of such a program are going to be presented below. Here’s what TrainingPeaks Athlete Edition, the industry leader in endurance software, claims that can help you with:

Planning

Workouts and meals – by planning ahead your workouts and meals, you can better organize yourself and avoid pitfalls.

Reminders – you can get a daily email containing your training and meal information. Or, you can sync your workouts with your personal calendar. Thus, it would be harder to skip a workout, as it’s just right there, ‘starring at you’.

Training and meal plans – if you are not quite sure where to start, you can get help. An expert can help you plan and achieve your goals, whether you are training for the Ironman competition, a marathon or you just want to lose some weight.

Annual training plan and virtual coach – if you want to be more in control, then you can plan your training yourself, based on your knowledge and fitness level.

Personal Coach – you can browse their network of more than 2,500 professionals to find your own personal trainer, more than ready to help you. If not, you can fill in a short questionnaire and they will find him/her for you.

Monitoring

Log meals, workouts and metrics – what you measure, you can improve, right? “With features like libraries and favorites to make recording your workouts, meals and metrics like weight and sleep faster, you’ll breeze through logging and reclaim some free time.” And with the mobile apps they have, you have no excuses for not logging your workouts, as you can do so extremely easy, just using your iPhone, iPad or Android device.

Calendar and spreadsheet – you can view the information as you want: list, by weeks or days. Moreover, you can add colors to be easier to visualize the data. Also, you can print it and have it on paper (and put it on the fridge to remind yourself of your plan).

Device agent – Over 90 devices can all use the same free software to upload workouts to TrainingPeaks.

Analyzing

Dashboard

You can organize and analyze all your data, and thus you can have valuable insights over your performance and why not, obtain an advantage over your competition. A dashboard allows you to view your fitness and nutrition trends over time. It is made up of charts which display a certain graph or report. You can have charts that show you:

Fitness related aspects:

fitness summary
distance by week/day
peak heart rate
peak speed
peak power
longest workout (duration/distance)
fitness history etc.

And also, report on nutrition:

macronutrients
daily calories
grocery list
micronutrients

Other aspects:

getting started
metrics
routes history
race reports weather forecast

Performance manager chart – one of the most important tools for an athlete, as it uses scientifically proven models to monitor the training stress and fitness to help you peak at the right times.

All of this sounds great, but are you willing to take the necessary time to fill in all the required data? Sure, it is good to measure your performance and keep track of it, and I agree that this can help you a great deal in terms of efficiency, but if you commit to doing this, are you really all in? This actually depends on what your objectives are: if you are a professional athlete training for Le Tour de France, then as a professional, you are willing to do what it takes to win, right? But if you are a regular person, only aiming at losing some weight, probably you take things less seriously.

However, even if you are a professional athlete or a fitness trainer/professional, why would you need a program to organize your life, when you already have a certain lifestyle that you would not give up for anything in the world? To be honest, this is a more complex issue and actually, there are more factors involved: your personality, your profession, entourage, mentality etc. Some people don’t need a software to train efficiently, while others might use one.

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