If I told you that NASA has developed a radical new way of monitoring and quantifying your workouts, and that that method outperforms all others, you’d probably assume that it involves bleeding-edge science. There would be AI, and some sort of wearable or perhaps even injectable technology. It would be very expensive.
But you’d be wrong, for reasons that tell us something important about the quest to transform training optimization from an art into a science. A new study by Mattia D’Alleva and his colleagues at the University of Udine compares different ways of assessing the “training load” of different workouts—and finds that a low-tech NASA questionnaire produces the most accurate results. The findings offer a reminder that outsourcing our training decisions to wearable tech algorithms doesn’t always outperform simply listening to our bodies. The research also raises a tricky question: is the workout that makes you most tired also the one that increases your fitness the most?
Why Does Training Load Matter?
The goal of training is to impose a stress—a training load—on your body that…
