#045 Monday Minutes: Which Subjective Measures are Ideal for Assessing State of Readiness?

In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, we're returning to our Monday Minute theme and answering an audience submitted question regarding what are the best subjective measures we use in order to measure an athlete's state of readiness. I discuss not only several subjective questionnaires but a few of the objective instrumentation we utilize here at Colorado. I reached out to my good friend, Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Newman University, Stryder Blackburn, to help me set the tone for the episode.

You can find Coach Blackburn on Twitter at @Stryder9090

As a reminder, our Monday Minutes shows are a quick 10-15 minute episode where I discuss current industry trends, research reads, current events, and occasionally offer my insights into the training process that we're undertaking each week. I believe with conviction, you'll take away something interesting from this show and I hope it delivers you a little bit of value in your day.

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Key Takeaways

• The Hooper-McKinnon and RESTQ-Sport questionnaires are the most valid subjective options covered, tracking sleep duration and quality, soreness, energy, mood, stress, mental focus, nutrition, and hydration on simple scales an athlete can complete every morning.
• Read the data individually, not as a team average. An athlete's scores normalize to their own baseline, so a steady three who drops to a one or a two is the flag that matters, and team averages will mask exactly those fluctuations.
• Act on what the questionnaire tells you: adjust the day's training plan and schedule extra treatment or recovery around an athlete whose readiness is down, rather than adding more stress to an athlete who is already buried.
• You do not need an expensive athlete management system to do this well. Google Docs can collect the responses and tools like Tableau or Power BI can analyze them, as long as you decide in advance what you are collecting and how you will respond to it.

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Episode Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.

[00:00:00] Sport science, strength and conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show. Hey everybody, this is your host Adam Ringler and welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show Monday Minutes. It is a brief five to ten minute episode where we are catching up on everything that is happening in our industry, things we're reading, things we're checking out, things

[00:00:49] That we are experimenting with, exploring, and it is meant to just be a quick little summary, little tidbits, little breadcrumbs of things that are happening around our strength conditioning and high performance industry. Like always, if you enjoy the show, there's a couple of ways that you can support it. The very first thing I would recommend is please head over to AdamRingler.com forward-slash newsletter.

[00:01:15] If you pop in your email, I promise I won't spam you, and occasionally about once a month, I'll send you an email, it will be things that I'm reading, almost like a monthly recap of these Monday Minute episodes. I think you'll get a lot out of it. I explained to my friends that it is essentially the birch box of newsletters. You don't know what you're going to get, but you know whatever you receive is going to

[00:01:37] Be chock full of great information. So head over to AdamRingler.com forward-slash newsletter. Hey everybody, welcome to the Monday Minute, I'm your host Adam Ringler, and today we're going to do something a little bit different. Every week after I make a publication, I usually get flooded with Twitter or Instagram, DMs asking some very specific questions about whatever we're talking about.

[00:02:04] Most of the times, they are relevant to sports science or performance sciences, and I thought rather than just discussing maybe the latest trends in our industry, we take a moment to address one question that I get from the audience every single week. So what I did was I went out and asked some of my favorite people in the world to ask some of these user-submitted, audience-submitted questions, and I'll take the remainder of the Monday Minute's time and try to provide some answers and provide some clarity and just

[00:02:41] Flesh out some of the details for every question that I receive. So without further ado, here is my good friend, Coach Strider Blackburn, head coach, strength conditioning, Newman University. Hey everybody, this is Strider Blackburn. Strength conditioning coach from Newman University. I'm joining the Decoding Excellence Show today to read some audience-submitted questions.

[00:03:08] What is the most valid subjective measure for fatigue and readiness? Strider, thanks for reading this week's question, really appreciate it from you, Matt. Without really going into all the objective ways that we can measure state of readiness, fatigue, HRV, things like that, whether it's a mega wave or force plate technologies, or even look at muscular skeletal sort of strength indexes. So using something like a Nordboard or a growing squeeze, those are all more objective

[00:03:34] Ways that we can start to look at fatigue and the state of readiness across our athletes across the team. So one of the few things I think would be smart to mention, right, is just the deployment of wellness questionnaires. There's a number of different ones that are pretty well documented, anything from the Cooper McKinnon to the Rescue.

[00:03:57] Those are two, I think, most sort of valid wellness questionnaires, the Cooper being a several question quiz that essentially looks at the state of readiness across an athlete. So it asks questions like the sleep duration, sleep quality, soreness, energy mood, stress, mental focus, nutritional amount, quality and hydration. Those are all really great questions to begin to start asking your athlete. The frequency of these wellness questionnaires start to continue to build, and as you start

[00:04:29] To get a better and more greater and more fruitful repository of all this information, the results will start to normalize. So if an athlete is a constant free on any particular one of these questions, let's just say, most of these are graded on a liker scale between one to five. If they are a constant three or two, that will begin to normalize so that you can start to look at their Zed score and start to say, oh wow, when this athlete actually fluctuates

[00:04:58] Up to a four, that's significant. If somebody's always answering a five and they down fluctuate to a three, that may be significant. Again, I think you have to look at the movement across their individual skills, individual level rather than just looking at the average across the entire team. If you're just looking at the average across the team, you're going to miss the wild fluctuations.

[00:05:22] Those that are a constant three that up fluctuate to a five, they're feeling great today. That's a great positive change. We want that change, we want that adaptability in our student athletes. That's going to mask those that are constantly a three that down fluctuate to a two or a one. People that you need to be flagged on, that you need to be paying attention to, and you

[00:05:44] Need to be reaching out to to make sure that the interventions and the training load and the stress aren't accumulating negatively in their adaptability to the training program. Outside of that, a lot of the times our athletes will come in, we'll ask them about their sleep and their soreness and their energy. We regularly deploy wellness questionnaires every morning. We analyze those results.

[00:06:08] We start to look at it. We start making assumptions based on that. We reach out to athletes. We start to try to get extra treatments. If they happen to have the logistical flexibility in their schedule, we use this as a way of altering not only the training plan, but the treatment schedule as well.

[00:06:24] If we do have a higher intensity session for today, and an athlete has some down regulation in their CNS or their fatigue or their state of readiness, then perhaps we can try to schedule additional modalities, additional recovery for these athletes around their academic and practice schedule so that we can give them the treatment and the stimulus that they need. I look at it as a way is that if somebody is already buried deep in the hole, there's no sense of adding additional training stress when they were managing and probably that

[00:06:57] Ill-management of the stress that we're already prescribing. That could be the competition loads, that could be the practice loads, that could be academic loads, any of the stressors that might happen in student athletes' life. That's wide-ranging, especially at this time, especially for our under-classmen, that are navigating being away from home, navigating academic stressors like no others, and the emotional stressors of being away.

[00:07:22] We need to be very keen with our understanding that athletes have a lot of different stress, and we need to be able to manage that stress, we need to be able to train around that stress, we need to give them the tools to, and the resources, and the education to try to make the best out of otherwise stressful situations. The Hooper McKinnon and the Rescue are two very valid and very positive ways of looking at how an athlete recovers.

[00:07:52] We've done things, and this is very early in my career where we were doing a CNS tap test. I think that's been sort of butchered in the research, but anything that you can get test, retest from, so anything from like, you know, this is maybe a little bit more away from the subjective and more towards the objective, but utilizing something like a just jump or a contact mat and looking at CMJs, hand on hip CMJs, looking at that can give you some some type of information, people that use grip strength as another objective

[00:08:26] Measure of looking at, you know, state of readiness and fluctuations and changes based on that, but I think really what you need to do is you need to sort of think outside the box, right? If you can't use an objective measure like a force play or a groin squeeze or anything like that to sort of check state of readiness and fatigue, then then the deployment of readiness questionnaires or wellness questionnaires is a next very valid way of looking and sort

[00:08:53] Of assessing the state of change, the state of readiness and the state of trainability with your student athletes. You do not need fancy athlete management systems or expensive technologies to do this. You can utilize things like Google Docs, you know, most educational plans also will qualify for reduced prices for things like Tableau. So looking at maybe deploying and collecting wellness questionnaires that are distributed

[00:09:23] Every day or every other day and then analyzing the results in any type of business intelligence tool like Tableau or Burst or Power BI is a very valid way and very cheap way of utilizing some of these resources and technologies in otherwise a very cheap and affordable economical way of deploying those things, but really for the most part we just need to do it, we just need to have you guys do it and we need to think about, okay, what are we trying to collect, what would we, how would we act upon the information when we receive it, what are we going to

[00:10:00] Be comfortable with organizationally wide, altering, intervening, how are we going to use this in the best way to help our student athletes continue to get better, continue to improve, but also do so in a way that manages the stressors and manages the various stressors that an athlete undergoes, not only in their athletic career at your level of institution or organization, but also academically, emotionally and socially as well.

[00:10:37] Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in to this Monday Minute Show. I hope you took something away from it. And as always, there's a number of different ways that you can support the show, right, the first thing is I have a monthly newsletter that goes out. It is located at AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter and like I said in the intro, it is chocked full of great articles, research papers, sort of daily notes, things I'm finding fascinating and experimenting with and being a human guinea pig with to try to change my own behaviors, my own habits, but ultimately

[00:11:14] To really try to improve my life and get something a little bit more meaningful out of it. So head over to AdamRingler.com forward slash newsletter, pop in your email and I promise you you'll get the welcome email and you'll start receiving those monthly updates and you won't regret it. I'm not going to send you a bunch of spam messages or anything like that. I really think that you'll get a lot out of it and check it out. I get questions every single time we publish, either an article or the latest update to the Decoding Excellence show and the question I often

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