What Is Quality Training?

Some practical advice for getting the best out of your training and your weekly recommendations.

The Rundown

What is Quality Training? Wearables give us lots of metrics to assess our workouts but do the numbers tell us if our training session was actually any good? What counts as a high quality workout? The latest research has a few theories.

When sports scientists at the Australian Institute of Sport interviewed elite swimmers last year to find out how they viewed training quality, their answers weren’t all about the numbers. In addition to saying that a quality session was about hitting the pace they were supposed to be hitting instead of simply going faster, the swimmers mentioned more nuanced things like connecting with their stroke and whether or not they felt determined or driven.

This led the Australian team to develop the Suggestive Training Quality scale, which asks athletes to rate their agreement with three statements: I met my physical training objectives in this session. I met my technical training objectives in this session. I was mentally and emotionally engaged in this session. The researchers suggested that the scale could be used alongside traditional metrics like pace and subjective effort to indicate how well you’re following your workout plan.

For Norwegian sports scientist Thomas Haugen, the STQ scale has a few weaknesses. What if you execute your plan perfectly but your plan is bad? Or what if you have a good plan but strictly observing it doesn’t always make sense? For example, if you felt great doing intervals, why didn’t you do three more?

Haugen and his colleagues at Kristiania University College in Oslo published a paper earlier this year debating quality in training. The team’s advice is to be clear about the purpose of your session before you begin. Make sure you’re fueled, hydrated, properly equipped and in the right headspace. During the workout, monitor how well you’re meeting your goals with either a smart watch or tracking subjective effort and adjust based on how you feel. Stay hydrated, fueled and focused. After the session recover well and assess how the workout went according to your goals.

Considering both approaches, what’s the best way to manage training quality?

In his work on the subject, Alex Hutchinson suggests that you could use the STQ scale but a simpler way is the “intention-execution gap.” Ask yourself:

-How close did I come to doing what I meant to do in the workout? (You could quantify this with average pace, power, or heart rate. But an easier option is your subjective perception of effort).

-How hard, on a ten-point scale, is the workout supposed to be?

-How hard did I actually push?

Hutchinson notes that this approach works in the gym or outside it and “adjusts for whether you’re feeling better or worse than expected.” It also gives you an easy metric to assess whether you pushed yourself to meet your training plan and allows you to see patterns.

Extra Point

Watch

Bye Bye Barry. Barry Sanders won the Heisman Trophy in 1988 and was named the NFL’s Most Valuable Player in 1997. During his career with the Detroit Lions, he was a four-time rushing champion, a six-time first team All-Pro selection and was named to ten Pro Bowls. In the summer of 1999 at the age of 31 he announced his retirement in a fax to his hometown paper in Wichita, Kansas, boarded a flight to England and walked around London leaving everyone to wonder why he left.

This documentary follows the now 55 year-old Sanders and his four sons on a trip back to England to explore his career and answer one of the biggest mysteries in sports. Why did Barry Sanders say “bye bye” to the NFL? Bye Bye Barry premieres on Prime Video on November 21.

Listen

The Mindful Minute. In her accessible podcast, meditation teacher Meryl Arnett offers an inspirational talk and a 20 minute guided meditation focused on how to live our lives “more mindfully, easily and happily.”

Read

Make the Overwhelming Feel Routine. In this post for the Growth Equation, Steve Magness argues that patience is the key to overcoming discomfort in life and in fitness. Sometimes, “we have to get comfortable with the uncomfortable just long enough to see if we’ll get over the hump.”