Really informative as always! The one struggle I have with submax testing is time and resources. I have 12 athletes with a limited time frame. So I have to have them all go at once. With that said, it would be great if we had some type of team HR monitoring system, but the school will not supply the finances at all. I've noticed a lot of them have smart watches when they run (different brands: apple, whoop, garmin, etc.) and I've heard that they all have different measurement errors. Would you suggest that I still track their HR from their smartwatch device and apply a 2% standard error measurement??
Thank you! Yes the benefit of SMFT is that you should be able to run all your athletes at once. I agree that if you cannot get a team-wide budget for HR monitoring, it would be good to make use of the wearable devices the athletes own personally. The SEM between-devices is likely variable depending on the device, so I'd suggest only making within-athlete observations (i.e. Athlete A's heart rate score has changed from x to y), and NOT between-athlete observations (i.e. Athlete A's score is X but Athlete B's score is Y). Another option could be to collect RPE from the athletes and track how their subjective perception of effort during the SMFT changes, but I find athletes tend to get bored/repetitive with this when it is the same fixed load.
Really informative as always! The one struggle I have with submax testing is time and resources. I have 12 athletes with a limited time frame. So I have to have them all go at once. With that said, it would be great if we had some type of team HR monitoring system, but the school will not supply the finances at all. I've noticed a lot of them have smart watches when they run (different brands: apple, whoop, garmin, etc.) and I've heard that they all have different measurement errors. Would you suggest that I still track their HR from their smartwatch device and apply a 2% standard error measurement??
Thank you! Yes the benefit of SMFT is that you should be able to run all your athletes at once. I agree that if you cannot get a team-wide budget for HR monitoring, it would be good to make use of the wearable devices the athletes own personally.
The SEM between-devices is likely variable depending on the device, so I'd suggest only making within-athlete observations (i.e. Athlete A's heart rate score has changed from x to y), and NOT between-athlete observations (i.e. Athlete A's score is X but Athlete B's score is Y).
Another option could be to collect RPE from the athletes and track how their subjective perception of effort during the SMFT changes, but I find athletes tend to get bored/repetitive with this when it is the same fixed load.