Why did we set out to build the best workout timer directly into the TrainHeroic app? Because strength training is interval training. In this blog, Adam Dawdy, product manager at TrainHeroic breaks down why we set out to build the world’s best interval timer directly into the TrainHeroic app.

The best workout timer is one that understands strength training is interval training

The famous Tabata workout: 8 rounds of 20s hard work and 10s of rest.

Why does that 10s rest even exist? It’s not much. Why not just go that speed for 3 or 4 min straight? That’d be harder, and driven athletes tend to believe something that’s harder is more productive. 

If you’ve ever done a Tabata session, you know you can’t sustain that rate of work for very long. Those intervals are supposed to be at a power output you can only sustain for a short time. Strategic rest allows enough recovery for you to do each interval at the same intensity. 

We all know rest periods are fundamental to interval training. It’s just part of the recipe.What about strength training? 

You can’t do all the work you need to do at once so you break it up into “work intervals” called “sets” and take rest between them. Sounds awfully similar.

The point: Your rest periods have a purpose, but that purpose often gets confused or lost. Let’s look at some of the problems that come up with rest periods.

Problem 1 – Not understanding the purpose of rest

Why do we break work into sets in the first place? A “set” of an exercise is just a chunk of work with a specific intent – exercise technique, reps, weight, and tempo for a set are all programmed by your coach for a certain reason. If you have to vary from them, are you getting the best results from all your hard work?

One example: training vertical jumps to get better at vertical jumps. To get the best results, you can practice jumping as high as possible. That doesn’t only mean trying to jump as high as you can. It means actually jumping as high as you can, or close to it.

What would happen if you were to jump as high as you can 50 times in a row? By the end, you wouldn’t be jumping very high. It’d feel really hard, but you probably wouldn’t be getting any better at jumping high. You’d be getting better at jumping 50 times in a row.

After only a few consecutive jumps, your performance would diminish to the point where you’d be better-served by ending the set and resting before trying again.You can’t do all the work you need to in one go and get the training effect you’re after.

If your coach has included rest in your program, you’re not being more virtuous or getting better results by cutting it short. It’ll probably feel harder, but that’s not necessarily better.

That rest was included to make sure you get the intended stimulus. There’s a reason for the old saying: “Bad training is one fool getting another fool tired.” Anything feels hard if you do it long enough or fast enough.

It’s strategic doses of work that get you the results you’re after.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work hard. It means that the goal isn’t always for something to feel as hard as possible.

Which brings us to…

Problem 2 – Not resting enough

The second problem we wanted to solve by building a workout timer directly into the TrainHeroic app was not resting enough.

A while back, I started coaching a guy who loved to train hard. While I envied his motor and work capacity, he came to me because he had been trying really hard, doing lots of work, and making zero progress. His training logs showed he’d been stuck at the same weights, and had missed his rep targets regularly.

He had a few things going on, but the biggest change we made was cranking the rest periods way up. He had been knocking out straight sets, with just 30-45s between them. I had him superset non-competing exercises, like bench press and dumbbell rows, with a minute or more between the movements. He was still getting a lot of work done, but his muscle groups got 2:30 or so to recover between sets.

He immediately started hitting his targets again. His training weights started to climb. After a month, he hit a 20lb bench PR. Observing appropriate rest periods was a big part of that.

Here’s the thing: this isn’t rare! A lot of athletes resist resting enough to get the adaptations they’re after. Sometimes they just like to move fast, so they keep their foot on the gas even when it isn’t appropriate. In other cases, they’re time-limited and trying to fit a lot in.

If you want to get strong, powerful, and improve performance in a lift, not only do you need to do the required reps, but the weight on the bar, technical execution, and effort and speed on each rep all matter. These elements are compromised when the rest is too short.

Want to improve the effectiveness of your training? Take a look at how long you’re actually resting between sets of the same exercise using a workout timer. If it’s shorter than 2 minutes or so, try resting a little longer and see what happens.

One thing I’ve seen and experienced is a tendency to rest reasonably between sets of main exercises, but then run through assistance exercises. If you’re doing them, they’re important. If they’re important, pay attention to how you’re doing them. That includes the right amount of rest even for accessory work.

You don’t have to just stand around – supersets can be great! That core or corrective work you put off can also be a great filler.

Can you go by feel and know how long to rest? Some experienced athletes can, but if your instincts lead you to shorter rest and you haven’t tried resting longer in a while, a workout timer can help. A minute or two feels like forever when you’re used to moving fast all the time!

Problem 3 – Losing focus and flow

On the other end of things, it’s easy to let rest go too far. If you aren’t keeping yourself accountable it’s easy to get distracted and lose your flow. Once that happens, it can be really hard to get back “in the zone.” Even if you came in with great intent and focus, you can get bogged down and underachieve.

To keep your head in the game, it’s better to pick a rest period and try to stick to it. If the interval timer goes off after 2 minutes and I still don’t quite feel ready for the next set, I still get into position for the next set, but give myself a bit more time. Then I just adjust the rest time up a bit for the next time around.

Since I started using a timer more often, I haven’t had any issues being productive. More than anything, I let performance from set to set be my guide in how much to rest. The workout timer just helps keep me on task.

Problem 4 – Watching the clock

The final problem we looked to solve by building a workout timer into the app might sound a little counter intuitive: watching the clock. 

So you’ve decided to keep yourself on track and make sure you’re resting appropriately. Maybe there’s a clock in view, so you keep an eye on it.

That can work. Just remember this isn’t a science experiment, and the rest period is an approximate thing. You don’t have to be too anxious about it. It’s just supposed to make sure you are taking enough rest to be ready for the next set.

What I’ve noticed with using TrainHeroic’s rest timer is that I can “set it and forget it.” Honestly, I thought it would be rigid and annoying to use a rest interval timer, but I find it’s actually kind of liberating.

I don’t have to worry about it or think about how much time I’m taking. Once it’s going I can listen to my music, hit a drill, and get ready for the next set when the chime sounds. It’s less mental work for me since I can outsource it to the app.

It also tends to keep me in the app. If I have my timer right there and my music or podcast is playing, I don’t have the same temptation to check my email or Instagram.

Building the best workout timer: Relevant research

If you’re hungry for more info, especially more scientific info, keep reading on. 

When you want to know what the body of research says on a subject, systematic reviews and meta analyses are a good place to start. In these, expert authors use rigorous methods to weigh the available evidence.

I’ve gathered 6 studies here that I found useful as we set out to develop the TrainHeroic workout timers.

Based on the 6 studies included here, the research says that there is some good evidence showing that longer rest might be better in trained lifters, but more research would be needed to really be sure.

Scientific beliefs in the area of rest periods in resistance training continue to evolve. For example, it was commonly held that shorter rest periods were better for hypertrophy because of hormonal responses and metabolic factors, but more recent research questions that assumption.

Training studies are hard to run, and there just haven’t been that many good ones that have looked at the impact of rest on hypertrophy.

Here are some sources that shine some light on the importance of rest periods.

Do short rest periods help or hinder muscle growth?
This is not a peer-reviewed study, but Chris Beardsley does a good job and lays out the evidence.

I am not a proponent of his “effective reps” idea he talks about, but that’s a conversation for another time.

Longer Interset Rest Periods Enhance Muscle Strength and Hypertrophy in Resistance-Trained Men, 2015 (free PDF available)

The well-known study by Schoenfeld et al., showing favorable outcomes from 3 min vs. 1 min rest periods. You’ll see this one mentioned all around the internet, but remember that it is only one study.

The effects of short versus long inter-set rest intervals in resistance training on measures of muscle hypertrophy: A systematic review, (free PDF available)

Effect of 2- vs. 3-Minute Interrepetition Rest Period on Maximal Clean Technique and Performance, 2018

A good example of a study that looks at the effect of rest periods on acute performance. General recommendations for rest during max strength and power training is 3-5 min. However, weightlifters might have as little as 2 min between lifts in competition.

This study looks at what happened when elite weightlifters used 2 min rest periods between attempts instead of 3 min.

Several measures of performance were worse with 2 min rest, and the RPE was higher.

Rest interval between sets in strength training, 2009 (free PDF available)

This is an older narrative review that shows the thinking of the time. Not a lot has really changed from this, except the emphasis on shorter rest being superior for hypertrophy.

It is true that metabolites can be concentrated by short rest periods, and that growth hormone release is related to blood lactate levels, but it’s not true that optimizing for those factors gets you the best results. This is an example of mechanistic evidence not translating to IRL outcomes.

Attribution tracking: your key to business gainz

If you are like the thousands of trainers and gym owners we serve, you’ve got a coaching business selling remote training service online. You’re marketing your services and training packages, perhaps using the TrainHeroic Marketplace. You’ve got more work to do than hours in the day. 

From programming to communicating, providing coaching services to your clients takes up most of your day. 

You know finding the time to be active on social media, create blogs, send email campaigns and other marketing efforts is vital to growing your business. But, let’s be honest, chances are you aren’t a trained marketer. If that’s the case, you’ve probably found yourself wondering: 

• Just how much marketing do I need to do to grow my online business to meet my income goals?
• Should I lean harder into any specific area?
• How do I maximize the return on the time I’m spending trying to market my remote training business?

Our newest tools allow sellers to answer all of these questions, and this guide is going to give you some insider insight to using data to make marketing decisions. 

Channel Attribution

Our attribution solution allows you to look at traffic and conversions coming from different sources and marketing efforts. This is done by appending a special tracking code to a URL you’ll use as a link for specific marketing efforts. 

We include custom links for:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Linktree
• Your website
• Email
• Twitter
• Tiktok
• Podcast
• YouTube

We also allow for very simple creation of new links that you can customize to run affiliate marketing campaigns like never before. 

Setting this up is simple and easy

Using the report, putting it into action:

Before diving into the report and making changes to your marketing efforts, it’s important to contextualize this tool in the broader scheme of your marketing funnel.

For illustrative purposes, we’ll use a very simple 3 stage funnel analogy to help envision your marketing efforts.

The stages of this basic funnel are:

Awareness (or top of funnel): we can think of this stage in a simple interaction. A potential buyer goes from never having heard of your brand and product, to being aware of your offering. Think of this as your first introduction at a huge digital party that is the internet.

Things like blog content, YouTube videos, podcasts, social media posts, advertisements and white papers are all considered “push” efforts at the top of the funnel. You, the seller, create content and messaging with the goal of pushing the message in front of potential customers and creating an awareness of your brand and the products you offer.

Consideration (or mid-funnel): The potential buyer in the consideration phase is actively looking for a solution to solve a problem or desire in their life. For example: I want to bulk up for summer. At this stage, they begin searching for a solution to the problem. As a seller, you want to pull them into your offering, stand out amongst the crowd, and ensure they see the connection between their desire and your product. Show them you are the guide to help them on their training journey to become their ideal version of themselves.

Organic search and even paid search advertising are considered “pull” efforts at the mid funnel. As a seller, we’re trying to pull some mental Judo here capitalizing on the buyer’s demand by serving great content that simply communicates why your product is the best solution to their problem or desire.

Your TrainHeroic Marketplace pages are a great tool at this stage of the funnel. A targeted offering (niche), great imagery, and compelling copy on your sales listing page are your best tools to convert lookers into buyers. It’s important to remember that modern buyers are considering multiple solutions, comparing and contrasting their options all the time.

Blogs, long form articles about your programming, etc. hosted on your own website are also great tools for the consideration stage of the funnel.

Decision (or low funnel): Potential buyers at this stage are convinced they are going to pay for a solution. They’ve done their research and likely narrowed down their options to just a handful at most. They are ready to make a purchase.
We’ve designed the TrainHeroic Marketplace product listing pages to pull potential buyers from the consideration stage down through the decision stage. Things like a sample week of training and athlete testimonials are valuable tools at this stage of the marketing funnel. This is also where retargeting campaigns and offers can come into play should you choose to leverage them.

Like a great training program, marketing is a combo of primary efforts and accessories

In many ways marketing is a lot like a great training program. Just like you don’t improve your 1 rep bench max by only benching, you don’t get business gains from pushing your message through a single channel. 

You don’t know down to the gnat’s ass exactly how much each accessory exercise contributes to the goal, but you do all of them because they all have a place and purpose.

In other words, if you take one thing from this article let it be that you should not try to use this powerful new tool to find marketing that “doesn’t work” or things to trim out completely from your efforts.

Marketing is like a machine. You cannot remove one of the basic cogs and expect the machine to work. The best marketing funnels are multi-touch and multi-channel. 

If you’re interested in the nerd-speak behind this concept, read on. 

*Puts on his glasses and points to a white board.

It’s important to understand that the TrainHeroic Marketplace Attribution tool is working off of a last-click attribution model. That means that a user’s visit or purchase is attributed to the last link they clicked on before visiting your site. This is a reliable and basic form of attribution modeling. 

Advanced attribution modeling would assign some value of a single conversion to each of the 7 (often more) touchpoints a consumer has with your message. But, this is extremely complex and more of an art than pure science. 

For instance: you might give 2x more weight to a video view than a blog read because research suggests the combination of visual and auditory cues has a larger impact than the written word on buyer psychology. 

But, what if you’re a great writer and not great at making video? Your video probably doesn’t have quite the impact. 

You might be asking, “well isn’t that important for me to know?” Or, “how do I optimize my marketing efforts without perfect attribution detail?”

While it’s tempting, chasing the perfect attribution model as a small to medium sized business is a quick path to spending a lot of time, energy, and money on something that isn’t going to give you a return – kind of defeats the purpose of maximizing the return on your efforts, right? 

If you are spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per month on different marketing efforts, attribution modeling could be a useful tool. Simple changes in budget allocation at this volume could lead you to massive changes in ROI. 

In reality, this probably isn’t you. 

More than likely, you’re running email campaigns, producing blog and video content regularly, and running a social media presence that is actively posting at least once per day. 

All of those things are foundational to any digital selling success. 

While it may be tempting, this tool should not be used to answer questions like: is social media working? Should I stop doing (insert marketing effort here)? Can we get rid of our email marketing?

Instead, use this report to understand the digital highways and byways by which people are getting to your product listing pages (traffic) and coming back to make a purchase. Optimize for what is working. 

Each brand’s funnel and audience is unique. For instance: you may find that your email campaigns are driving huge numbers of conversions. Rather than looking to cut other efforts like social media for instance, aim to look for ways to get more email addresses from your social efforts. 

Look first to bolster your efforts by finding easy wins. One of the biggest mistakes we often make as marketers is not including direct calls to action in our efforts. Use this information as a guide to ensure you are putting enough marketing messages with strong calls to action into the market on a weekly basis across multiple channels. If you aren’t actively keeping the roadway open, people will not come to your site. 

Armed with these tools and a better understanding of optimizing your marketing efforts, go forth and conquer, friends!

// 4 tips to best leverage coach home

Use the Readiness Score to Gauge client wellness

You’ve probably noticed some trends in how your clients report their average readiness score. 

Easily keep an eye out for abnormal scores that could indicate some excessive external stressors in your athletes’ day-to-day and use it as an opportunity to personally check in. 

Do you have a customer who typically reports an average Readiness Score in the mid-3’s and today they’ve reported a 2.4? 

Now is your opportunity to direct the client to provide support they might need beyond their daily workout.

Use the Summary Card for Programming feedback

The summary card provides key feedback on your programming that your customers might not directly provide. 

Along with the readiness score, the summary card allows you to quickly gain insight on crucial components of your programming: session completion, duration, intensity, and volume. 

Are you noticing that a lot of your clients are taking 90+ minutes to complete lifts that you intended to be finished in 60 minutes? 

This could be a good indicator that you may need to “trim the fat” on some of the sessions you’re programming.

Use Direct Message to Quickly Engage with Your client 1:1

Daily communication with your customers will help keep them engaged, motivated, accountable, and on the path to success. 

With Coach Home, you can now easily access 1:1 messaging with a client to ask how a specific exercise went, reply to a comment they left on the session, or praise them on their hard work that day. 

Leverage direct messaging to remind your athletes of their goals and find daily successes to communicate to them. Because at the end of the day, it’s all about progress, not perfection.

Use the Calendar Filter to Easily Check on Team compliance

Are you working with multiple teams or groups of clients and need to check who is putting in the work? 

Use the calendar filter to effortlessly narrow down your view of clients on a specific team. 

Once you’ve filtered to the team view, you can also use the calendar icon to access certain dates and review how the team has been doing over the course of the week, or scroll back to a prior testing date.

putting it all Together

With all this data at your fingertips, there’s no reason you can’t take your coaching to the next level and keep your athletes more engaged and motivated than ever.

What are you waiting for?

Get after it, Coach!

// a new activity stream & coach home experience

Providing value to your clients is as much about relationship management as it is programming. Your role is guide, mentor, coach, and support system. 

If you want to be the kind of coach who is always on top of things and whose athletes feel valued and cared for, we think you’ll love this new solution now in the mobile and desktop TrainHeroic app. 

This Activity Feed will display any sessions logged on 1:1 or team calendars. You can leave them collapsed for quick scrolling through summaries and comments, or expand the cards to see all the details your athletes log.

Filters allow you to focus on a specific team or date, as well.

From here it’s easy to engage with them in your own authentic way, regardless of whether they’re on a team or coached 1:1.

You can even comment publicly in the session comments, or send a DM to the athlete with the session attached. 

// being aware of what’s always been vital

My mom lives 15 minutes away, but you’d never know it.

You know how it is – we haven’t always gotten along, but I love my mom and we don’t see each other as often as we should. We both work and have our own interests and lives, and the weeks get filled with more important things. 

I have been missing her more recently, though. Instead of hunching over my sad stash of lentils, I’d really like to go over to her house, eat one of her patented overcooked steaks, and watch some inane TV. 

In this anxious new world of “pants optional” work from home practices and TP-hoarding, our need for human connection is turned up several notches. We can’t visit family. We don’t get our casual fixes at work or out in public. Even the gym, that beloved “third place,”  has been taken away from many of us. 

what does this mean for you, coach?

What does this mean for you, coach?

It means you have a big opportunity to step up into the void and be essential. It means you have a chance to be more valuable and help people more than you ever could before because people need the connection, focus, fulfillment, and escape that training with you offers.

It won’t only help them. The more essential you are to them, the more likely they are to stick with you if things get hard for them personally or financially.

Things are weird, maybe even scary. Let’s not deny that. It also isn’t easy, especially if you’ve suddenly pivoted to remote coaching because you had to. You’ve probably already realized that to be as successful as possible with remote coaching, you have to adopt some new behaviors to make it abundantly clear you’re engaged and available.

This is doubly true right now. For many of your athletes, those softer benefits their training community provides is at least as important as your expertise.

Sound familiar? It’s because crises make us more aware of what was always vital. These things are also hugely important under normal circumstances. Our awareness of them just becomes heightened when they are threatened. 

We started building our new Activity Stream way back in the Before Times, but this is the perfect time to be rolling it out to you. 

Simply – we’ve given you a way to review your athletes’ training in one place. If you want to review every session your athletes log, you can on web or mobile.

We’ve always said our goal was to help you “coach more athletes, better.” This is another big step in that direction.

Be your best,

Adam Dawdy

Product Manager, TrainHeroic

// Communicating with your athletes just got a lot easier…and more fun

Our vision is to create a World of Millions of Connected Heroes finding Joy in the Journey of Training. We chose the word “Connected” very intentionally. After all, coaching is about much more than programming. Coaching is connection. Coaching is motivation. It’s feedback. It’s providing the spark your athlete needs to stay motivated and on their path. We’re proud to announce our newest set of features to the TrainHeroic platform. We call it TH Chat.

Now, TrainHeroic coaches can:

• Send messages to entire teams or chat with your athletes individually
• Use Gifs and built-in reactions to make the conversation fun (we call it adding the flavor packet)
• Easily provide feedback to your athletes, while keeping all of your important messaging in one place

All from your mobile device or your desktop experience.

We’ve created a fun and engaging way to communicate with your athletes that we hope you’ll love. But, we didn’t stop there. We support thousands of coaches and athletes who train miles apart. This type of relationship requires some specific communication styles.

• Athletes and coaches can now share video directly in the TrainHeroic platform.

// gassing our athletes’ tank along their training journey

I, an eager TA: “Yeah, it’s tough, but I think it’s going pretty well. Their first exam is coming up.”

She, a seasoned professor, between panting breaths: “Ha! Be ready for them to fail.”

Seeing my pride shrivel, she quickly clarified: “It happens to every first-time teacher. There’s just so much you know, and so many debates you’ve had that you just forget what it’s like to not know…”

And then the part that made me think about things differently.

“…and your students are not like you.”
She was right, of course. I was a grad student who had been coaching for years and was still salivating for any obscure tidbit I could learn about training. A mental hoarder, I stowed everything I could, just in case it might be useful someday.

My students were 19 on average; more influenced by social media than science at that point, and probably didn’t have quite the education I received in high school. Many were also first-generation students taking my course as a means to an end – to get a degree so they could go into physical therapy or medicine.

Nodding my very wise head and stroking my stubbled chin, I nerfed the test a bit.

They still bombed. I made it clear it was my fault, let them earn their points back, and we had a good semester. But, that little soundbite has stuck with me as a coach.

My students were not like me.

My athletes are not like me.

I’m sure you know this on an intellectual level. But it’s really easy to forget.

We tend to view our own beliefs, motivations, and things we like  – essentially, the way we ARE – as normal and good. We end up projecting the way we think onto others, even when we have no good reason to.

Combine this with the “curse of knowledge,” which makes an informed person unable to think like an uninformed one; it’s common to be blind to the fact that other people don’t want the things you want, believe what you believe, or know the things you know. Even when we’re aware of this, we’re still prone to feel that people who disagree are flawed in some way, rather than simply different.

As a coach you’re a master of your craft. You know training. You LOVE this stuff. It’s not just a means to an end. Whereas your athletes squat so they can jump higher or grow bigger wheels, you squat for the sake of squatting. Think about it: who are your favorite athletes to coach? The ones who adore training the way you do?

For us, immersing ourselves in the process is a reward in and of itself. 

Me, building another Excel program instead of actually training, circa 2004. Colorized.

When Training becomes a grind,  make it fun

Training isn’t always sexy. Sometimes it’s all you can manage to punch the clock and get the reps in. Sometimes it straight-up sucks. Once the beginner gains have been gotten, not every day is a PR party. 

Here’s the thing we don’t talk about as much: it can be a grind for you, too. You’re not only on your own journey, but part of the story for how many other people?

This is why we think it’s important to “Find Joy in the Journey.” Unless we’re able to enjoy the process, we risk getting lost before we’ve even really gone anywhere. It takes effort over time to accomplish anything of note. 

We all know this training thing works. The trick is sticking with it – for this week, this month, this year, and beyond.

So, when we sought to overhaul our messaging tools, we of course improved the functionality and made the experience better. On both mobile and web, you’ll find your direct and team messaging in their own communication center. This is also where you’ll find your messaging notifications. 

Maybe most exciting: you can use these GIFs and reactions (or even type a reply to say something material) to engage with the videos your athletes upload. Yep – you and your athletes can now upload videos up to 1 minute in length directly to messages and session comments. 

I can’t always be smart, but I can always be a smart-ass

Be your best,

Adam Dawdy

Product Manager, TrainHeroic

// strength & conditioning programming directly from your phone

While last month we put out an array of features for athletes to edit their prescribed training on their mobile devices, Coaches can now do so much more for their athletes from their phones. Now, TrainHeroic coaches can:

• View and manage Athlete and Team Calendars
• Create new sessions when your athletes drop in for training
• Edit sessions on the fly
• Reschedule sessions when life’s roadblocks occur
• Delete sessions when athletes need a break
• Copy and paste sessions on the calendar to iterate on existing programming

All from the convenience of their mobile device.

// navigation on our athlete’s training journey

All of our athletes are on their own journey. 

As coaches, it’s a fact that’s too easy to forget. Like anyone else, it’s easy to allow ourselves to feel self-important. It’s easy to let ourselves believe it’s about us.  

In reality, we have a pretty basic role:

Within our athlete’s journey, we are the mentor. 

We are responsible for providing four basic things: 

1. High standards (“This is how it’s done”)
2. Assurance (“I know you can do it”)
3. Direction (“Here is the path”)
4. Support (I’m here for you)

In this manner, we are little more than a trusty guide in their journey; a steady, reliable co-pilot in the car as they drive toward their desired destination. 

Our athletes are ultimately the ones in control. Their hands are on the wheel and their foot is on the gas. We’re there to provide the map, narrate the course, monitor the dash, and help them adjust course when things get in their way.

being the best co-pilot

This past weekend, I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Chris Morris, Director of Sports Science at the University of Kentucky, drop knowledge at the Power Athlete Symposium.

If you haven’t been, the Symposium is an unbelievable experience for the mind, body, and soul. For any committed coach or athlete, it’s well worth an annual voyage. If meeting and learning from thinkers like Chris isn’t enough, the opportunity to indulge at Austin Food trucks, connect with your comrades in the war on mediocrity, and watch Tex get tazed is an outsized return on investment.

Fluid Periodization –  programming on the fly

In his presentation, Dr. Morris introduced a training model he calls “Fluid Periodization.”

To illustrate his approach, he asked us to consider the navigation app Waze.

Waze is a navigation app that dynamically adjust the route to your destination by acknowledging roadblocks, traffic, and accidents, so that the journey to your destination is the smartest path you can take, in real-time.

Dr. Morris suggested that the training model we leverage with our athletes should be a lot like Waze in this way. When providing direction to our athletes in the form of a program, too often we view it as a static map. However, if we want to optimize our impact and improve our results, Dr. Morris suggested the map we should provide is one that responds in real-time.

Within Fluid Periodization, Chris suggests we accept the external factors of reality. We humbly acknowledge the roadblocks (logistical complications), impact of traffic (too much stress), and random accidents (injury) that invariably come our athlete’s way.

This isn’t to say we change our desired destination, it just means we may not take the path we originally planned to get there. We openly admit that our map was just a best guess in the first place. Accordingly, we update our hypothesis with the latest information so it’s tuned to provide the fastest path toward optimal performance.

Less Rand McNally…more Waze. Cartography for the modern era.

I think Fluid Periodization is genius on several levels:

• Branding
• Theory
• Application
• Universality

Branding

I’m a sucker for good branding and not ashamed to admit it. 

While we’ve all been told not to judge a book by its cover, any joe who’s bought an RxBar, Strong Coffee, or Apple product can attest to the power of purty packaging.

Chris’ naming convention is self-evident, effortless to remember, and easy to communicate. These qualities lend it to rapid uptake and sharing. While I’m not sure Chris’ ever studied Ogilvy, he certainly applied the tenets of good branding when naming his model. 

Theory

Fluid Periodization just makes sense. It works on both an intuitive and logical level.

When do we ever experience life going exactly as planned? If ours doesn’t, why would we expect it to be the case for our athletes?

To account for such variability, the Fluid model assumes programs are a work in progress, not pillars of perfection.

This is a good thing because Fluid systems are inherently more resilient than rigid systems. Bruce Lee is famed for instructing his followers to “be like water.” He taught that water’s qualities provide it the ultimate strength.

Water can break through any substance, cannot be hurt, is infinitely flexible, and always adapts to the context in which it’s placed. Fluid periodization channels Bruce’s wisdom. It takes programs off the pedestal and puts them into practice.

Application 

While it may seem like more work, in the end, there’s a case that a Fluid model saves time. 

I’ve seen enough evidence to believe a Fluid approach creates less overall work by reducing waste. In fact, we’re seeing many of our best coaches have great success applying such a method.

For example, Drew Hammond, Director of Human Performance with Air Force Special  Operations plans a week at a time. While he used to program in 4-6 weeks blocks, he continued to find his athletes getting banged up, injured, or deployed into the field of battle. He found himself constantly throwing out weeks of programming and starting anew.

To save his sanity and enhance his athletes’ experience, Drew now only works in microcycles. 

If a week works, he progresses it the following week; copying, pasting, and making adjustments on the fly based on the data he gets back from his athletes. 

If the wheels start to fall off, he can easily swap in a new template and make a quick tweak. Without a long-term investment, his emotional and practical attachment to the plan is nil. By reducing the emotional and logistical sunk cost, Drew makes it easier to do what’s best for his athletes.

Using this model, he’s singularly able to provide a personalized level of service to over two hundred operators.

Universality 

I tend to like things that have broad appeal and I believe this model works in any planning context. 

In fact, at TrainHeroic, this “Fluid Periodization” model, mimics the “just in time” / “Lean Roadmapping” model we use in product development. After years of planning annual…and sometimes multi-year roadmaps, we gave up. We continued to experience the plans we created were outdated, often by the time we put them into practice. 

While we held a strong understanding of where we are today and vision of where we wanted to go, what kept getting mucky was everything in-between.

Today, we plan just enough to get data on what’s working best for our customers. We see how they respond, then we adjust our course accordingly. We’ve found such flexibility helps us to better serve our coaches around the world while keeping our team happy and on the same page.

// bringing it home: giving you the power to change, adapt, evolve

As you may be able to tell, at TrainHeroic, we’re big believers in Fluid Periodization, by any name. And to align ourselves to that belief and make its implementation as easy as possible, today we rolled out a new solution so coaches can better adjust their athletes’ training on the fly.

Our vision has always been to put more power in coaches’ hands. This latest solution is just the next logical step toward that end.

TrainHeroic exists to empower you to coach more athletes, better. We hope these solutions make that mission, just a bit easier. 

We love hearing from our customers. So if you have feedback, ideas, or just want to chat, feel free to drop us a line. 

Be your best,

Ben Crookston

Founder, TrainHeroic

// life is change

It’s inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be hard. In many ways, we choose how it feels and impacts us.

With every change, great or small, we have a choice to resist or respond. React or adapt.

Two years ago, I had major surgery performed on my left hip. A genetic abnormality, years of athletic abuse, and laughably misguided training smashed my hips into a shape that better resembled those of “an 85-year-old woman.”*

It turns out, there are only so many barbells we can juggle and ice-cold max lifts we can attempt before our body calls the bill due.

I’ve had my fair share of injuries over the years and have the scars, scraggly fingers, lingering back issues, sliding shoulders, and a stack of CT Scans to prove it. But nothing before fully prepared me for the forced humility of having my hips hacksawed to pieces.

One day I’m trying out for the US Bobsled team, the next I’m in a wheelchair; with Lauren bathing and assisting me to go to the bathroom.

The change was real. And initially, it was hard.

Where I used to recover like Wolverine mainlining Deer Antler; at 32, my body had enough. As much as I wanted to race back to lifting, hooping, and ripping mountains on my bike, my aging meatsuit had other plans.

For the entire first year of my rehab, I held an outdated mental model and expectation for improvement. I thought I could do as I normally did, when and how I used to do it. That meant doing too much, too soon, too fast. Unsurprisingly, such arrogance only led to setbacks and heartache.

Our body has its own clock that keeps track of time in aches and pains rather than hours and minutes. We can try to speed it up all we want, but we’re not the ones in control.

While I may be stubborn, I’m not entirely stupid.  Eventually, I learned to listen and respond to what my body needed. I began to ride rather than fight the wave of change.

Who I was in the past is not who I am today. And I’m okay with that. In fact, in many ways, I prefer it.

Today, my coach programs for me each week

And while the week might look great on Monday, by the time Thursday rolls around and life happens; more often than not, I’m adapting his prescription to the changes that came my way.

Where deviating from the plan used to frustrate me and make me feel like a failure, I’ve gotten better at shifting my attention to the process, training only to improve my body and mind, rather than achieve some arbitrary goal I’ve been programmed to care for.

At TrainHeroic, we call this “finding joy in the journey of training.” It’s one of the elements of our Heroic Spirit, and to me, the one that’s often the hardest to live up to each and every day.

The journey’s more of a squiggly line than a straight one. Simply staying on the path often feels harder than achieving almost any end. So as a team, we work intently to deliver solutions that make such a balancing act just a little bit easier for the committed athletes we serve.

Our solutions seek to keep them in the fight, feeling the satisfaction of progress in the process, regardless of the obstacles they face.

To help athletes better dip, dive, duck, and dodge the wrenches life chucks their way, we recently launched a new solution in our mobile app.

Introducing our latest update to trainheroic

Our latest update empowers athletes around the world to adjust prescribed training on the fly. 

 Today, athletes can adapt their sessions by:

• Logging warm-up sets and added volume
• Adding Exercises to account for extra work 
• Swapping Exercises to make changes when injury, equipment, or ability demand
• Rescheduling sessions when conflicts appear

And to make things extra nice, we wrapped up all those benefits in a redesigned, streamlined experience to keep athletes focused on what matters most.

Over the past month, I’ve found these improvements quite beneficial in my own training. I suspect others will too. 

If you have feedback on our recent updates, please reach out! There’s nothing we love more than hearing from those we serve.

We have more upgrades planned for the near future, so keep your eyes out and stay ready.

Until then, as life changes, how will you respond? 

Adapt, evolve…be your best,  

Ben Crookston

Founder, TrainHeroic

*doctor’s quote, not mine

** hat tip to our big brother TrainingPeaks who’ve used this quippy mantra for years as a guiding value

Today, the average strength coach has more responsibilities than they did in the past. They are expected to monitor an entire program, not just the weights and conditioning. Communication with athletes is a key part of success, as we all know, but doing it in an effective manner is a challenge.

Enter: a readiness survey. 

A simple readiness survey can make a good program great, and it can help prevent a great program from crashing down due to overtraining or injuries.

Using a readiness survey daily is the strongest ally a coach can have next to another coach, and watching the trends of your training group can make you a better coach if you invest the time into the process.

In this article, I cover why you should start or get back to using readiness surveys, and share how the information can change your coaching process. If you are not using a readiness survey now, you need to step up your game. If you already are, science and expert coaches have made our job a little bit easier.

// Supercharge the Science into Coaching

Image 1. Readiness survey data should be easy for the athlete to log, and easy for the coach to access and analyze. Over time, a coach will be able to guage the readiness of his athletes, both from a team perspective and an individual perspective. Sample above is from inside the TrainHeroic calendar.

A readiness survey is a frequently asked series of short questions that athletes answer about how they feel and how they are recovering from training. They are exactly what their name implies: a direct question of an athlete’s status to train for that moment.

Using them fosters better communication and results.

Asking subjective questions is an effective way to improve a training program according to the science, but only if you use them consistently will they make a difference.

If they don’t have any information from the athletes they work with, coaches will worry constantly about overtraining or fatigue, and sometimes about being too conservative. Readiness surveys reduce either doing too little or too much… and sometimes shed light on the wrong type of training.

If you truly value listening to your athletes, then do it every day and do it efficiently.

It’s easy to say you communicate well with an entire team, but if you are honest, it’s hard to juggle dozens of athletes in your head every day without help. Every coach values communication, but doing it without a readiness survey is difficult logistically.

Starting out with an organized summary of groups is the best way to keep training on the right track and ensure athletes are not left behind.

Plenty of research is available now to show how valuable and useful subjective monitoring is, and the work of Anna Saw, Shane Malone, Martin Buchheit, Aaron Coutts, and others like Dr. Sands is more than enough evidence for the inclusion of readiness surveys.

One of the fathers of modern monitoring is Dr. Sands. His work from decades ago is still useful today. If you want to make a difference with results, training needs to be complemented with science.

But the main issue of readiness surveys is that while the science supports their use, most coaches don’t add enough or any energy behind them. After a few weeks of daily questions, typically the honeymoon period wears off with athletes, and the coach is now the villain for asking for information on how they feel over and over again.

I don’t blame athletes for getting annoyed, as most of the questionnaires are rarely connected to the training and get old quickly, but that’s due the process, not the science.

If you don’t put the passion into communication with your athletes like you do with sets and reps, the best you have is just guesswork. 

Science can only help if it’s valued by coaches and athletes, and if it’s not implemented properly, the compliance fades fast.

// Real Benefits of Asking the Right Questions

I have three experiences that really hit home the value of readiness surveys. After careful reflection, I know I am not the only one facing issues with accountability, unexpected challenges, and the management of variables.

Here are three lessons in particular I have learned over the years that have turned into advantages.

Lesson 1: Coach and Athlete Accountability

Athletes today need accountability more than ever. Being accountable is simply being honest and taking ownership of both training and recovery. Athletes who are not accountable are often dodging responsibility and are brilliant finger pointers to everyone else besides the person in the mirror.

The best reflection is a readiness survey, as it forces athletes to put in their own words what is going on in their recovery and readiness. Athletes who are fibbing about sleep and other hidden training factors like diet will see their peers improving. This will force them into a reality check.

Conversely, if the training program itself is the problem, the information from readiness surveys will force coaches to rethink what they are doing. Bad readiness trends and poor training outcomes will be enough to nudge honest coaches to go back to the drawing board.

Lesson 2: Dealing with Unexpected Challenges

Readiness surveys are the first line of communication between what is going on and the athlete. Using readiness surveys daily is a quick and effective process, and translates a lot of information into a quantitative summary.

Watching their trendlines is an easy way to keep tabs on the wellbeing of an athlete, and keeps coaches nimble to change if necessary.

One of the biggest challenges is when an athlete provides information that requires a coach to redirect their program to “Plan B” – knowing earlier is ideal.

Many times in training an alarm response isn’t necessary, as training or life challenges encountered are slow creeping problems. Readiness surveys are perfect solutions to deal with the unexpected realities they face daily, and adjusting to those events is how a program can keep the goal the goal, as Dan John says.

The best reflection is a readiness survey, as it forces athletes to put in their own words what is going on in their recovery and readiness. Athletes who are fibbing about sleep and other hidden training factors like diet will see their peers improving. This will force them into a reality check.

Conversely, if the training program itself is the problem, the information from readiness surveys will force coaches to rethink what they are doing. Bad readiness trends and poor training outcomes will be enough to nudge honest coaches to go back to the drawing board.

Lesson 3: working with others

Even sports medicine can see the data, and it centralizes what is going on daily. Quick summaries of readiness is an athlete’s dashboard internally and physically, and using them fosters not only communication between the athlete and the coaching staff, but also the support staff.

Getting on the same page isn’t easy with teams and facilities, but readiness surveys force everyone to be working together collectively. 

// Turn Readiness into a Priority and a Better Training Session

Readiness surveys work scientifically, but only if you put the work into making them appear valuable in your program. If you want to use a readiness survey with your athletes and get something out of them, you need to sell it, reinforce it, and actually use the data.

Selling readiness surveys can be easy or very hard, depending on the culture of the team or environment, and the level of sport.

As the competition level increases, the power of the coaches and support staff decreases generally speaking. Still, if you want to sell the survey, treat it like a gateway to service, meaning if an athlete wants or needs something, communication through the app is necessary.

Another selling point is the short note section that allows an athlete to express what they feel needs to be shared openly. I would argue that if a coach could read just one sentence of what an athlete is feeling over a year, that alone would be worth the time and effort.

Perhaps the most important way to make a readiness survey resonate is to use the data just as much as they give it.

If the athlete doesn’t feel an equal exchange exists between giving information and the coach using it, they will rush through the questions and give information that lacks careful reflection and thought. If you don’t make modifications from the communications of your athletes, they will not put the effort in with the process.

Even if you don’t adjust the training, make sure you still communicate to athletes why you are prescribing the session the same way.

When using a readiness survey regularly, the work is done by the software to help guide you like a GPS. In combination with coaching experience and deductive reasoning, training programs are sharper and more individualized instead of blind guess work.

// Commit to communication

A good readiness survey can do so much for anyone who places full effort into them, and it’s easy to get distracted and look for the next best thing in training.

We all know communication is a timeless necessity in coaching, but if you can’t get it done consistently, results will suffer and confidence in the training program will decline. I have access to some of the best technologies such as athlete tracking, physiological monitoring, and blood analysis, but without simple athlete reporting questions, it will only be limited.

Monitoring athletes with a core set of questions is more important today than ever, and using the methods I learned from the best minds in sports science will make a big impact in your coaching.

It turns out, having too many “somethings” make the right thing harder to find.

It’s more than a bit ironic then that one of Netflix’s most popular shows right now, “Tidying Up, with Marie Kondo” is about reducing clutter in your life. If you haven’t seen it or are still stuck in an infinite scroll of dread, I’d encourage you to give it a go.

In it, Kondo works to free people from their lives of stress by clearing up their clutter. Like the best coaches, Kondo applies simple principles to transform the lives of others. Her cornerstone rule to guide people in their decision to keep or toss an item is, “does this item spark joy?”

At TrainHeroic, one of our Priorities is to “help athletes find joy in the journey of training,” so Kondo’s simple rule rings true.

This February, our first act of kindness to the coaches we love was a little “Tidying Up.” We moved some things around. We cleaned some things up. And there are even a few things we’re looking to throw away. 

We trimmed the fat and cut things down so you can better focus on the things that bring you joy.

We went from 11 items in our navigation down to 6. We grouped the Analytics with the Classic Reports. We collapsed the big screen Leaderboard, Whiteboard, and Team Training views you use for in-facility training into one category called “Gym Tools.” While we may have removed 45% of the items in your main view, we think this experience makes it 100% easier to find what you really need.

Like Kondo, we believe that when we’re Tidying Up, we’re not just cleaning, we’re making space for something else, something more important.

In our case, we wanted to clean up your navigation so you could focus on the things that really matter:

The athletes and teams you serve, the programs you design, and the feedback that describes the impact you’re making.

These are the essential things. Sometimes more is not more. Often, more is less. In many instances, the desire for “more” is a function of fear. Fear of inadequacy, fear of insecurity, and fear of the unknown.

We’re not so sure fear is ever a good reason to do anything.

We’d been eyeing this Tidying project for a while and simply lacked the time and courage to tackle it head on. We’re glad we finally did it and think you will be too.

And if you’re wondering, this simplification effort isn’t a one time thing for TrainHeroic. It’s a commitment to quality over quantity. Steve Jobs once said, “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Simplicity works, but it takes work. We’ll never be perfect, but we’re making progress.

TrainHeroic isn’t about adding more to your life, it’s about removing the monkeywork in your way so you can spend more on what matters: developing deep and lasting connections with the athletes you care about.

We hope this simple act of tidying up sparked a little joy in your experience.

I’d love to hear your feedback on these changes. And if you’re curious, our team’s got a few other changes to roll out shortly, each thoughtfully designed to help your athletes find joy in their journey of training.

– Ben 

I’ve always been a performance nerd.

I was never naturally great at the things I cared about. I was a Try-hard that had to do everything under the sun to improve and get an edge.

So when I got the chance to talk with Dr. Anders Ericsson, the renowned “expert on expertise,” I jumped at the opportunity.

Ericsson is the pioneer of Deliberate Practice. For over 30 years, he has studied the practice habits and routines of top performers across dozens of domains. If anyone knows how to maximize potential and achieve mastery, it’s him.

After two days of turning his theories inside out and examining them from every angle, I asked him. “Anders, if you had to boil it down to a single point, what’s the secret to mastery?”

He folded his arms and pursed his lips, mentally compressing decades of research down to a singular morsel of wisdom.

He told me:

“Those who do the most work over the longest period of time, do the best.”

It turns out, if you can just stick to something long enough, you’ll eventually get pretty good at it. The operative words being, “if you can.”

The problem is, “sticking to it,” is easier said than done. Most of us simply don’t.

The reasons are numerous but often related. We get scared. We lose focus. We burn out. We get hurt. We suffer.

Eventually…we quit.

For these reasons and more, far too many of us never reach our potential. And that’s a shame, because at TrainHeroic we believe reaching our potential is the most valuable thing each of us can do for ourselves and society.

In fact, our friend and newly minted #1 author Logan Gelbrich presents an argument in Going Right that failing to stay on one’s path is one of the sadder things happening in the world.

We tend to agree and are working to fix this.

// We partner with coaches to keep athletes on their journey of training, designing solutions to help them find joy along the way.

In the spirit of that purpose, this past month our team rallied to energize and bring our Mobile Athlete Profiles to life.

Our initial implementation in 2018 was basic. Some might even say “spartan.” While it was built upon a firm philosophical foundation, the presentation left much to be desired. Our first pass didn’t quite honor athletes’ efforts the way we felt it should.

We believe effort is beautiful and we thought the design of the athlete Profile should reflect that belief. So when our UX maven Kelli Fox set out to take that interface up a notch, she carefully considered the intention and effect of each visual element.

The newly designed Profile pops. It moves. Loading states pulse like a high intensity heartbeat. Rising bar charts document athletes’ individual efforts. Area graphs add up each smaller effort to show their contribution to the bigger picture.

There is enough detail for an accurate portrait of performance and enough perspective to drive home the theme.

Every Rep Counts.

As PowerAthlete CEO John Welbourn says, “Training is like moving a pile of dirt. Some days you use a shovel, some days you use a spoon but as long as you move some dirt, you’re headed in the right direction.”

Whether you had big days or smalls days in the past, what really matters is that you showed up consistently and remained committed to the process.

Combined, the elements in the updated Profile our team crafted tell the story of that process. They visually narrate the obstacles overcome, reps performed, and hours put in.

We hope the refreshed Profiles better honor the art of your efforts and inspire you to take action today.

Because as the great Coach Bill Shakespeare once said, “What’s past is prologue.” Whatever happened in the past, regardless of its seeming level of significance, set the table for this moment.

In that way, the past is everything and it’s nothing. It’s both responsible for providing the opportunity in front of you and it’s irrelevant to what happens next.

In each moment, you have a choice.

You can choose to Be Your Best or choose to be something less.

You write your destiny every single moment of every single day. To that end, the rep that matters the most is the one you do next.

Don’t waste energy worrying whether each session is perfect or how it stacks up to the last one. On the journey to being your best, Every Rep Counts.

So get your reps in today and continue crafting the masterpiece of your journey.