Measuring Exhaustion and Readiness

Project Infobox
Self researcher(s)	Philipp Kalwies
Related tools	Check My Level
Related topics	Sports and fitness, Heart rate, Cardiovascular
Builds on project(s)
Has inspired	Projects (0)

Show and Tell Talk Infobox
Featured image
Date	2013/05/11
Event name	2013 QS Europe Conference
Slides

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Measuring Exhaustion and Readiness is a Show & Tell talk by Philipp Kalwies that has been imported from the Quantified Self Show & Tell library.The talk was given on 2013/05/11 and is about Sports and fitness, Heart rate, and Cardiovascular.

Description

A description of this project as introduced by Quantified Self follows:

Philipp Kalwies talks about the risks of over-training and how an athlete can measure their body's level of exhaustion. He believes that the right amount and intensity of training is the key to successful performance for athletes. In this talk, he discusses the testing of a new device which promises to conveniently deliver data that athletes need to measure their exhaustion and intensity and help to find the right moment for their next workout.

Video and transcript

https://vimeo.com/69808656

A transcript of this talk is below:

So my name is Philipp Kalwies. I’m the co-founder of the meet up group in Hamburg, Germany, and today I would like to talk about measuring training often and measuring training readiness with this special QS device. It’s still not open, and it’s still very very new and that’s why I’m very excited to talk about it.

And what I’m talking about is what does every athlete have to do? He has to train, exercise as much as possible, but many get into some kind of overtraining. Overtraining happens when people trained too much and do not get enough time to recover. As you can see here on the slides, after each training the body gets a little weaker; this was meant to be. And between one or two days of recovery it brings them back to the level before and then it gets stronger, and this is called super compensation. And the question for every athlete is, when is the right moment to train again. If it’s done too late, then it’s not the perfect moment. If he does it too early then it’s even worse. So the perfect moment for the next training is at the peak of the super compensation. Once you are at the peak you can train again, and then you have the weakness and then you recover again, and get the super compensation and so on, so you go up. But what many people do is they train and train and train and train, like Mikhail told us in his talk this morning and they get into the overtraining; the negative super compensation, so they get weaker and weaker and weaker and this happens to a lot of people. So like 50% of all professional athletes, many amateur athletes suffer from this problem; it’s a huge problem. For example, a friend of mine she was running 3 to 4 times a week and each time 10 to 15km, which is way too much and one year later she broke her leg because of that, because she effectively weakened her body the whole year. So the current symptoms full overtraining is persistent muscle soreness, fatigue, lower heart rate variability, sometimes even depression or mental breakdowns and this is how you look like when this happens to you. So when is the right moment, and how can we find the right moment for the next training. There is this sub rule of one or two days and this is quite okay, but sometimes it’s much more and sometimes it’s less and it’s hard to find the right measurement. So 48 hours is not a good time rule and it’s not really a good rule. So what do you do, and as we are here at a QS conference, of course the solution is a gadget, and this gadget needs to be one that tells us and indicates visually when the right moment for the next training is and if we should rest or not. This year, at People 2013, this is the fitness and bodybuilding fair in Cologne Germany, I found this device which is called Check My Level. And I really like it because the good thing about it is it works so easy and it tells you can give you a direct feedback, so you do not have to measure things by yourself and finding the feedback for yourself, it just does it for you. The way it works is that it puts a very mild current through your column, and the response of the muscular system tells you how it is. So I used it, and of course before I used it I did not train at all. I did not do anything like three or four days before. And here are the results, the results are 150 points means I’m totally ready for the next training, and I can train as hard as I want, and I am totally rested and my body is just in the right condition for really strong training. So this is what I did. I went to the gym, I took some boosters before I trained and I worked as really really hard as I could in order to get some results, and as you will see on the next slide the next day I measured it again, and what was the result? This was the result, and it told me to slow down because the body fatigue was very high; I was very exhausted from it. When I looked into the online platform, I found out that I get knocked 150 points like before, but only 16. Below 20 means you are very very exhausted, and you should avoid every training as much as possible. Between 20 and 40 there is some kind of exhaustion, and 40 to 100 is okay, and over 100 you should definitely train. But of course I didn’t do it. I went to the gym the same day and do the training again very hard, as hard as I could. This time relax and I was very eager to see the result because I wanted to know is there some recovery or not. And the answer is there was no recovery at all as I exhausted myself again there was no recovery. Again 16 points, so very exhausted. This device told me to slow down and not to train again. This was the day before yesterday. Yesterday I came, so I could not do any training and when I measured it again this was the result I got and then I was really surprised and asked myself what’s happening here, and why am I getting some evaluation. I thought that I was recovering. But in fact I did recover but only a bit. The training was so intense that the recovery was very low. So instead of having 40 points or 50 points or whatsoever, I only got to about 25 points. And this system told me to visit the doctor or visit my training coach, or just to find a new way because this was not normal. It’s not normal to have three days to have such exhaustion in a row, and the system told me very correctly that actually my body was sick because the training was just too much. What the system didn’t know anyway was that I had taken some boosters before; I took some caffeine pills, and that exhausted my body so much that I was so exhausted. So my takeaway from this very little test of this very new device is that if you train really hard, two days of recovery is not enough you need more. The device is very accurate and at least it provided data I wasn’t expecting to get. Of course we need much more, so I invite you all to test with me and it would be very interesting to know from you and your experiences. And in the next weeks I will try to make so much more tests like branch chain amino acids, glutamine, some sleep, some herbs, and so on and then try to have the best training that I can get in order to be a winner.

So thank you very much for your attention.

About the presenter

Philipp Kalwies gave this talk.