Understanding Effort

Discover how your team's training week unfolded and adjust training intensity to ensure athletes hit the right amount of work in each energy system.

Effort

Your effort insights offer valuable information on how your team's training went the previous week. They provide essential guidance for optimizing training plans and ensuring alignment with seasonal goals.

• Weekly Training Composition: Your weekly reports highlight the composition of training sessions, indicating whether the week was predominantly focused on recovery, aerobic, threshold or speed work. This insight allows you to assess whether your training plan aligns with the current phase of the season, helping you make informed decisions to keep your team on track.

  It also shows how closely the actual training aligned with your planned distribution. This information helps you gauge training effectiveness and make adjustments as needed to optimize performance.

• Individual Session Cards: Each session card provides detailed insights into individual workouts, including the number of athletes present, deviation from planned intensity, distribution across training zones, and volume/rest compared to the plan. Additionally, the average Triton score for athletes in each session offers a snapshot of overall training quality, allowing you to track progress and make adjustments accordingly.
  
  

Evaluating Deviations

When you see a deviation between planned vs actual intensity for a workout, you can use the zone distribution, volume and rest to understand where things went wrong.

• Zone distribution: The hashed lines represent the structure for the type of workout planned(recovery, aerobic, threshold or speed - as shown in the image below). Under the hashed line are zone colours, with the bottom hashed line being entirely zone 1,  zones 2 and 3 merging to rep the middle line, and the top line is a combo of zones 4 and 5. When the way athletes swam a workout matches the plan, the shapes of the coloured and hash lines should be very close. As they miss paces and interval times, the shapes will start to move toward a different plan type.
• Volume & Rest: the light blue circle on the volume and rest lines represent the plan, while the darker circle is what actually happened. As swimmers deviate from the plan on rest or volume, it combines with zone distributions to move the workout do a different type. 

Examples of typical deviations: 

• lower volume, higher rest, higher speed - this will move you up from aerobic into speed. Often happens when swimmers felt good so went faster than the prescribed paces.  
• higher volume,  lower rest, higher speed - this will take you from aerobic to threshold.  This will happen if pace times were too fast for the swimmer. They are swimming fast to hit them, but not hitting them, so getting less rest. 
• volume and rest on point, higher speed - this can move you from your chosen workout type up one. 
• lower volume, higher rest, lower speed - this can change a workout to recovery. Often happens when an athlete isn't feeling awesome and misses paces but skips reps to stretch. 

Why Effort Matters

Understanding effort insights in your weekly swim reports empowers you to fine-tune your training approach, ensuring that your team is on the right track to meet their performance goals. By leveraging these insights, you can optimize training plans, monitor progress, and ultimately achieve success in the pool.