Optimized Training™
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Optimized Training is not a traditional training approach. It uses entirely different data, technologies, methods, and metrics to generate your training program.
As an athlete, there’s arguably no more consequential performance-related decision than determining how you’ll invest your precious training time. This decision is the largest determinant of your race-day results, training time required, and likelihood of training-related injury. (Optimized Training™ is available through TriDot and RunDot.)
Optimized Training helps you "do the right training right"™ to deliver your best results in less time.
So, what is “Optimized Training” and how is it different from other training options that you see marketed as individualized, customized, scientific, data-driven, dynamic, and even “powered by AI”?
Let’s start with what Optimized Training is NOT.
What Optimized Training is NOT
- Optimized Training is not a traditional training approach. It uses entirely different data, technologies, methods, and metrics to generate your training program.
- Optimized Training is not simply the computer automation of a traditional training approach. There are many training apps popping up that offer cheap, computer-generated training. Some are even “powered by AI”. These are merely the computer automation of the traditional training method—not Optimized Training.
- Optimized Training is not a replacement for a coach. Optimized Training designs training for athletes with or without a coach. TriDot’s Augmented Coaching™ and RunDot's Augmented coaching services are available to coaches who want to focus their time on their athletes and leverage Optimized Training to deliver the highest quality training for their athletes.
Optimized Training is as different from traditional training approaches as using a navigation app on your smart phone is from using an atlas or continually stopping to ask for directions.
Optimized Training Overview
Training optimization is a process for generating the best performance improvement plan from infinite possibilities to produce the best results within a given amount of time and an acceptable injury-risk tolerance and is powered by Predictive Fitness's nSight™ Optimization Engine.
nSight is a massive dataset, data normalizing technologies, and advanced decision-making technologies capable of quantifying alternatives, comparing them, and prescribing the best one.
The Dataset
Our proprietary dataset contains biometrics and performance data from more than 50 million optimized training sessions from more than 250,000 athletes worldwide and continues to grow.
The Data Quality
Training optimization begins and ends with data, so data quality is essential. As the saying goes, “Garbage in, garbage out.”
Data iQ™ Data iQ™ (Input Quality) is a proprietary metric that quantifies the “quality” of data you provide that are used to optimize your health, fitness, and/or performance. Some of the most significant factors that impact Data iQ are equipment, intensity metric type, corroborating data, and recency. Higher quality data input means higher quality outputs—analysis, predictions, optimization—that lead to better results for you. Learn more.
nSight uses sophisticated data-normalizing algorithms to contextualize performance data making it useful for comparative analysis by isolating the impact of the training itself from the impacts of other factors such as your genetics and training environment. The impacts of genetics and environment on training are substantial and make it impossible to isolate and measure training effectiveness without normalization. With Optimized Training, “dirty data” will not do.
nSight accounts for the impact of your genetics and environment during both prescription and analysis phases of optimization with its Physiogenomix™ and EnviroNorm® technologies.
Physiogenomix™ Physiogenomix technology uses DNA to determine an athlete’s Training Intensity Response, Aerobic Potential, Recovery Rate, and Injury Predisposition. Learn more.
EnviroNorm® EnviroNorm technology accounts for environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, elevation, wind, and terrain that have a significant impact on your training and racing. Learn more.
Normalizing performance data based on the genes inside you and the environment surrounding you dramatically increases the quality of the data used to optimize your training program.
The Decision-Making
nSight uses your training and biometric data along with its proprietary dataset and numerous analytical and prescriptive technologies such as data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and prescriptive analytics to make tens of thousands of training decisions resulting in a training plan that will deliver the best results specifically for you.
If you asked ten highly qualified coaches using traditional training methods to design a season training plan for the same athlete including the same races, you’d undoubtedly get ten different training plans. It would be impossible to tell which plan would deliver the best results.
Rather than using optimization based on actual data from tens of thousands of athletes to design your training, traditional training uses individual opinions based on theory, philosophies, and personal experience.
Traditional training methods can help you get better, but Optimized Training can help you become your best.
Optimized Training Metrics
Metrics are the standards used to evaluate data and make decisions. The degree of “meaning” required of the metric being used is always relative to the decisions being made. With traditional training methods, accumulation metrics (or “messy metrics”) may be adequate. E.g. Training may be measured using only distance, duration, or generic “training stress” values. These messy metrics are adequate if you only want to get better, but if you want to be your best, more meaning is required.
Below are some of the metrics used to optimize your training. Keep in mind that you don’t need to be a data scientist to benefit from Optimized Training. The system uses these metrics to optimize your training, so you can focus on just doing your training. (If you’re a coach using RunDot or TriDot, you can just focus less on the data and more on your athletes.)
That said, for many athletes it’s helpful to be familiar with the metrics and terminology used to optimize their training. If you don’t know the words used to describe your training, it’ll be difficult to understand or even think about it clearly.
Here are a few of the training metrics and methods used to optimize your training:
Training Stress
Normalized Training Stress® (NTS™)
Normalized Training Stress is the consummate method of quantifying the physiological stress from a training session. It considers the session’s discipline type, environment, intensity distribution, intensity levels, intensity durations, and your Training Stress Profile® or your ability to absorb training stress. Learn more.
Residual Training Stress™ (RTS™)
Residual Training Stress is a measure of the residual effects of NTS on your body based on its varying intensity, duration, and frequency. Different sessions with the same NTS value may have different residuals thus impact your future RTS values differently. Simply put, NTS describes your training. RTS describes your training’s effect on you. Learn more.
RTS7™
Your RTS7 is a 7-day rolling average of your RTS. It’s a leading indicator of changes in fitness (NTL) and Performance Readiness. Learn more.
Normalized Training Load® (NTL™)
Normalized Training Load is a measure of your fitness or training capacity. NTL does not describe your performance ability, rather it describes your capacity to maintain a certain level of training stress. Learn more.
Performance Readiness™
Performance Readiness is a measure of your ability to perform at your best. It’s derived from your NTL, RTS7, and RTS. RunDot and TriDot will ensure you have high Performance Readiness on your race day and considers your lack of Performance Readiness during training and assessments throughout your training. Learn more.
Fitness, Stress, & Readiness™ Graph
Your Fitness, Stress, & Readiness™ (FSR™) graph allows you to visualize your current, past, and planned RTS, RTS7, NTL, and Performance Readiness. Learn more.
Performance
RunDot® and TriDot® Scores
Your RunDot Score is a measure of your performance ability in running. For triathletes, your TriDot Scores are a performance measure for each discipline. SwimDot, BikeDot, and RunDot Scores reflect your normalized functional threshold power or pace (FTP) on a 1 to 100 scale with 1 being the slowest and 100 being at or near world-record pace.
TrainX® Score
Your TrainX Score is a single number between 1 and 100 that lets you know how you're doing with your training. TrainX describes your “training execution” of your prescribed optimized training relative to its value and impact on your overall performance improvement. It scores individual training sessions, weekly training, and multi-week training periods.
TrainX is quite different from and more powerful than the traditional “accumulation metrics” used by others to measure and quantify training. Accumulation metrics focus athletes merely on accumulating or maximizing training time, distance, or stress over a given period without consideration for what training was done, how it was done, why it was done, or its actual contribution to performance improvement. Athletes focused on accumulation metrics are highly susceptible to performance plateaus, unrealized potential, and training-related injury. Learn more.
Training Stress Profile®
Your Training Stress Profile® (TSP™) is your fitness fingerprint that allows nSight to prescribe highly optimized training specifically for you based on your unique athlete profile, training data, and genetics.
Your TSP is a 27-dimension training capacity profile that quantifies your ability to absorb different types of training stress (aerobic, threshold, muscular, and neural) over different time periods (days, weeks, months) for different disciplines (swim, bike, run).
Projections
Threshold Projections
nSight predicts future improvements in your functional thresholds based on your performance level, age, aerobic potential, aerobic trainability, recovery rate, Normalized Training Stress, Residual Training Stress, and Normalized Training Load, and your expected level of training execution, among other factors.
Stamina Curve™
Stamina is your ability to hold specific percentages of your threshold beyond one hour as is needed for longer events. nSight calculates your current and future stamina curves to show this power/pace-duration relationship based on similar factors to what’s described under Threshold Projections.
RaceX®
RaceX is to racing what RunDot and TriDot are to training. It optimizes your racing to give you the best possible results based on your performance potential. It closes the data loop between your training and racing. It projects your FTP normalized to race environment, target power, and precise pacing throughout the course, with final projected finish time.
Summary
Optimized Training is a proven process for generating your training program using dependable data, meaningful metrics, and advanced analytics to deliver your best results in less time with fewer injuries.
The days of the traditional training methods using personal opinions about theories and philosophies and using dirty data and messy metrics are gone.
Best beats better!
