Press Release: TRAC and Readiness
By Mike Tuchscherer
TRAC has become an athlete’s favorite for physiological monitoring. It gives detailed, accurate, and individualized information on how the various processes of the body are functioning.
But some athletes have noticed what seems to be an interesting and dissatisfying phenomenon. TRAC may show low stress, good CNS, and good adaptive indications, yet the workout they have later isn’t very good. Or TRAC may show high stress, poor CNS, and/or poor adaptive reserves, yet they have a very good workout.
How can that be?
On the surface, it seems like inaccuracy, and it is IF you expect TRAC to predict your readiness. But TRAC was never designed to gauge readiness; it was designed to measure adaptability.
What’s the difference?
Readiness is a very complex topic, but the basic idea is simple. Readiness seeks to measure how “ready” the body is for a high level performance on a given day. High readiness should equal high performance. The reason readiness is complex is because it relies on a number of systems in the body. For example, a powerlifter relies on the muscular system, various energy systems (mostly alactic), the nervous system, etc. And even still, readiness is not so simple as to be the sum of all the component systems.
On the other side of that, Adaptability is the idea that at certain times the body is more capable of producing adaptations than other times. This means that if we take advantage of those times, then we can create bigger gains in the long term. There are even more physiological systems here, including hormones, but the interplay between them seems to be reduced, thus making assessment easier to do and meaningful recommendations are easier to generate.
What to do?
If your TRAC is good, that’s not a promise that the workout will be good. The opposite is also true. But what it does say is this: If you manage your training and life so that you consistently have good adaptability in the body’s systems, then your long term gains will be better. The concepts are grounded in medical theory, built on top of medical research. Then they were studied and applied to TRAC, then extensively tested by our R&D team. So I can tell you that it does work and it works for everyone because that’s the way it was designed.
What you should do is follow the recommendations given by TRAC. This will ensure that you are doing what you can to keep your adaptability high so that the program that you are doing is producing the best possible results.
Final Anecdote
Personally, my gains have been very good recently. This stems from several things that have changed in the training setting. From techniques such as Force Curve Shaping and other techniques to manage the contents of the training load to increased attentiveness to technique, all of it surely plays a part. But what I have previously failed to mention is how I’ve adapted the stress management portion of the training program. I have allowed TRAC to completely guide the training stress of my training, so the volume is controlled based on how “stressed” my body is feeling. This is a bit like Novocain – it takes a little while to start working, but once it does, you’ll never want to go back.
And that’s where I am right now. Allowing TRAC to govern my training stress has been a critical to my continued success. And I have to look no further than my own training logs to prove it. If I had to go back to the other way of training, I could do it, but I don’t think it would produce the same kinds of results as actually training according to my body’s physiological need.
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