Firstbeat and the Individualized Athlete – Achieve Training, Recovery and Performance Goals

“There was one athlete who religiously went to bed at the same time, but no matter what, his recovery didn’t start until 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning. With this athlete’s protocol, the strength coach added a daytime nap, just a 30-minute nap during the day. This bumped up his recovery by almost two hours each night,” says Benjamin Jensen from Firstbeat Sports.

Jensen has seen many success stories like this over his eight years with Firstbeat Sports, the global leader in athlete monitoring technology. As Director of North American Sales, Jensen knows first-hand how Firstbeat’s heart rate monitoring and heart rate variability (HRV) tracking lead to significant improvement and optimization for athletes.

“At Firstbeat, we provide tools for coaches to improve performance and to keep players on the field, and that’s what it’s all really about,” says Jensen.

To truly maximize an individual athlete’s training, performance and recovery, each athlete requires an individualized plan. The Quick Recovery Test from Firstbeat Sports is a 3-minute test that, when administered on a regular basis, identifies trends with each athlete and allows the coach to respond, creating opportunities to address the unique requirements of each athlete.

“We have teams that run the Quick Recovery Test everyday, and they run it in a standardized environment. They run it at the same time of day and in the same place,” says Jensen. “So, we’re in the locker room, everybody’s sitting up, we’re quiet, we’re off the phones. Here we go, three minutes. And from that, we’re going to get a quick snapshot of each athlete, individually. We’re going to pull some HRV data and some resting heart rate data. We’re going to capture respiration rate. From this data, we’ll generate a score indexed down to a single number for each athlete.

“Coaches will see a team average, but they’ll also obtain a unique score for each athlete, today. And that’s important. Then, they’ll see each athlete’s average score for the last seven days for comparison and answer critical questions like, ‘What has my team and what have my athletes been through this past week?”

Comparing results from the past 7 days can help spot important team and player trends any strength coach must address, or identify anomalies with individuals to inform the overall narrative of why they’re feeling and performing the way they are.

“Consistency is obviously huge, not only with administering the Quick Recovery Test, but trying to make sure that players are eating and sleeping on as consistent a basis as possible. But midterms are midterms, finals are finals,” says Jensen. “So even if you have optimal recovery occurring with an athlete, he or she will still experience external stresses coaches can help them identify and manage, whether it’s academics-related or there’s some trouble at home, or with a boyfriend or a girlfriend. It really helps a coach do his or her job not only in the weight room but beyond the game.

“Some people kind of look at it as a bank, with recovery accounts and sleep accounts for the week. Maybe on Monday, you’re short a little sleep because you only slept for six hours. Well, now we know and can adjust. It’s OK, because on Tuesday, the athlete can try to bump it up to seven or eight hours. You might even ask them to add a daily nap, giving the body a chance to regain those losses.

As with any worthwhile software/hardware approach to fine-tuning teams and individuals, Firstbeat Sports’ Quick Recovery Test continually learns about each athlete and adapts, helping coaches evolve their programming.

“Based on an athlete’s history, the Firstbeat Sports solution will produce ever more accurate results by learning each athlete’s spectrum of indexed scores, which feeds back upon itself, creating even more precise scores going forward instead of starting from scratch every day.”

The individualization opportunities that arise are off-the-charts valuable — and even more importantly — actionable.”