In striving to achieve maximum athletic performance, it’s easy to believe that putting in maximum effort will always yield the greatest results, but that is not strictly the case. Many coaches will find that getting athletes to perform at their fullest potential is a much more complicated challenge than simply having them put more time into the weight room.
Mike Bewley has been coaching athletes in the weight room for the past 22 years. He began as an Assistant Strength & Conditioning Coach at Georgia Southern University in 2002. He then moved onto the University of Dayton in 2006, where he worked as a Specialist in Sports Nutrition and Strength & Conditioning Coach. Bewley then became the assistant director of human performance for the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets in 2012 and later served as the Director of Basketball Strength and Conditioning for Clemson University from 2016-2020. Like many strength coaches, throughout his coaching tenure, he was constantly looking for the most effective way to prepare his athletes for gameday.
“Coaches often say, ‘I’m going to make the practices so hard that the games seem easy.’ That’s a bad recipe,” Bewley says. “No one says I’m going to go out and run a marathon and a half in preparation for a marathon. No one runs a marathon before the marathon. At least, sane people don’t.”
So, if training athletes harder and pushing them well beyond their limits isn’t the right solution, then what is?
Bewley suggests that as athletes approach game day, their training should evolve based on the relationship between minimum intensity thresholds (i.e., in-game intensity metrics) and the relative fitness of individual athletes.
In other words, by measuring how quickly each athlete’s heart rate recovers after activity matched to in-game intensity levels, Bewley could then assign activities individualized to the athlete based on the positive or negative progress being made, rather than universally increasing exercise intensity as game day approaches.
The key to knowing how much is just enough lies in the data Bewley can generate on an individual basis. And that data is recorded and interpreted by the Polar Team Pro system.
Here’s an example of how it can work. First, Bewley sets his baseline measurements against a real-world workout, and sometimes, the best coaches can do is a scrimmage.
“Try to set up that scrimmage, an inner squad scrimmage. Ask the coaches to do that,” Bewley explains. “Run it just as you normally would a game or as close to a game as you can. And that will give you a good reference upon which to draw if you’re in that off-season.
“What I’ve gleaned from doing this 20 plus years is that 75 percent of the game is spent at 85 percent of your max heart rate and 15 percent is spent at 95 percent of your max heart rate.”
To prepare his athletes appropriately, Bewley used heart rate data from the athletes’ scrimmages to make sure they were training at levels that matched their in-game intensity. This ensured that, when the time came, his athletes would already have achieved an appropriate level of conditioning. They could perform under the same levels of stress demanded during regular play.
“With the Polar Team Pro, I could be there and watch the athletes during that heavy match play. Those days were like light bulbs for me,” he says. “I wanted to be able to see athletes get near their max load. I already knew they were going to hit 95 percent of their max heart rate. That was a good enough test for me. And then when they stopped playing, I sat there and watched individual athletes to see how their heart rate recovered.”
Bewley’s go-to method for gauging his athletes’ fitness levels is Martin Buchheit’s 30-15 IFT program, which can be found on the Google Play or Apple iOS App Store.
The test consists of three zones on a basketball court, where athletes must reach certain zones within a 30 second period based on a sequence of tones. They are given a 15-second rest period and can only miss three zones in a row or else the test ends. Accurately evaluating an athlete’s energy system can be tricky because it’s unlike training strength, where you can directly quantify progress. Without the heart rate data provided by the Polar Team Pro equipment, it would become far more difficult to practically visualize each athlete’s real-time fitness.
“Polar allows you to systematically plot those progression points along the way and it gives feedback to the coach, to you, but also the athletes,” says Bewley. “They’ve got to buy into what you’re doing too. Fortunately, when they see the data and they experience the results, total buy-in becomes easier.”
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