Why you should be paying attention to bio-feedback
Bio-feedback is our bodies way of communicating with us to provide hints about how it’s feeling. By tracking metrics such as sleep, energy, stress, hunger, and soreness you can evaluate trends to determine how your body is recovering and adapting to training demands.
Biofeedback is basically all of the ways that our body communicates with us to give us hints about how it’s feeling. Every single day we’re doing things that ultimately have an impact on he we perform and feel. The way that we train, work, eat, sleep, interact, and move will all impact how your body functions. Tracking biofeedback is a powerful tool that can help to optimize your training routine. By monitoring various physiological and psychological metrics, such as sleep quality and quantity, energy levels, stress, hunger, and soreness, biofeedback can provide valuable insights into how the body is responding to training, allowing you (and your coach) to make adjustments to your routine to achieve optimal results.
While we don’t have an objective measure each day of how our body is fairing on a scale from 1-10, we do have a lot of tools at our disposal to understand how you’re responding to these external stimuli. Tuning into bio-feedback and tracking trends over time is an excellent way to listen to your bodies cues and use that data to modulate the external stimuli.
When tracked daily, you can evaluate trends and determine how your body is recovering and adapting to imposed stressors. For example, if you are having a period of increased stress at work and then we notice that soreness has increased and is sticking around for longer and sleep quality has gone down the toilet, it might be an indication that you’re not recovering well as a result of the extra work stress. This discovery allows us to adjust training volume to better aid recovery.
Here are the 5 key bio-feedback markers that you should be paying attention to:
Bio-Feedback markers
Sleep (quantity + Quality)
Track both sleep quantity and quality! Adequate sleep is essential for muscle recovery and growth, and inadequate sleep can lead to decreased energy levels and impaired performance. By tracking the quality and quantity of sleep you can make adjustments to your training routine to ensure you’re getting the rest required to optimize gains (ex: opting to take a rest day on a day after you only slept 5 hours).
Energy Levels
Low energy levels can be a sign that you’re overtraining or not getting enough rest, while high energy levels can indicate that the body is ready to take on a more challenging training routine. By tracking energy levels, you can adjust training intensity to ensure that you’re maximizing each session.
Stress Levels
Stress plays a huge role in how we think, feel, and perform. In addition, high levels of stress can lead to increased cortisol levels, which can have a negative impact on muscle growth and recovery. By monitoring stress levels, we can see correlations between high stress days, weight spikes, and poor training days. This one in particular can add a lot of color to your performance and help you adjust expectations based on the season of life that you’re in.
Hunger
Adequate nutrition is essential for muscle growth, and monitoring hunger levels can help to ensure that you’re consuming enough calories to support training. It is also really helpful to be aware of how hungry you are in the context of your current nutrition goals. If you’re in a cutting phase, for example, and you’re feeling insanely hungry all the time then it’s probably a good indication that we’ll need to start reversing soon because your body can’t handle any more reductions in calories.
soreness
Soreness is a metric that can be used to adjust training intensity. Soreness is a normal part of strength training, but excessive soreness can be a sign that you’re overtraining or not giving your muscles enough time to recover. By tracking soreness levels, we can adjust training intensity or frequency to ensure we’re optimizing growth and recovery
Bio-feedback is also an amazing way to track progress separate from the scale! As clients start to build better habits, we might notice increases in energy and sleep quality which are huge wins that also come from living a healthier, more balanced lifestyle.
You don’t necessarily have to track all of these metrics each and every day, but I’d encourage everyone to start listening to what your body is telling you. This can help you understand when to start altering training or nutrition to fit different seasons of life and it can also help you track your progress in different ways!
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