Wednesday Wisdom: Monitoring Training Loads For Functional Training Pt. 2

Hello again to everyone, Luke here again from the FTI.  Previously, I have posted an article discussing how functional training instructors can embrace recent scientific methods of monitoring and calculating the session RPE and training load your clients and of course, yourself may experience in each of your daily functional training sessions.  To reorientate yourself to the concept of training load you can read this article again below. At the completion of that article we called for all FTI instructors to fill out our sample session RPE and training load survey. Well, the results are in and we are now going to have a look at what we found out!

1. What was the purpose of your training session

It appears from the  responces we gathered, that most FTI instructors and practitioners, train for a variety of responces, but most notably it appears to be for metabolic conditioning, strength and aerobic endurance.

2. What sort of functional training did you undertake?

The results of question 2, it is clear that the majority of respondents utilise a variety of functional training implements, with the ViPR being one of the more prominent tools.

3. How hard was your training session

31% of survey respondents in this survey has reported that their functional training sessions get as high as 8/10 when it comes to rating the intensity of their session on a 0-10 scale, even more interesting is that 19% of survey responded rated their sessions even higher, at 9/10!

4. How long was your training session?

A staggering 96% of survey respondents reported their functional training sessions last for an hour!

Summary:

The results of this FTI survey highlight a few interesting features about our functional training sessions, they are (1) used for a variety of training adaptations (2) utilise a broad range of functional training equipment (3) are often very intense and (4) for high intensity training, quite long.

In my next blog I will discuss how functional training instructors may be able to adopt some strategic periodisation strategies utilising the session RPE / session load system to avoid overtraining and to help maximise adaptation. In particular, we will look at Banisters fitness-fatigue model.