How to Determine an Athlete’s Fitness Level

How to Determine the "CURRENT" State of an Athlete's Fitness Level?

When we begin to train an individual, the first question every coach asks is: what is your fitness level?

Perhaps this may sound like a silly question, but if we stop to think about it, we will see that the answer is not so obvious to what we imagine.

Have you ever wondered how we determined an athlete’s fitness level?

And if there were a single number that would determine our level of conditioning, would not it be much easier?

Joel de Bem, coach and founder of Commandos Legion

Exercise physiologists generally agree that there are only three things you can improve to become physiologically more fit for endurance sports performance: aerobic capacity, lactate threshold and economy. Ultimately, these are the reasons you train … All this seems to tell us something, but at the same time they do not say what we really should know.

Well, as we all know, there are genetic factors that contribute to our Vo2max. However, this does not mean that an athlete with a higher value of Vo2max will beat another athlete with less value.
For this will be influenced by the racing economy, how long the athlete manages to keep his effort at more intense levels. And most of all, at what speed it maintains its these levels of intensity.

Physiological Fitness

Aerobic capacity: Also referred to as VO2 max, aerobic capacity is your ability to use oxygen to produce energy.
Stroke volume: Improvements in aerobic capacity have largely to do with how much blood (which contains oxygen) the heart pumps out to the working muscles with every beat. This is called “stroke volume” and has a lot to do with how much aerobic capacity you have. A purpose of training is to improve your stroke volume.
Lactate threshold: Also referred to as anaerobic threshold. While sports scientists may argue about the differences between these two terms, for athletes there is little reason for concern. Both are essentially the high intensity at which you begin to “red line.” On a perceived exertion scale of 1 (low) to 10 (high) you redline at about 7 or 8. Whatever your heart rate, power or pace is at this moment is your lactate threshold intensity.

Let's understand how to get the variables that will define our fitness state.

SAID Principle & fitness

The purpose of training is to physically challenge the body. From this challenge the body adapts and becomes more capable of handling a given level of stress. And to be effective, the training should be specific to the stress anticipated in the goal event for which you are training.

Therefore, Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands (SAID) is associated with “fitness.”

Each athlete is equally fit for the unique physical demands of their sports. For example, if you want to define fitness as the physical skill required to hit a ball a long way accurately with a stick then the golfer is the fittest.

(Joe Friel)

Fatigue is a product of Stress

From the moment you promote stress, at the same time you will be unbalancing your body at the muscular, chemical and physiological level. And as a result, we can sum to the term fatigue.

Fatigue is the product of stress.

There is a very strong link between fitness and fatigue. If you are fatigued from training, then you stressed the body adequately enough to create the potential for fitness. So, when fatigue is rising you can expect the same thing from fitness. The opposite is also true. (Joe Friel)

Form

Then we got to the point of competing. In order to race well one must reduce fatigue. This is what tapering before a big race is all about. You don’t want to go into important races tired.

Reducing fatigue is called “coming into form.”

Coming into form requires losing fitness. You must give up some fitness in order to shed fatigue and therefore race at the highest levels. Peaking is as much an art as a science. That’s because we are humans and not machines. There are many variables in our lives.

(Joe Friel)

Doing the Math...

The form would be the result of the subtraction of “today’s” fatigue by the athlete’s “today’s” fitness. The result of this account will be the “tomorrow” form of the athlete. This number can be both positive and negative. When negative, it is probably not the best time for competition, given the athlete’s fatigue. Positive numbers indicate an athlete rested and perhaps already fit to compete.

And what is the unit of measure to reach the magic number?

This may be the best definition of an athlete’s training load today. Through this parameter, called TSS (Training Stress Score), we can represent, through a single value, the relationship between the athlete and his workload.