Autoregulation and Getting in Touch with Yourself in Training

“Just listen to your body!” … You’ve probably heard that phrase uttered many times. In fact, it may also seem straightforward. However, it can be a bit more involved and require some development based on individual tendencies (those who go all in vs cautious) and experience (novice to expert) regardless of what we are applying it to.

The idea of tuning into what your body is telling you for our training (or for your healthy life and fitness journey generally) and learning how to heed the call can be a very valuable skill to hone.  In fact, it may be the most important general skill/tool to develop, whether you are a competitive athlete or casual gym goer. This is true whether talking about taking it to the limit without burnout or injury at high level competition sports, or when trying to dial things in for a sustainably healthy life where staying fit and maintaining capacity is a priority.

As a coach as well as a former athlete in a variety of sports, I have experienced my own long list of injuries when I did not have a refined autoregulative practice and would ignore the voice inside telling me to pull back or tone down. This led to some issues that may have ultimately lowered the ceiling of my full potential, while also delaying any progress I could have been making. However, this also helped to develop my appreciation for autoregulative practices and their ability to keep things progressing sustainably.

At Resilient Body we have also seen this MANY times with people we work with that may get caught up too heavily in numbers, competing and trying got keep up with their peers, and have a greater tendency to push past limits, not have as much experience with what true maximal efforts are, or perhaps have changing priorities or stressors in their lives (a recent move, a new child, career change, relationship stress, etc).

With life priorities, various stimuli, and stressors always in flux, it only makes sense to help develop a keener ability to auto-regulate and navigate best through those changes in a more in tune and balanced fashion.

Autoregulation defined:

Simply put, autoregulation involves being able to self-adjust to various stimuli and stressors accordingly by modulating a variety of factors…  Again, it’s balance. Your body essentially does this on auto-pilot with many processes like regulating blood flow to various tissues and organs to get nutrients and oxygen to where it is needed most depending upon what is going on in the body or in response to the environment. You don’t have to think about this because it just happens. However, this can and does also apply to training (and largely, life).

Your readiness to train or perform, recovery status, and current overall capacity (psychological included) is affected by many other factors that you may not have full control over. These include nutritional status, sleep, mood , prior training session and overall load, menstrual cycle, emotional stressors, support network, biases, and the list goes on. While you weigh and calculate these many factors both consciously and subconsciously, you can become your own VERY reliable source of information regarding your readiness to train and recovery-status IF you are given the proper tools and training and able to tap into it.

So, Why the IF?

That IF is often times why autoregulation comes under fire due to its very subjective nature and ability to harness it. Quite frankly I also have to agree with that critique since many individuals tend to skew one way or another, be guided too heavily by ego, pushing too hard or perhaps not at all, and this can become a far cry from being “regulated” and more like “out of whack”.  

Whether your tendency is to push far beyond your abilities every session (or endeavor) or perhaps to remain consistently cautious with one foot out, you are therefore not able to regulate yourself appropriately if you are not able to account for that fact and adjust. In fact, many people may simply not have the SELF AWARENESS to make those adjustments, and this is where autoregulation may take more or less time and effort for you to develop.

The Special Blend:

It takes a special recipe and balance of self-awareness, drive, aggression, temperance and self-control, patience, experience, and resultant maturity and humility to be successful in “listening to your body” and then going by feel (or gut) in a totally autonomous and subjective way. This can be tough and takes a lot of time and experience to develop unless naturally gifted in that realm of self-awareness and actualization.

Understand, THIS DOES NOT MEAN ALL HOPE IS LOST AND END IT HERE. In fact, there is much promise in already having some of this ability and developing it further. Some research and also personal experience with people we work with dictates that it is indeed something attainable and perhaps something you can already do to a greater extent than you may realize. As it turns out, our own evaluations based on experience may be better predictors of performance than objective biomarkers.

Subjective May be Better than Objective:

In a review published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2016, it was found that subjective questionnaires asking about readiness vs fatigue were more able to predict changes in training stress than objective measurements of hormonal status, immune function, muscle damage, inflammation, as well as heart rate and heart rate variance.

BUT HOW?! While these very relevant and influential objective measurements are useful, they miss some key pieces to the puzzle also part of the entire human experience affecting our ability to perform. These objective measurements are only a piece of other equally important factors (and sometimes more so) such as  psychological, neurological and complex physiological interactions. Where objective data fails, a subjective self-analysis (a valid and reliable check-in) can assess the total picture and therefore better predict recovery and readiness.

There are also autoregulative scales that have proved this in practice like Mike Tuchscherer’s rate of Perceived exertion (RPE) scale based on repetitions in reserve (RIR- how many more reps you think you could do without reaching failure) which is a modification of the original RPE scale. Where this modified scale is especially useful is for weightlifters with varying abilities, as one person may be able to do 20 reps at 65% of their 1RM (1 repetition maximum- the most you can do one time) where another can do only 14 at 65%. This is where you can see that prescribing sets based on percentages of 1RM may not be the best when trying to prescribe a specific total number of total reps or provide a specific stimulus since there are varying levels of ability or experience that will contribute in 1RM percentage-based training. Thus, RPE and other subjective tools based on autoregulation (but with embedded stimulus goals) can be very handy- if not better- for achieving a desired stimulus. Some data specifically comparing Tuchscherer’s RPE to 1RM based training shows an advantage to RPE with slightly better strength gains. So it does work!

My experience, along with many I have coached, shows this may not only be the case for strength training but perhaps in other areas of sport or life pursuits where we may tend to be more rigid than go by a more developed sense of “feel”. I see this often in developing intuitive eating practices with nutrition and holistic health coaching clients since that skill can maintain sustainable healthy nourishment habits for a lifetime over restrictive diet programs.

The Rise of the Intuitive Tech:

These days there are also MANY fitness, health and wellness technology tools aimed to help guide users and collect data that then allow those users (and arguably the companies who created them) to make better decisions about how to regulate themselves. The accuracy of those tech tools and agendas of the companies producing them is a topic for another time, but many of these tools have helped people with a more self-guided healthy lifestyle.

I like to recommend these types of tools as a tuner rather than THE TOOL. Afterall, as I have been highlighting here, you may be able to do that better than any tech contrived tool; and when you better build out your own auto-regulative skills while using some of these tech tools you may be able to avoid some errors and also get back in to balance more easily.

Imagine trying to triangulate (think suspense thriller where the good guys are trying to find the location of phone/caller). If you only have that person’s phone and one tower to track it’s location, you might not be so successful at pinpointing where it is. It’s just a signal some distance out there but you don’t know where it is, as far as a specific direction. Add another tower and it may help you get a little closer to the right direction. Then add a third and you can get a pretty close lock on a location. However, if you add too many towers with conflicted or similar/cancelling signals, you may not be able to find that phone/caller at all with all the noise or drop off. This can be the case with tech.

Some tech can help us get a better ballpark of where we are at, how recovered we are, how many calories we have consumed or expended, how our sleep was the night before, etc. This can be extremely helpful especially when we need to find out where we are to begin with. However, once we have those bearings and more experience, we don’t need those tech tools as much. In fact, we may not need them at all, sometimes we may use them to check in, verify, or recalibrate if we feel something is off and we can’t pinpoint it; but over time you may need them less or perhaps not at all.

Balance: The key to leveraging technology vs the other way around

Getting in touch with yourself using the data you may have and using observation and developing a keener sense of intuition can be a win-win. There may be a quicker initial calibration and a quicker restoration of balance if we feel out of whack and can’t intuit why. However, this STILL TAKES TIME. Sometimes more than we think. Afterall, we need experience for those reference points, so we can live through those events, previous subjective feelings, marks, goals achieved, failures learned from, ego checks, etc. These are our other and, I would argue, more important references to triangulate from.

Some guidance to better autoregulate:

·         To improve at anything, it takes an understanding of one’s limits (historically what our limit are; and being able to gauge what those currently are based on history). Examine what those limitations are and how they influence your ability to clearly see yourself and the world around you.

·         Observe your ego and get it in check. Your ego forms part of your identity but it shouldn’t own your existence. Watch the stories it may spin and how those shape your treatment of yourself in your training and life. Do you constantly tell yourself you’re not working hard enough? What if I could be like so and so? Only you know the deeper you and while coaches and those around you can help guide you, you must work toward acknowledging and working with your strengths as well as limitations.

·         Examine where you are at in your life broadly and what your main priorities and capacities are. Training? Family? Do I have the emotional juice right now?

·         Examine where you are in your fitness journey and more immediately in your training cycle so you know if you should be pushing, sustaining, holding back.

·         Examine what is on the agenda immediately today and even momentarily. This goes for training as well as areas that can influence it (and vice versa). Self-reflective practices like those based in Mindfulness can be very helpful here.

·         STICK TO YOUR GUNS! It’s easy to be swayed by outside influence, hype, media, competition, peers, marketing, your own biases. See those clearly and do you.

Personally, and many I (and we at Resilient Body) have worked with spend lots of time developing these skills and it is a process. Nevertheless, it is probably the most valuable introspective process and tool that can be had. Take your time to develop this skill and see your ability to better train, recover, and reach goals in and outside the gym continue day after day in a more meaningful and sustainable way.

To read more on this subject in fitness, both Mike Tuchscherer, Eric Helms and others in their field are excellent sources having shaped many current ideas around this.