Quantifying Stress with Stress Score™ with CPT Premier Coach, Rick Crawford

Stress is pressure by which things change, for both good and bad. In an effort to keep stress forcing positive adaptation, it is important to understand how stress affects us, and to be aware of how to manage and account for it.

Because each person is unique, stress, in its many forms, has a different effect on every individual. This makes it difficult to classify and manipulate. Over the years, working with dozens of athletes, I have observed that there is a vast array of possibilities of outcomes when one method is administered to different people. It has been my observation that this is seldom a factor of physical adaptation, but rather a function of how the athlete diverts energy towards the adaptation. Stress, whether physical or any other of its myriad forms, requires energy from the organism in order to make an adaptation. If the body is being bombarded by stress from several totally different aspects, which does the body adapt to.

For an athlete who wants a very specific positive adaptation, having the body making unconscious decisions about which stress to adapt to poses major problems. One, it takes choice and control away from the athlete as to how training will affect him/her. In a perfect world, the athlete gets stressed only from training, and the only adaptation the body has to make is to training. Unfortunately, the world is far from perfect. Life is wrought with challenges, from domestic issues, to finances, to sunburn. The body is always dealing with pressure from a number of directions. The way to control a certain aspect is to be aware of its impact, and control it at its source. To maximize the affects of one type of stress, one must learn to minimize the impact of other types to free up energy for adaptation to the stress that is desired. Sometimes stresses are relatively fixed, and very hard to control. Sometimes they are as easy to manage as just planning ahead. Sometimes very hard decisions and/or lots of hard work are necessary to manipulate or eliminate a certain stress.

From the coach’s standpoint, I found it astounding at how little control some athletes had over their lives. The training happened no matter how hard everything else was, and the effect of the training could take many outcomes, not always positive. I sought to understand how the flow of energy could be managed more efficiently so I could help the athletes have more control over the outcome. I figured the first step was to quantify stress and the reaction to it, so that we could at least do an accounting and try to manage stress better.

From those efforts the Stress Score™ emerged. It is like balancing a checkbook, where a daily accounting is done, and a balance carried forward. At month’s end, it is reconciled. Stress is classified into three broad categories: Physical (P), Mental (M), and Emotional (E). Each type of stress is given a numerical value between 1 and 10, with 1 representing the least amount of stress, and 10 representing the maximum stress. The key here is that ALL stress is captured in the scoring system.

Stress is balanced by recovery. Recovery is classified into three broad categories: Sleep (S), Rest (R), and Therapy (T). Like stress, these are quantified from 1 to 10, with 1 representing the least recovery value, and 10 representing the maximum.

So a typical day might look like this:

STRESS

Physical (P) 2, Pathetic… didn’t do anything physical.

Mental (M) 8, Tons of emails/phone calls/ articles/meetings… 16 hour day!

Emotional (E) 5, Stressing about Sage’s grades, finishing basement, heat bill, $$

Stress Total: 15b

RECOVERY

Sleep (S) 8, Slept long and well

Rest (R) 4, Busy day, but not physical

Therapy (T) 2, Nada

Recovery Total: 14

• DAILY TOTAL: S1 (Subtract and assign difference to category with higher total)
• RUNNING TOTAL: S6 (add values… i.e., S5 + S1 = S6, S5 + R1 = S4)
  

  At the end of each mesocycle (4 week training cycle), the athlete or coach must reconcile. If the athlete is carrying forward a stress balance, then the athlete must recover until the balance is zero. If there is a recovery balance, then the athlete must zero it out and start the new mesocycle at zero. I usually build in a rest week every 4th week to help accommodate recovery.

  Rick Crawford and the coaching staff of Colorado Premier Training work with each of their athletes to monitor their Stress Score™ and it is believed that this is the primary method to appropriately balance training load. For more information on coaching with CPT, Click Here or call 970-672-4780.