The “daily analysis of life demands for athletes” is a tool developed by Brent S. Rushall, Ph.D for measuring stress tolerance in athletes. This monitoring tool provides useful information about an athlete’s adaptation to training and life stresses.
The tool is outlined in the book, Rushall, B. S., & Pyke, F. S. (1991). Training for sports and fitness. Melbourne, Australia: Macmillan of Australia.
It provides an easy yet valuable means by which one’s general condition can be monitored.
Monitoring provides athletes, (trainers and coaches) important information about an athlete’s life that is not normally available. This information allows the training of athletes (and indeed all people who train) to be modified appropriately.
Without such a process the evaluation of an individual’s capacity to adapt and cope with the various demands of training, work, relationships and the myriad of other stresses we encounter each day, is a matter of guess work.
To maximize the benefits of training you would need to be attentive to such issues - guesswork is simply not acceptable.
This procedure provides a number of key benefits :
- It provides a simple method of measuring the demands made upon each individual
- It takes into account a range of stressors
- It allows us to identify average or normal responses for each individual
- It provides a simple method of identifying when the individual is not coping with the demands placed upon them
- It allows early recognition of deviances from the established norms for each individual, allowing early intervention and a decrease in overall demand to be initiated.
- It provides a valuable resource for reference pre and post injury / sickness
- It provides an educative awareness of the various stresses and areas which require attention in our daily lives
The procedure takes a minimal amount of time once it is understood (approx 5 minutes per day) and requires only your individual responses, a pen or pencil and a short amount of time.
Complete the log daily, answering each question honestly and accurately. Once a week go through the complete components of each question to clarify what you are responding to.
Answer each question - it provides documentary evidence as to your response to every stage of the program and a valuable record of areas in which you may require further assistance and/or education.
By establishing normative data (a statistical process that evaluates your expected or average answers and the expected deviation from them) we can easy recognize when your training is not optimized.
As per the adage “No news is good news”, often little change will be evident for long periods of time. This is to be expected, however, what we are looking for is an increase in the negative (Worse than normal) responses over a 2-3 continuous days.
If this occurs, a clarification of the reasons for such responses needs to be assessed and appropriate action taken to either remedy the immediate situation and/or reduce the amount of total stress you are under by decreasing the demand in other areas.
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