Thoughts of the makers of myTRS

But one thing is worth mentioning before we get into the topic: The whole build-up training thing is not meant to be detrimental to your health at all. After all, what good are the most beautiful and attractive body shapes if your joints break down in the process? Or if your tendons and ligaments are constantly aching or even tearing? One thing is very clear for you: You are looking for a reasonable, in a sense “sustainable” form of build-up training. Supported by a healthy lifestyle, but in any case without the dangerous game of direct intervention in the hormonal control system of your organism. So: healthy, natural build-up.

And it is precisely at this point that the topic of “regeneration” comes into play. This is because the recovery phase is when the actual build-up takes place following intense training stimuli: First, the microscopic damage and injuries caused by the heavy load are repaired. And after that, that adaptation takes place, which is responsible for the fact that the body of athletes changes: Your muscles adjust to better handle such stresses in the future by increasing their ability to perform. Whether you are specifically looking to increase strength or muscle mass, it is always the phase of regeneration in which this desired build-up effect takes place.

So far, so good. But how do you best use this knowledge in everyday training? Not only is there the question of how soon one should reload a previously trained muscle, but also: What do I do when the day-to-day madness wrecks my plans? When I have to leave the ideal line of my well-thought-out training plan and improvise?

Of course, real professionals know exactly which muscle parts are ready for a hard workout at any time. But what about those of us who do our build-up training as amateur or recreational athletes? We don't have the years or even decades of experience to rely on the instinct that comes from that. We also don't always have a complete overview of when we last exercised which areas and how - and which muscle parts these exercises actually stress.

To enable a way out of this dilemma, we have developed myTRS. The name stands for: „My Training Regeneration Status”. Let this web app offer you ideas on how you could design your workout today! Get answers to questions like ...

• Status: Which areas of my body are currently in which condition?
• Overview: Which muscle parts are ready for training again? Which ones should still be spared? Which ones would training be possible at if you really wanted it?
• Preview: For which muscle parts does full recovery take even longer, and for which should a training stimulus be set again soon?
• Review: What have I trained so far? What weights have I used?
• And additionally: What do my training partners actually do in the meantime?

You see: simple questions from the everyday life of athletes, but which are often anything but easy to answer. Get inspired by myTRS' suggestions – and then decide for yourself what you want to make of today's training day!

And lo and behold: After a few discussions it became more and more apparent that a serious and scientifically based planning of an build-up training has to cope with a considerable amount of complexity. Because when you consider that different muscle parts take different amounts of time to recover and be ready for the next training load, it quickly becomes clear: This calls for a wise exercise selection that takes into account the current recovery state of the athlete to avoid counterproductive overtraining that interferes with the buildup. And keeping track of all this is surprisingly not that easy.

Soon we had first sketches and drafts: On body diagrams we should be able to see which zones are still loaded after the last training and which are candidates for the next training. A preview of the coming days should be possible as well as a review of all that has already been accomplished so far. And based on the current regeneration status, it should also indicate which exercises would be advisable or which should rather be refrained from.

All in all, this is a kind of assistant designed to help athletes plan their workouts spontaneously but in a customized way. And also a tool for personal trainers who can see the status of their clients at a glance and act on it. Last but not least, the creation of a platform for training partners to keep track of each other's activities as well as their own.

What we rejected from the beginning, however, was the development of a system with sensors that constantly measure and monitor people. Quite apart from the delicate question of whether such sensitive personal data could fall into the hands of unauthorized persons and be misused by them, from the very beginning we wanted a system that puts the human being at the center: He feels inside himself and defines whether the execution of an exercise was good or not. We find this better than such systems that tell users how to feel.

Are you ready to start your personal experiment with myTRS? Ready to step off the beaten path and explore unconventional exercise combinations based on your current state of exertion? And are you also ready to give more room to spontaneity and improvisation in your daily training routine? Then the results of our programming work could be an effective help for you.

Welcome to myTRS - and your training will be more alive than ever.