Written by: Tristan Hogue, Head Coach of Endurokin Coaching

As a kinesiologist and mountain athlete, I’ve always loved to assist other athletes and outdoor enthusiasts to level up their game and best prepare for their objectives. For many years, I would use personal Excel sheets to monitor data for each athlete, regardless of the watch they were using or even if they were wearing any. That means a handful of charts and a crazy load of back and forth with athletes to ensure I get the right data, sometimes approximative, to ensure the most accurate tracking possible. It is however a method that proved me efficient given my strong analytic personality.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to upgrade my game with some tracking softwares such as TrainingPeaks and WKO4. Even though those tools can be beneficial, I’d still come back to my initial Excel sheets at some point to get the exact data that I’d need. This methodology would ultimately lead to multiple platform usage, making it harder to keep up.

I was introduced to the Training Hub only a couple months ago. During this time, I have been able to create, understand, and interpret all the data and charts available on the platform in order to improve performance. Below you will find three of the best features from the Training Hub that can significantly help any coach or athlete to improve their training game.

TRAINING LOAD MANAGEMENT

Being the bread and butter of COROS Training Hub, this massive and not-so-complex chart really gives an overview of the athlete and his/her current state. By including load impact and fatigue in a single viewpoint, I am able to get a quick glimpse of what’s going on and keep track over time of possible overtraining. Even though I created a similar chart before, the training load management goes a step further by linking all data together in an intuitive chart even for athletes without extensive knowledge of sports science.

CALENDAR

One thing that other platforms lack in my opinion is the visual structure of future workouts and their impact to our training. In the Calendar section of the Training Hub, you get a very clear representation of what happened in the previous weeks/months as well as what’s about to happen depending on the training plan the athlete is following. Our training load management explained above just stepped up again by now predicting the possible base fitness and fatigue based on future workouts. For coaches, this feature does facilitate our work slightly by giving us some sort of backup, but for athletes, this gives great reassurance as they are able to see what possible impact their training will have and can serve as motivation. 

TRAINING PLAN

As mentioned above, the Training Hub gives us the possibility to build full workouts and training plans that can be followed instinctively through the watch. This feature gives the athlete a mind-free environment during training and allows them to focus on what really matters. For us coaches, it gives us nice additional features to look at afterwards, such as HR zones prescribed as seen in the photo below, as well as facilitate the connection between coaches and athletes.

Those features combined have allowed me to stay away from my Excel sheets while still being able to accurately monitor athletes. I absolutely love the fact that COROS Training Hub is entirely focused on scientific and valuable data, leaving all the unnecessary charts behind.

MOUNTAINEERING BONUS

As a mountaineer, I’ve always had a hard time finding the right tool to track and interpret such complex data. As a bonus, the Training Hub provides a wide variety of valuable information from a 15-hour climb in some of the most remote areas of the Canadian Rockies. As from the photos below, I get a clear representation of the route taken which is worth a thousand words when planning to lead up there. I also get, just as any other workout, interesting numbers that can help me understand strengths and weaknesses during this ascent, such as peak HR that occurred during a strenuous solo downclimb or average speed on technical terrain.