Data Tracking For Olympic Weightlifting Part 1 of 5: What And Why Should You Be Tracking?
Over the next 5 articles, we’ll be taking a dive into understanding data tracking for weightlifting. In this article we’ll cover what you metrics you should be tracking, and why, and over the next few we’ll break down each metric individually.
First of all, the biggest reason you should be tracking data is to better understand your athletes performance, and make better predictions on what will drive performance over the length of their career. If you are a coach and your athletes want to compete at a high level, you are doing a disservice to your athletes by not tracking their data. All of the best coaches in the world track data in some form or fashion, and there’s a reason their athletes continue to perform at a high level for many years.
There are a huge variety of data points you can track from qualitative data like sleep quality, stress level etc, to quantitative data such as tonnage, average intensity, and number of meals eaten before training.
This can make tracking data seem overwhelming, and even if you did track data, what do you do with it?
My recommendation is to start with the basics. Here are the data points we currently track:
Qualitative Non-Lifting Data
Sleep Quality
Stress Level
Quantitative Non-Lifting Data
Hours of sleep
Bodyweight
Meals before session
Quantitative Lifting Data
Snatch reps
Clean reps
Jerk reps
Squat reps
Pull reps
Press reps
Snatch Tonnage
Clean Tonnage
Jerk Tonnage
Squat Tonnage
Pull Tonnage
Press Tonnage
Snatch Average Intensity
Clean Avg. Intensity
Jerk Avg. Intensity
Squat Avg. Intensity
Pull Avg. Intensity
Press Average Intensity
Now don’t panic! This may seem overwhelming, but if you are already writing a program, most of this data is already available to you, you just need to do a little basic math. To calculate reps, just add together the total amount of reps above a certain percentage (up to you), then to calculate tonnage, take those reps and multiply it by the weight for each rep. so 10 reps at 10kg is 100kg of tonnage. To then calculate Average Intensity, just divide the tonnage by the reps. So for the previous example would be an average intensity of 10kg. Now these are pretty simple examples, and most of weightlifting training doesn’t come out to such pretty numbers, but with some practice it can be pretty easy to figure out.