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.

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