What’s the Recovery Value of a Massage?
By Mike Tuchscherer, 5 September 2017

We’ve always said massage is good for recovery, but how do we know?  I get massages periodically.  I would like to do it weekly, but often I’ll go a month between them.  We always *thought* it was good for recovery, but as time has gone on I’ve noticed less and less of a difference.  With the time constraints that one accumulates with life, I began wondering if it was time well spent or not.  So I pulled my TRAC data and compared my scores after a massage to my scores after a normal rest day.  I was very surprised by the results.  Quick aside:  TRAC is our athlete monitoring system.  It’s how we monitor the recovery for all of our athletes.  It’s available for everyone for free via the RTS website – just click on apps in the main menu.
Read more…

Understanding Your TRAC Score
By Mike Tuchscherer

We live in a smart age. Smart phones. Smart bombs. Even smart cars (yuck!). It’s about time our training system got smart too. When you think about it, this is really the mission of TRAC – smart training.
And boy, is it ever smart! When you perform your tests in the morning, it takes somewhere between 7 and 10 minutes to complete it. Using that data, TRAC can figure out how several systems in your body are functioning and it spits it out on a nice, smart report! Your TRAC Report is really what gives you insight on how you can react to your body. But when you’ve got smart tests, smart systems, and a smart report, do you have to be smart too? Well, maybe a little, but by the end of this article, you should be smart enough to get the bulk of your TRAC report.
Just to reiterate, it can take a few days before your report is populated and several days after that before TRAC “gets to know you” well enough for your report to be reliable. But just the same, the more you use it, the better it works. Read more…