By Ed Lippie, founder and CEO, Momentum Wellness

In 1992, one of my college football teammates told me he gave himself five to 10 minutes in the gym before making a decision about continuing his workout. He explained he could tell how productive the workout was going to be within five to 10 minutes, based on his warm-up plus a set or two.

My teammate had unknowingly been deploying a subjective version of “autoregulation.” This is simply the practice of modifying workouts based on an assessment of relevant data points. Fast-forward three decades, and there’s wisdom we can tease out of my teammate’s practice of self-assessment.

A Set of Data

In the 1990s, the metadata that went into my teammate’s self-assessment would have likely included the following:

• sleep quality
• muscle fatigue
• muscle soreness
• injury status
• overall stress level

In team settings that use sports science, each of these elements are often scored individually. Then they’re tallied as part of a “readiness” metric that’s used as a way to quantify the impact of past training sessions, and inform future training sessions…