What is the recommended strategy for assessing an athlete's readiness for higher intensity?

The recommended strategy for assessing an athlete's readiness for higher intensity is through progressive overload and monitoring. This approach involves gradually increasing the demands placed on an athlete’s body during training. By progressively overloading, you can measure an athlete's performance over time, allowing you to track improvements in strength, power, endurance, and overall fitness levels. This strategy is vital because it helps ensure that athletes are adequately prepared for higher intensities, adjusting the training stimuli based on their responses and adaptations.

Monitoring their performance and recovery regularly is essential to identify any signs of overtraining or insufficient recovery, which can indicate that the athlete is not ready to safely increase intensity. This method emphasizes an individualized approach, taking into account each athlete's unique response to training and ensuring that they can handle increased stress effectively.

Other strategies, such as random testing or inconsistent scheduling, do not provide the structured and systematic feedback necessary for making informed decisions about readiness. Testing only during competitions fails to consider the continuous nature of training adaptations and offers limited insights outside the competitive environment.