To echo @brenph, intervals.icu has helped me understand what a “healthy” training load looks like, and how the TR plans end up being structured. Here’s the graph he mentions showing the rest of my base phase, the build phase I’ve got planned after it, the specialty phase after that, and my two-day ride at the end:
Top is CTL (blue) and ATL (purple); bottom is the difference. Green is the building zone, gray is maintenance, blue is ready to race, red is dangerous.
I know all TSS is not created equal and there’s a decent amount of fuzziness in the model, but being able to see that TR’s structure maps sensibly against the fuzz gives me some confidence that I’m on the right track, and probably not headed for overtraining.
Ok intervals.icu is a fantastic tool! Thank you! I saw I was in the danger zone a few weeks ago, but am “fresh” this week! Going out for a long hillclimb now
Thank you!!!
Friel is suggesting that we target a ramp rate of 5-8 CTL a week.
I personally find that fairly difficult to do and it seems that with TR as long as I get more than 3 a week I’m doing good enough. Of course, much of my base is in the winter in the midwest so, I’m inside and frankly can only tolerate so many hours on the trainer at any given time.
Like with typical training, I also personally find that if I have as consistent ramp rate throughout a cycle as possible I’m getting improvements.
You’re going to get a lot of anecdotes on this topic. This is one of the highly personal metrics in this sport… in my opinion
for me there is no One Perfect TSS / CTL that i find is tolerable. It all depends on the makeup of the TSS. E.g., TSS that consists of only aerobic hours, could be 6, 7, 800. However much time i have available, i can use it, and it’s NBD. I might not be fresh; i might not put out good power or win any races. But nothing bad is gonna happen.
Conversely, if the TSS is made up of hard intervals, it could be 400 or 500 that becomes too much, if i don’t leave enough recovery in between sessions.
CTL is roughly your daily TSS over the last 3 months and 42 day is the time constant used to calculate the exponential-weighted moving average. Full discussion: The Science of the TrainingPeaks Performance Manager. Personally I pay more attention to my ATL. When my ATL hovers in the high 90s, I am trashed or get sick.
My money is on Coggan. Friel wasn’t that involved on the original wattage forum (or current) where the ideal initially germinated. Link from my previous post dates to 2008 but TSS, CTL, ATL, etc dates back to 2003.