Calculate Needed Training Load?

Glad to hear it’s at least pulling data from intervals.icu for you now! Did you do anything different from your previous attempts?

I’ve figured out why the other sheets are not populating - I was a bit over-zealous when clearing out my data to share the file. As you can see in your first screen shot Column A is blank, but this should have dates in it which are then used as references to pull data across to the other sheets. I have updated the shared file now with the formulae that should be in that column, If you go back to the shared file you need to copy across column A from the sheet “intervals.icu_activities-export”. Or copy the whole updated shared file and re-enter your details in the red boxes.

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All sorted.
I saved a copy in my Google Drive, but I see I was trying to open your file, not the copy I made.

I will test and give my objective feedback.

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Now it’s working. Tks to you and to @Andrii_Magalich.
I might have missed the explanation of the rational behind the “Potential Next Activity with training load of”.
What is it trying to accomplish? to keep you in the “optimal” Form(TSB) zone? any periodization ( going to fresh)?
Any possible input of Fitness CTL ramp rate?

Appreciate your work.

Best regards,

PS:

I’m confused:
I had a load yesterday but it shows zero for status as "Next activity Tomorrow and gives me a load for Next Activity Load.
If I choose status as Next activity Today it shows my today’s load and gives zero as load for Next Activity.

The way I understand it, the next load is 58; look a few rows below.

The workout suggestion is then shown below:
25min of VO2 work down to 58m of Endurance (L2, or Z2 as some refer to it).

Me too but look right bellow on “Prior daily Load”. It shows zero but I do have a load of 25 from yesterday.
And, If I change to “Next activity Today” “Prior daily Load” we get my today’s load of 109 and no prescription for the next activity.
I’m trying to understand “Next Activity Tomorrow” vs “Next Activity Today”.

Also, what is this recommendation based on?

William should answer the first part of your question, as I do see a Prior daily load if I have done something on the same day. The lookup is in row 5, when I believe it should be row 6.

The recommendation is based on the load needed to get to green. Load is dependent on the intensity and duration, which is what the table below the recommendation. The higher the intensity, the shorter the duration.
(1) The load from the last workout, providing it’s the same day
(2) The next activity load is the shortfall from keeping the form in green
(3) The various workout durations will give different loads.

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@Gerald i think you’ve pasted the wrong screenshot

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Thank you

Thanks, I’ll add the other one later

Sorry for slow response, haven’t had a chance to reply until now.

@Gerald pretty much has it figured out. It’s just trying to hit a target Form% in the short term (next activity). That could have been achieved with ramp rate but I chose to target a Form value instead - over longer periods the two do relate to one another of course. There is an attempt to avoid training monotony rather than periodisation by looking at the intensity of recent activities to give a recommended intensity. I could have added some explainers to the sheet but I didn’t spend too much time on this to be honest. By all means modify your version to function more how you would like if you think some of the choices I made were strange :slight_smile:

As for the “prior daily load”, I see the confusion, but that is not trying to give yesterday’s load, it is trying to give load already accrued today, e.g. if you do a double day and want to figure out after the first activity how hard you should go in the second activity to achieve your set form target. So whenever you set to “Next Activity Tomorrow” it will be zero, and should only be non-zero if you set to “Next Activity Today” and have already done an activity today. Hope that makes sense? Happy to update the template with a better descriptor / title of the cell though if you can think of one!

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This seemed an appropriate place to share that I have made some updates to the above discussed Google Sheets doc that leverages the Intervals.icu API.

This is the Direct Link to take a copy from if you want to use it: Next Activity_icu v1.1 (shared) - Google Tabellen

And it is kept in this shared Google Drive folder, where I will put any further updates: Next Activity_icu – Google Drive

What’s new?

  • I have added a FAQ (or readme) tab which I think addresses most of the ambiguity encountered by those who have tried out the original version.
  • I have added a Dashboard tab which shows your last activity, current training status, and how long you may want to rest for if you have been training hard / just done a big event.
  • Next Activity tab has been tidied up a bit, and presents your Next Activity (suggested) in a format that can be copy-pasted directly into the intervals.icu workout builder.

Below is a screenshot of how the Dashboard looks for me, with my intervals.icu data already pulled through the API.

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Exactly what I needed to understand this all! :smiley:

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This is really outstanding. So helpful. Thanks.

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@William_Barnes
I love the next_activity tool. Super usefull for having a more dynamic training “plan” that takes ALL activity into account. I’ve found the Garmin Training Plans to be too dogmatic for my taste, and the virtual coaches and Daily Suggested Workouts to be completely unaware of activities in other sports.

I’ve encountered some unexpected behavior in version 2.8 of the Google Sheet. When I set $Next Activity:B5 to “Strong/Fresh,” the values for B8:F8, and for B9 all become vlookup errors, “Did not find value ‘-1’ in vlookup evaluation.” All other values for B5 work as expected.

As a troubleshooting measure, I created a new copy of the sheet directly from your shared document. Before adding my credentials, and thus before importing my activity history, all works as expected. Once I imported my data, the new sheet exibits the same unexpected vlookup error.

I’m happy to perform any other troubleshooting you might need, and provide any other info which may help.

Thanks again for the great tool. Luckily, I’m not feeling as fresh today as I was yesterday, so I’ll just “downgrade” my self assessment and adjust from there.

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Hi @Kristopher_Dick,

I’m glad you find the tool useful and thanks for the positive feedback! Thanks also for informing me of this error that has crept in (it won’t be the last!), I’ve had a go at recreating it but haven’t managed to so far unfortunately. I’ll send you a private message to see if we can get to the bottom of it together.

I would like to start by thanking you for sharing this great tool! It is unique in its form. I was able to import everything without any issues with the current version (v3.00). However, a message in a tab in “Zones” appears saying that the Power and Pace Zones (run) are not retrievable because they are not set in the settings (Not defined in Intervals.icu). But they are set. What am I doing wrong? - Thank you in advance

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Hi @APFFME, thanks for your kind words and I’m glad that you like the tool!

Sorry for this slow response to your query, I don’t recall seeing a notification for it.

There are a few things in the Zones tab which are accompanied by the statement “Not defined in Intervals.icu” or similar. This is nothing to worry about as these are parameters used in the tool to define your HR/Pace/Power models which do not have direct comparison metrics which you can manually set in intervals.icu.

You should (hopefully!) have the numerical values corresponding to your intervals.icu set zone thresholds in the Zones tab still. If you don’t have those though, or my explanation hasn’t hit the mark, I’d be happy to try and help further if you can provide some more detail.