Grey zone is optimal?

[headquire]

I’m an aging age grouper triathlete. I had a running injury 9 months ago, and as I came back from that I’ve been paying a lot more attention to training load metrics from various apps. Pretty much all of them show that I was overtraining in the month leading up to that injury. Not Intervals.icu though – it says I was in the green zone. On the other hand, I’ve seen excellent progress over the past ~2 months, and Intervals.icu has me mostly in the grey zone, hovering just barely into the green zone. (For comparison, HealthFit shows me in mostly green, spiking into yellow, during that same timeframe… but I think the colors mean something else.) I’m using HRSS for training load. I’ve adjusted and double checked the HR zones in each sport, and I’m not seeing any obvious misconfiguration.

Is it possible that at my age and fitness level, grey zone is actually ideal for making optimal fitness progress? Or should I keep hunting for some other misconfiguration in my Intervals.icu settings?

[MedTechCD]

Do you have Form set as absolute value or as a % of Fitness?

FITNESS PAGE - a guide to getting started

FAQ Fitness Page: My Form number is not matching how I feel This is a remark that shows up regularly on the forum and there are multiple reasons why people have difficulties understanding this. A first thing that has a pretty big impact on the numbers, is the setting of how Form is displayed. It can be displayed as an absolute difference between the Fitness and Fatigue numbers or as a percentage difference related to the actual Fitness number. If your Fitness number is 100, both settings wil…

[headquire]

I had it set to absolute value. I changed it to percent just now, but it’s not really more useful, because it just makes it look like the return from injury was full of red, while the actual injury stress period isn’t red.

It actually seems like I can get useful training load input for this by leaving it on absolute value but targeting grey zone or borderline green zone, while further into green zone was a problem for me.

[Another_Intervaler]

@headquire

Is it possible that at my age and fitness level, grey zone is actually ideal for making optimal fitness progress?

Yes for sure if you don’t get injured by dialing it down a bit.

I’m a bit in the same boat, had multiple overreach/overtraining phases last year. Since then I have restricted myself to strict mild progressive overload focusing on getting max number of sessions per week, mild volume increase (max 10% per week) and the long run at max 30% weekly distance. All if this mostly in Z1/2. Occasional time trials to feed Stryd, occasional rest weeks.

This feels ridiculously easy but progression works just fine. And I feel zero of the warning signs (calf tightness etc). Intervals.icu shows me mostly Grey with occasional dips into green.

So yes, at least my body trains well in Grey, obviously not breaking any records, but steadily increasing volume. Avoiding injury is much more important to me. I will add interval sessions back in when the easy runs take too long to be logistically sustainable.

[briangabel]

Like the Coggan power zones I would look at training load metrics as descriptive rather than prescriptive.

If hanging in the grey zone helps you avoid injury and allows you to remain consistent then that is the “optimal” zone for you.