I’m creating this post because I have some doubts regarding fatigue management. I know that we should avoid being in red zone in order to not overtrain, but the description of the graph isn’t specific on how much time in red zone starts to be worrying.
Should I avoid touching red zone at all, is it ok to touch it here and there, or should I even try to be there for a couple of days in order to increase stimulus?
Now for the second doubt, below are two images of Fitness, Fatigue, Form graph from yesterday and today, and somehow, the ride I did yesterday was giving way more fatigue yesterday than it is giving today, even though the TSS didn’t change (244TSS).
Can it be related with the information not coming from strava anymore? I moved to garmin + dropbox, but I just unthicked the option of getting activities from strava instead of deleting the connection. (and I dowloaded all the activities before).
Nevertheless, in 12th December, my Form, Fatigue and Fitness were the same so if this was due to any activity shenanigans, these values should have changed as well right?
A day or 2 towards the end of a block as part of an overload etc prior to recovery week is OK. Either way, listen to your body and how you feel. This should be your primary subjective measure of fatigue - the data should either back this up or help inform trends.
Let’s start at the bottom with the red “High Risk Zone.” Back on the right side legend again you can see this zone is below -30 TSB. I call it “High Risk” because if you spend much time here you will create great fatigue and are flirting with extreme overreaching that would likely become overtraining if continued for too long. Notice that Dave was in this zone several times throughout his season, but only one episode was long enough to be risky—in the last few days of March and early April. This represents a period of very hard training for Dave. In early April he backed off by doing easier training and his TSB began to rise indicating he was moving toward freshness. That’s exactly the way you should react when you find yourself deep in the High Risk Zone. This is the time to reduce training so that you exit the red zone quickly. How quickly you need to react depends on your unique capacity for training stress. It’s usually best to stay there no more than a few days at a time. You may only get into this zone two to four extended times in a season with an R&R break ending each of them.
Pretty much what @Olly_Thomas said, and a little more from me:
In terms of how much is too much, it’s like any limit… you have to (slowly) exceed it to find the failure point.
An example can be found in all the cycles:
Session interval
Can you add another interval?
Micro cycle
Can you push another week before a recovery week?
Macro cycle
Can you peak twice in a season?
Season
How many weeks do you need to take off to be refreshed?
The session interval is unlikely to cause too much fatigue, and you can quickly bounce back after failure. You can also try this more than once per block (mesocycle cycle).
The multiple peak per season will require a few seasons to find out what works for you and what doesn’t. Over time, you will learn by trial and error.
To answer your question on the graph changing between “yesterday” and “today”. Fatigue is the weighted moving average for 7 days, so look at the total load over the last 10 days and compare the total for days 1-7 for each day. You will see a big load on your last activity compared to the previous day. The purple line indicates a big jump.
I understand that, but what I’m referring to is that the same activity, had a bigger jump (in purple line) yesterday than it has today, even though the TSS for said activity didn’t change.
Strava will automatically be hidden if there is a duplicate activity from Garmin. It should remain hidden unless you added Garmin (refreshed data) after clearing the Strava data.
That might actually be the case. It makes sense, and it explains why it changed from yesterday to today as I was changing some settings to the data sources for Intervals.
