Anyone have any advice? I recently had a great PR up a now 36 minute climb but it I feel like my fitness is totally stagnating. I can’t seem to move it into positive territory. Should I just back off for a couple of weeks and call it rest?
Posting this in training so I hope I could get some good advice in here. Also, been losing steady weight, hit a low of 63.8kg. THinking about beginning to focus on muscle building now. Thoughts?
Thanks in advance. I truly appreciate any non-troll responses.
How much extra time do you have to train? Are you at your absolute max.
Based on the 94(CTL) looks like you’re on about 30,000 TSS per year.
How many hours are you training? 12-16?
Can do you more?
@Steve_Balboni
By looking at your chart, I can see that your most recent training sessions are in the gray Form area and that your Fatigue is smaller than Fitness meaning a decreased training load. So that is what has to be changed. You have to increase Fatigue so that Form goes to the green area and Fitness increases as a result.
Assuming you train 6 days a week and using your Fitness and Fatigue current values, I made a simulation with my CYCLING FITNESS - CTL PLANNING WORKSHEET on what Load/TSS values you should aim for to increase Fitness. I always plan for a ramp rate between 4 and 7 to assure improvement and avoid fatigue and a training block of 3 load weeks and one recovery week. The recovery week uses 50% of the load of the last week.
These are Screenshots of the results:
I entered your current fitness in START FITNESS and your fatigue in START FATIGUE and results for weeks 1 and 2. You shall get to the green Form section in six days (after finishing Saturday’s session):
And this for weeks 3 and 4
At the end of load week 3 your CTL/Fitness should have increased to 109 from the original 94 and by the end of the recovery week it should be about 103, an expected decrease as a result of the rest, lower load days.
By repeating these cycles, you should be able to plan what you need to do to get to your target Fitness/CTL.
The daily training/workout loads shall be planned considering other goals you may have as well such as improving average speed, climbing, FTP and so forth.
The forum does not allow to attach Excel files but you may download the sheet from this link (it is free) and adjust it to fit your actual available training days and time.
I hope this helps.
Cheers
I’m curious if anythng has changed in the way that my chart is calculated over time. WHy does it feel like adding CTL is more difficult now than before?
Maybe you need to rest
Gaining on the fitness chart is not a goal in itself. Personally I don’t like the way intervals translates CTL and ATL values to call them ‘fitness’, ‘fatigue’ and ‘form’. It leads to exactly these kinds of misunderstandings. I wish they just called them what they most closely represent: chronic training load, acute training load and the balance between those two.
So obviously there is a limit to the amount of chronic training load your body can handle. To indefinitely go higher on the ‘fitness’ chart you would have to indefinitely increase the amount of training you do.
Not progressing on the ‘fitness’ chart doesn’t mean you’re not getting better. For instance, me personally, I’ve had a period of 6 months this season where I was lowering my chronic training load, but at the same time I was setting new personal best power numbers across the power curve, improving my FTP and VO2Max, and getting higher LT1 power.
Also be aware that training load is calculated relative to your FTP. If you increase your FTP in settings, the same ride you did previously will generate a lower load value going forward. This also means that to have accurate and comparable load values between weeks, months, years, the FTP value in your settings needs to be accurate at all times. I don’t think that for the majority of users this the best option and personally I changed the setting to prefer heart rate to calculate load. This is much more stable and doesn’t require me to do regular FTP tests which I hate.
Oh got it so the word fitness and fatigue dont actually mean fitness and fatigue.
Silly me.
Logically it would make sense that there’s an option to use eFTP to change the calculations for the TSS each ride, no? Wouldn’t that make more sense? And let us update our eFTP if necessary.
Perhaps this will give some additional insight. My ratios of z5/z4…etc have shifted quite a bit. Perhaps this is a cause?
But the eFTP value that is calculated requires regular all out efforts on multiple time scales to be up to date. Not everybody is prepared to do those as often as necessary as they can be too taxing for comfort. I just did a 4 minute all out effort yesterday to guage progress for the first time in 6 months. I had an uncomfortable sleep last night and still suffering from brain fog this morning. It’s just not pleasant. To get an accurate FTP value I’ll have to do an all-out longer effort later this week which I’m already dreading. I guess it depends on how deep you dig during all-out efforts but mine absolutely devastate me.
Man, I am hoping not to waste your time here. Great quality advise above. So, Just try being reassured and possibly encouraged your on the right path. Hey I began collecting strava metrics a year and a half ago meanwhile analyzing and scrutinizing every one of my workouts looking for better faster times** and noticed my workouts tend to get better after using weights for 2-3 times per week Mix up my muscle groups and really highly recommend spotify podcasts by Menecham Brody!! Good luck
Just my opinion, but I find using those words for CTL and ATL very convoluted and don’t make things much clearer, especially ‘fitness’ and ‘form’. They’re some ways removed from everyday use of those terms.
I hear wahoo fitness watch calculates such things and takes away all this guess work
Haven’t heard or seen complaints regarding the Wahoos not even along the lines of blood oxygen levels or correct heart rates or anything else perhaps used for a consistent power meter number:people_wrestling:
. Sorry BE IT
See threshold training chat forum
Have a read here… What is the Performance Management Chart?
I would (as always) start with your goals. Don’t chase CTL…increasing it does not always mean increased ‘fitness’ - like TSS, fitness can be achieved in many ways…
My goal is 6w/kg. I’m at 4.1 now.
Yes i get it that’s not the goal many would choose but increasing my w/kg is what I’m experimenting with now.
Just to clarify… 6w/kg for what duration? I don’t know your history or what level you are at now but that is World Tour level w/kg
40-60min.
My best 30 minute power ever was 5.3w/kg so I don’t think 6 is far off.
Those terms are registered trademarks of TrainingPeaks, and cannot be used without permission. TrainingPeaks themselves also call it Fitness, Fatigue and Form.
It should be medium-term load and short-term load, where medium is defaulted to 42 days and short is 7 days.
It doesn’t work like that.
I didn’t know they were registered trademarks. Silly world we live in, to require permission to use certain words or phrases. Must be possible to come up with good alternatives though. I know cyclinganalytics.com uses the terms LTS (long term stress), STS (short term stress), and SB (stress balance).
When did you start riding and what age are you now? 6w/kg for those durations will put you with the best in the world…
