I’m finding it really difficult to manage fatigue. If I train in such a way as to get my fitness line to go up, I quickly end up going into the red on fatigue. So I back off on the training, fatigue goes back to green but then I lose fitness. I’m currently recovering from a broken collarbone so I’m doing 2 hour Zone 2 rides. I would not expect these zone 2 rides to push me into the red. Any ideas on what might be pushing me into the red on Fatigue so quickly?
Do the lines on the screen reflect your own feelings about your actual level of fatigue?
How does the the number of 2 hour Zone 2 rides you are doing compare to the work you have been doing recently (say, over the last 6 weeks).
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Thanks.. That article gave me a clue as to what I think is going on. Before my collarbone break my fitness was between 60 and 100. During that time, I was able to stay in the green 60 to 70% of the time. Right now my fitness is at 42 (coming up from 14 in the last month). So Im guessing my high fatigue rating is coming from the fact that my fitness numbers are still low. Im guess that when my fitness gets above 60 it will be easier for me to keep things in the green with the current Zone 2 rides.
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Are you feeling any physical fatigue in any way, or are you only referring to the chart?
The fitness and fatigue lines are simply the weighted moving average of your previous 42-days and 7-days respectively. So if you are quickly ramping up training after a period of minimal training, then the chart will show that you’re in the red, as it perceives you to be doing more than physiologically possible.
Getting back to 60 just means you are averaging 60 (load, or TSS) everyday for 42 days, or 120 every second day, or however you make up the average for 42 days.
That looks like a quit big Ramp Rate and is possibly a big part of the explanation. Now if you already had a fitness number of ~80 for several seasons, this ramprate could be sustainable for some time. So we get back to the same question: How are you feeling?
If you feel sufficiently recovered and don’t have troubles doing those endurance rides, then that’s what you should follow. Not the red/green whatever indication on a chart that only was developed to help you in managing training progress.
You say that you are recovering from a broken collarbone, but does that mean that you had a significant break in cardiovascular training, or does that simply mean that you were unable to practice your priority sport while still being quit active with other stuff?
I’m recovering from a dislocated collarbone, but I never stopped doing cardiovascular activity. I’m still unable to ride my bike outdoor due to the lack of force in my left shoulder, but I do regular indoor rides and walk/jog a lot.
If you did similar activities without logging them, I’m pretty sure that you didn’t loose 30 - 40 Fitness points, but if you didn’t log them, the ‘system’ doesn’t count them…
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Thanks for this … interesting. I’m a bit confused though…
If I’m starting out, and say my fitness is 10, you’re saying that I should use absolute, rather than percentage, because I’ll be counting a stroll with my grandma as a workout and never get any fitter if I use %form. I can definitely see that.
But … lets say my fitness is 10 and I want to get it well and truly into the green zone. Then I should do a workout with a load of 40 everyday for a week… but then I might not feel very well after that. Using the %form will result in a much lower ramp up in activity load but maybe it would be more sustainable??
On the other hand, if I had a fitness of 100, then as you said, absolute and % are hte same, but if I had a fitness of 200 (ha!) then doing a 30% harder workout might just be impossible, but a 230 load workout might be ok (15% higher).
As an example of a real starting out situation, consider the Couch to 5K programme as an example of ramp rate.
It goes from nothing to “running 5km without stopping” in about 9 weeks across (IIRC) 27 workouts.
The lines on the chart are very useful information, but how you feel is more important, especially if you are starting out. As you establish your own frequency, then duration and then intensity of exercise, more data becomes available and that, generally, leads to better correlation between the lines on the chart and your reality.
Here is a piece by a well respected contributor on the subject, Joe Friel
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Comparable situation:
- Your coach prescribes a workout in Zx.
- You say to yourself: I’m going to do that workout constantly on the top of Zx, because ‘obviously’, ‘higher is better’
- When your coach sees what you’ve done, he is (or should) yell at you, that you need to do what he tells you
if you want to improve…
The moral of this: your coach wants you to develop in Zx to elicit proper response from the targeted body system. While you are doing something that is only ~50% in the target zone because the other 50% is working the zone above…
Math and exact numbers are the Achilles heel of sport science. Constantly living on the edge isn’t going to make you better in the long run. The most important thing is finding the balance point that will make you train consistently. Sustainability, motivation, joy of working out, staying injury-free, etc… will all be impacted negatively when constantly living on that edge.
There are no clear borders to any zone, there is a range. But math isn’t all that good to take that in consideration.
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The plan I have is 8 weeks (0-5k), but it’s part of a 0-10k (over 14 weeks) and then another 8 weeks to a half marathon. As a novice runner, intensity matters. A relatively fit cyclist would have lungs equipped to handle almost anything, but the conditioning (mostly legs) might not be. A beginner, without much fitness, will have to take it even easier.
The run portion, of each workout session, could be anything from a slow jog to an above average-paced run. Then the final 5k non-stop run would most likely be at the same pace (intensity) as the training.
I haven’t created a plan, so haven’t seen the ramp rate for this,
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From experience: when I started jogging/running, I had a muscle tear in my right calve already after 3 weeks. And I thought I was going easy…
It takes some time to adapt muscles and learn the correct form/technique. What I can advice is to focus on small steps with high cadence. I had a tendency to take strides that were too big while that increases muscle tension and actually just slows you down because on every stride where your foot lands too far ahead of you, you need to ‘arc’ all your body weight ‘over’ the foot. While small strides with high cadence give you way less vertical movement and is more efficient all while putting much less stress on calves/knees.
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Potential injuries from running are a significant concern for pretty serious runners.
Here is Ben Felton (a 2h23 marathon runner), who has started using an indoor bike to do quite a bit of his aerobic work (including doing the festive 500). Around 4-5 hours / week on the bike and 8-9 hours running.
Here is the video, cued up to the 2 minute section of the video where he talks about that specifically.
In this case I was fatigued and so the line was accurate, however the problem was still the same, specifically, how do I train in such a way as to improve fitness with out ending up in the red. My workouts have been really low intensity so I was struggling to understand how I could train at all with out ending up in the red all of the time and make progress.
2 hour Z2 yields approximately 90 TSS which is more then double of your actual Fitness number. So yes, if you do this 5-6 times in a week, this will drive the chart to the red.
But if you are coping well, which is entirely possible if you have a longer endurance training history, then you shouldn’t mind. It is temporary until the Fitness number comes back up.
If you do feel tired, it is too much and you might be better to cut down to 4-5 x 90min per week and be a little patient for the fitness (number and reality in that case) to come up again. Then increase duration again.
The rule is that you can’t simply pick-up where you left off. You need to adapt again, but the longer the history, the faster it goes. And the chart isn’t reflecting all those ‘personal’ differences. A fitness number should never be a goal, sustainable performance improvement must be the goal.
The only thing the Fitness number is telling you, is how much load you took on over the last 42days. It is by no means a performance indicator. It is an indicator of how well your effort/recovery is balanced and it warns you if the balance seems off.
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I refer you to @MedTechCD answer
To keep the lines “nice” you have to increase the load slowly.
Whether the lines match your own reality as you ramp up from a very low level is something entirely different.
If your current training is sustainable, carry on and the lines will catch up.
If the lines are reinforcing what you are feeling, reduce the load and ramp rate.