New to cycling. Question about how form reacts to training load

Hey everyone,

Started cycling last october. Switched to indoors at the end of november. Have been training since then. I am middle aged, “fit and pretty lean” but have never done cardio sports in my life before :).

My question:

I have been training pretty consistently - my weekly training load moved from 150 to around 200 since november. My goal until end of february was to just keep my form in the green zone. Dont care about numbers just stay at it kinda deal.

Unfortunately that is not possible anymore. Last week I did 220 training load (really hard week for me), but my form went into grey. The forcast (at 210 weekly load) shows that if I keep doing the same I will be less in green every week.

Does this mean I need to train more every week or am I doing simething wrong? I dont think it will be physically possible for me to increase any more. My legs feel sore enough.

Regards, and thanks to any answer

There are a number of topics on this matter. Staying in the green is not possible if you have exhausted your available training time.

You can read about the fitness chart and a few related discussions here:

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If you hit your available time, then you need to play with other means of getting “fitter”, or rather increasing load - primarily via intensity and/ or workout composition and programming to insight some form of progression and/ or progressive overload…

By that I mean, more intensity will increase load, but that might be at the risk of not being able to complete other workouts. Does that mean you are less ‘fit’ - absolutely not…

Other approaches might including stacking back to back workouts, or double days - overall volume may stay the same, but stimulus will be different/ increase

All roads lead to…Tokyo (as Dr Andy Coggan) recently said

Here’s another recent similar question:

It’s clear that most of the new users don’t have a good understanding of what the Fitness chart represents. Still think that it’s best to route them to the Guide section for more info.
Another good starting point for people who like self-education is off course Training Peaks:

The highlighted text here is VERY IMPORTANT:

It is the explanation why a stagnating fitness number is not equal to a stagnating performance!

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