It can continuously increase if you want it to but that’s eventually going to mean you have to ride 20 hours a week to keep it climbing. Too many people fixate on an ever increasing CTL. It’s an easy trap to fall into if you keep reading that greater CTL = greater fitness. That’s OK up to a point but then you have to factor in event specificity and that’s when the training changes and your CTL almost inevitably will fall.
Sound like you’ve got a decent handle on it now anyway.
Hi, thanks for the further explanation.
I realised that to increase CTL you do in fact have to continuously increase TSS. But before this great site, I just saw CTL as a line that went up and up. Now I see it’s directly related to Load, so if Load levels out, so will CTL. Previously I was on TrainerRoad and they don’t show any of this.
Hopefully someone else has the same question and will see this!
Andrew: actually, TR’s 6-week average TSS is their attempt to mirror CTL. Equally, their weekly TSS is an approximation to ATL. The differences are
[1] TR uses simple averages rather than exponentially weighted averages [that weight the recent more highly than the distant past]; and
[2] TR uses weekly calculations rather than daily moving averages.