The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast by CTS

DATA MINING TO MANAGE FATIGUE AND SUPERCHARGE TRAINING (#242)

• CTS • Season 5 • Episode 242

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OVERVIEW
How much fatigue can an athlete accumulate without hurting recovery and hindering progress? That's the million dollar question for all coaches and athletes because it reveals how much training you can do in a given time, what type of workouts to use, and even what goals are within your reach. Coach Adam Pulford delves into the software tools he uses to analyze athlete data, monitor fatigue, assess an athlete's capacity for future training, and much more. Listen to Episode 242 of "The Time-Crunched Cyclist Podcast" and learn to leverage your training data to supercharge your training and results. 

TOPICS COVERED

  • What training metrics represent fatigue?
  • Defining training stress score (TSS)
  • Acute vs. chronic training load
  • How stress (fatigue) is balanced by rest (recovery)
  • Why "ramp rates" matter and how to use them to plan training

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HOST
Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

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Speaker 1:

From the team at CTS. This is the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast, our show dedicated to answering your training questions and providing actionable advice to help you improve your performance, even if you're strapped for time. I'm your host, Coach Adam Pulford, and I'm one of the over 50 professional coaches who make up the team at CTS. In each episode, I draw on our team's collective knowledge, other coaches and experts in the field to provide you with the practical ways to get the most out of your training and ultimately become the best cyclist that you can be. Now on to our show. Now on to our show. How much fatigue can one carry without hurting your progress? That may be the single best question I've received from an audience member on this podcast. Yet why? Because it drills down to the core of what every coach and every athlete is trying to figure out how much training can one do before it's too much? And why are we seeking that? Because, conceptually, the more training stress you can handle and recover from, the stronger you will likely get. But it's a very fine line with steep consequences if you get it wrong. I'm your host, Coach Adam Pulford, and today we'll be learning how to use data-driven metrics, along with intuition, to manage your fatigue and maximize your performance. In other words, it's both science and art. To answer this fully Now, I want to read the full question to you to bring context to the discussion today. Then we'll work on answering it.

Speaker 1:

Here's the original question Fatigue. This is a training peaks metric that I watch. How much fatigue can one carry without hurting progress and normal life, If that can be answered? I listened to your latest podcast and I'm just getting back to writing after nearly three months off the bike due to sickness and a foot injury. Right now I'm doing day on and day off rides during the week and I want to start weekend riding but do not want to become ill due to being ultra tired. Thank you, MD. Again. I think this is the best question ever. So thanks, MD. Again. I think this is the best question ever. So thanks, MD. And here's my honest to God answer I don't know. I don't know how much fatigue you can handle. I don't know how much fatigue this person or that person or this person here can handle specifically, but I can say with reasonable confidence that everyone is a little different and to know how much you can handle, you need to tune in with both data and perceived effort or how you feel, to know where your limits are. There's just as much art in solving this as there is science. So let's explore fatigue a bit more, how the science works around it and how best to understand it.

Speaker 1:

First, I always like to start with a working definition. So what is fatigue? Webster defines it as tiredness due to mental or physical exertion or illness. So in a training context, it's usually the physical exertion or the physical fatigue we're referring to, Although the mental side or the cognitive side shouldn't be overlooked. And when you're sick or you're ill you shouldn't be training until you're healthy again. So physical fatigue is what we can best measure and monitor and that's what we're going to focus on today.

Speaker 1:

Training peaks causes fatigue. Metric, acute training load or ATL, it's a little pink number or pink line If you're on the, the uh on your laptop looking at it or on your uh on your app on your phone. And to best understand how much of this fatigue or this ATL that you can handle or carry without being hurt in the pro in the process, it's best to understand how it's measured and how it works with the other metrics on TrainingPeaks. So let's zoom out to stress scores in general. There are many iterations out there to quantify training stress, anything from suffer scores to relative effort scores, trim scores. There's even a foster score out there, but again I'm going to focus on TrainingPeaks. That's the platform that I use and CTS uses to prescribe and analyze data. Also, a lot of their terminology, methodology and technology is being used in a lot of different devices out there. So Training Peaks measures this ATL first by establishing a global training stress score, or TSS, for every workout.

Speaker 1:

Tss is a function of intensity or normalized power with time or duration, and it gives you a score. So, by definition, if you ride one hour at FTP and your FTP is recorded accurately and properly because you listen to our other podcast about field testing and you know what it is If you ride one hour at FTP, that's 100 TSS points. So I give you that as kind of a grounding of what. How many points can be accumulated in a certain amount of time? How many points can be accumulated in a certain amount of time? Now you can ride at lower intensity so long endurance rides and you can go for a long time period and rack up points. Additionally, you can go harder or more intense for shorter, repeatable efforts and you can rack up points like that by intensifying your training. But FTP is the hinge point to it all and duration plays a big role, because how much time you ride at above or below FTP is how you accumulate these points and how you add stress to your system, your body. Now, as you train more, you'll earn more points. It's kind of a gamification if you will earn more points, you get more fit, and that's how it works in general terms.

Speaker 1:

Now again, this only you know. The accuracy of these training stress scores are only as good as the accuracy of your data in your current testing. So if you haven't tested recently, you don't know what a field test is. Go back and listen to my podcast on field testing. Now, specifically, the fatigue that MD is talking about here in this question is that ATL or Q training load. You can't look at just one metric and put your finger on it and say this is how I am governing or monitoring my training, and you can't do that with ATL for sure. You have to look at all these metrics that training peaks and other systems are using. You have to look at them together. So what I want to do now is I want to look at the performance management chart, because ATL, CTL and TSB these are the key metrics that you need to be looking at all together and I think it's best to describe them with a visual. So if you're on our YouTube platform and you're watching, I'm going to bring up a visual to show that. If you're listening on our podcast just just with audio and no video, I'll do my best to describe it just by words, but either way, you're going to get the picture. So I've got our visual pulled up and what we're looking at is a performance management chart, and this is actually my own data. Just do that for simplicity sake. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to describe each of the key metrics here of ATL, CTL and TSB.

Speaker 1:

Atl is that pink line that we see right here. Okay, it's going up and down, up and down. That pink line, or acute training load, is measuring the exponentially weighted average of your TSS over seven days, which means it's measuring the stress in your system for about two weeks, because that's how exponentially weighted averages work. That's in pink. So CTL, or chronic training load, is measuring the exponentially weighted average for about 42 days. So the TSS over about 90 days is what it's accurately measuring. Okay, so ATL is more that weekly fatigue and it racks up and kind of carries over. And that's to MD's question is how much can you carry over? Atl is carrying it for about two weeks. So if you do hard training, this pink line goes up on training peaks and it kind of carries through for a couple of weeks. Now if you take an easy week, that pink line goes down and you start to freshen up. But meanwhile as you do more training load and the pink goes up and down and then back up and down. Pink goes up and down and then back up and down. Ctl or your fitness, this blue line goes up gradually over time. And that's how acute training load and chronic training load work together.

Speaker 1:

This is my analogy of saying you need to crack some eggs to bake the cake. You're cracking eggs that's inducing fatigue from an ATL standpoint and you're baking the cake of fitness. Right, you got to cause some destruction in order to make that cake happen. Terrible analogy probably for some people, but hopefully you smiled. So these are the short-term and the long-term training stress score metrics that you can use on training peaks to gauge how much fatigue and how much fitness you're gaining over time. Now the other color that you can see here on our visual is yellow and that's TSB, or training stress balance. Simply put, this shows us how you're adapting to the training and gives us more insight on how fresh or maybe unfresh you actually are, based on the previous training block. So to bring some description to what you're seeing here on the performance management chart online is essentially at some point.

Speaker 1:

I got organized with my own training at the end of February, beginning of March, and I was actually pretty sick too. I got COVID for February and that's why the TSB is through the roof and so high. So once I got healthy I started to induce a training and training fatigue. So you see, pink goes up and it kind of has like a little spike Meanwhile. Ctl kind of follows that. Then I start to get into some heavier training and that pink line goes up. I start to get into some heavier training and that pink line goes up. Meanwhile the blue line, or CTL fitness, gradually goes up. And that's how training works. You do a week or two of training and you get tired and over time you'll get fit and you can see that blue line gradually building up over time as the pink line oscillates and then at some point we see these dotted lines, and I'll get into that maybe here more in a second. But that's the model approach of the prescriptive workouts that I have built in training peaks, moving forward into the future, Because this performance management chart I have set up for the last 180 days in the next 45 days, that's how I look at it and suggest how people look at it in their training peaks.

Speaker 1:

Now to the back to the question at hand how much fatigue can I handle? How much fatigue can MD handle? How much fatigue can somebody handle? I don't know, I really don't it, but it really depends on a lot of things and so many things that I'm not going to cover all of them. But things that come to mind for me are age, training, age sleep, lack of sleep, motivation lack of motivation, fueling habits both on and off the bike, recovery habits like the timing of food, post-workout hydration throughout your day and evening, stress management, work stress, family stress, life stress, trends of fitness or fitness decay, previous illness like MD and I both had, and the list goes on. So the amount of fatigue that you can handle right now definitely depends on all the factors that I talked about, including kind of a moving target of sorts. Because right now including kind of a moving target of sorts, Because right now, based on what you can see in my performance management chart, what I could handle just a month ago is I couldn't handle very much training and now I can handle a lot more training and I can feel that as well. You know a hard three or four hour ride. Put me on the couch as well. You know a hard three or three or four hour ride. Put me on the couch. And now this past weekend I just did three, four hour rides back to back to back and I handled it quite well and I felt good on that third day. So in a sense, that fatigue can be a bit of a moving target. You don't want to overdo it because the consequences are high, but you definitely need to crack some eggs to to bake that fitness cake.

Speaker 1:

Okay, Now the other thing to age right. A younger, motivated athlete with no family and minimal job demands they can handle a lot more training than a middle-aged or older person with family, a full-time job, things like this. So most normal humans have a lot going on, which is why it's really hard to give a straight up answer. If you're to somehow remove that middle-aged person from their normal stress day to day and you put them in a training camp, all of a sudden, boom, they can handle a ton more ATL or fatigue or stress from a training context because they have less going on, or stress from a training context because they have less going on.

Speaker 1:

Now I'll tell you this when I build training, say like in the base build and prep time periods, where I want to increase fitness, I want to increase CTL, like you see here on the performance management chart, my main focus, like MD wants to do here, I don't look at ATL only and I don't even look at it first. I look at all the metrics together, actually build the training. Then I look at something called ramp rates, which we'll get into here in just a minute. Then I look at CTL, I look at TSB and I look at how the modeled ATL ebbs and flows. Does it build up and come down every two to three weeks or so? And you can see that with the visual on YouTube. It spikes up, comes down. Spikes up, comes down. That's what you want to see out of the ATL.

Speaker 1:

But in terms of that pure number. What's that pure number you should be shooting for? I don't know. I even looked it up. I asked a few coaches that I work with. I went out there searching, I even chat, GPT'd it and, depending on where you're looking, most people do not prescribe or give a range of what ATL should be like. We do with CTL, I would say, because it has so many variables to it, it's not good to aim for one CTL over another. You just want to get it high as you're inducing a training effect when you're trying to uh, get fitness or change something form an adaptation from your body.

Speaker 1:

Okay, Now I I use other tools too, like anaerobic and aerobic impact scores and fatigue tracking charts. That are all available on WKO5. So for the extreme data geeks out there, I'll put a link in our show notes to how you can get WKO5 and start using it for your own training. So, like I said in my coaching practice, I don't find it useful or applicable to shoot for some sort of range or number on ATL. It's too variable. Shoot for some sort of range or number on ATL. It's two variable CTL and ramp rates are more reliable to keep you on track and in my opinion, they do so without overcooking yourself too soon. So let's learn more about how to use ramp rates. Okay, so now I've pulled up a different visual on our YouTube channel. So for those wanting to look at that, head on over to our YouTube and start watching and listening there.

Speaker 1:

But again, I'll do my best to describe what's going on In TrainingPeaks. Premium users. They lay out ramp rates for you over the past seven days, 28 days, 90 days and 365 days. I generally focus on the weekly ramp rate and what this actually means is just looking at your increase of CTL week to week. Generally speaking, if you're between a two and 10 for a ramp rate, I'd consider that to be appropriate. Eight to 10 is pretty aggressive. One to two is pretty minimal. And all of this is assuming, once again, your FTP and your data is accurate, Okay, and it's clean. So don't don't get me going on data hygiene. It's it's a touchy subject for me, Okay, but just make sure that your FTP is up to date and it is up to date on training peaks. Now I want to see these ramp rates between two and 10 occur for two to three weeks in a row.

Speaker 1:

Then I generally for my athletes, I generally give them a block of recovery or maybe a recovery week. So five to seven days of easy riding, a couple of rest days in there, and help them freshen up and adapt to the training stresses. Because, remember, stress plus rest equals adaptation. That is the equation that we're all using when it comes to getting faster, getting better, getting stronger, getting more powerful and trying to get on that podium. You can't adapt without rest, but you also won't form an adaptation without some adequate stress, which is why MD's question is so damn good. Okay, here's a quick story.

Speaker 1:

When I was a young coach, I went to Dean Golich who in my opinion is still probably one of the best coaches I've ever met and I asked him what makes elite athletes different than non-elites? And he answered pretty quickly and he goes how fast they adapt and how much they can suffer. So let's put this suffering to the side for now, Okay, and let's focus on the adaptation. He said how fast they adapt, Right? So I thought about that for a bit and I was thinking about my stress plus rest equation and I came back to him and said well, how much stress can we give them? How much stress can I give an athlete? Then and he replied pretty quickly and he said if someone knew that, they'd have all the medals. And again, this guy is one of the best coaches. He now works with Um, but I I don't know if I can say it online, but he works with another pro uh world tour team, um team at the highest level and he knows his stuff. So his point was obviously that we don't really know and it's different for everyone and it's a process that every athlete and every coach needs to figure out for the own individual athlete.

Speaker 1:

You need to be in tune with yourself and your feelings. For sure you also need to know how to use data in science to help us understand and how to form those adaptations without cooking yourself too much. Now how can you use these, like these general tips that I just gave you of ramp rate, you know two to 10 kind of stay within there. Well, there's different ways of inducing that right. So, like you can stay at the low end of the ramp rate, call it one to two, maybe three uh ramp rate for every week and you can run that out for several weeks in a row. And I do that for some of my athletes, where we keep the intensity low and we're building up the volume I can. I can keep that ramp rate going up for several weeks before taking a break, however, up for several weeks before taking a break. However, if that ramp rate is 10 plus right, and you just drill yourself into the ground, Well, maybe you only do that for one week and then you go easy for a block and then you come back to training. So, again, using those ramp rates as a guide generally, that's going to be. That's going to be better, because the fatigue aspect, or the, the ATL, that pink line or the pink number, it has too many variables to it. Okay, Other things to really ask yourself is how do you feel today?

Speaker 1:

How do legs feel today? Have you been sleeping well? How are you performing the next day in training? Are you motivated? Do you have good energy? Are you looking forward to training? These are all great questions to ask yourself when you wake up and you start to get your equipment together and head out for another training ride, or you have a cup of coffee in the morning and you're trying to decide well, should I really do these intervals or not?

Speaker 1:

Now let me make one additional point. I kind of poked at this earlier. But we only want to use these ramp rate guidelines in CTL when the goal is to increase fitness or when we're in that base, build and prep periods. After that, increasing CTL is not really the goal, at least in my practice in working with athletes. At some point we don't even focus on CTL anymore. We try to increase power, we try to increase speed, we try to increase the specificity of race demands Okay, and that takes higher priority than just fitness alone.

Speaker 1:

One good quote that you can take away from this podcast is what it takes to get fit is not the same thing it takes to stay fit is what it takes to get fit is not the same thing it takes to stay fit. What that means is in that base and build time period. If you build your base properly, you can then move on to higher intensity and let CTL just stabilize, Let it kind of plateau if you will, and you can manage that with intensity and a couple of long rides every couple of weeks, Okay. But at that point what you're doing is you're actually decreasing your ATL or your fatigue so that you can focus on performance, so you can focus on increasing your power production. That's how good training works. Now, once you're fit, how you measure and monitor fatigue can get even more artsy with your data. Okay, but I better leave that for another time and wrap this thing up.

Speaker 1:

My final point, and the bigger picture here, is consistency prevails when it comes to gaining fitness, Because here's really how training works. If you train a lot for two weeks, you're just going to get tired. If you train a lot for two months with proper recovery just going to get tired. If you train a lot for two months with proper recovery, you're going to be on the right track. If you train a lot for two years with the proper balance of stress and rest, you're fit. So play the long game with your fitness. Be consistent, don't rush it, and you'll be way more successful. And to you, MD, pay closer attention to your ramp rates on a weekly, monthly basis, and I think you'll find this guides you far better than ATL or fatigue. So that's it.

Speaker 1:

That's our show for today. If you liked what you heard, please share it with a friend or your training partner. If you have any other great questions, like we had today, head on over to trainrightcom backslash podcast and click on ask a training question. Those get sent directly to me and the team at CTS and we'll do our best to answer it on a future episode. Thanks again for listening and we'll meet back here next week for more actionable training advice. Thanks for joining us on the Time Crunch Cyclist podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. If you want even more actionable training advice, head over to trainrightcom backslash newsletter and subscribe to our free weekly publication. Each week you'll get in-depth training content that goes beyond what we cover here on the podcast that'll help you take your training to the next level. That's all for now. Until next time, train hard, train smart, train right.

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