You’ve probably heard me harp on this before: Train + Rest = improved performance or capacity. But HOW MUCH training? And HOW MUCH resting? And how do you quantify it? Miles? Hours?
Unfortunately, Volume (miles or hours) isn’t a very good indicator of workload because it doesn’t include intensity. How hard did you run those miles or ride those hours? A 30 minute jog is clearly much less tiring than 30 minutes all-out-cross-eyed-and-drooling effort (unless a 30m jog gets you cross eyed and drooling. No judgement).
Likewise, Intensity doesn’t tell us much by itself. “I ran in Level 5 today.” Neat. For 2 minutes? For 2 hours?
The software I use to coach all my athletes, Training Peaks, uses a combination of the two factors (Volume and Intensity), called Training Stress Score (TSS). Each workout gets a TSS score, and those scores are added in a day for multiple workouts.
In order to give you a good idea of where you’ve been, AND even a little prediction of the future, Training Peaks uses the Performance Management Chart (PMC), shown below, to use TSS to track three main factors, Fitness, Fatigue, and Form.
Fitness, or Chronic Training Load (CTL,the dark blue line), is a weighted average of your daily TSS for the last 42 days (weighted meaning more recent workouts factor more into the number). The higher your CTL, the higher your cumulative workload has been, suggesting that your fitness is high.
Fatigue, or Acute Training Load (ATL, the pink line), is a weighted average of the TSS of the last 7 days.
Form, or Training Stress Balance (TSB, the yellow line), is really just the ATL shifted back a day. So if you do a big workout today, you’ll be shit TOMORROW. In order to have a good performance, typically I try to get my athletes to have a race day TSB between -10 and 0, biasing higher for longer races. The DIRECTION that the form line is going can greatly affect performance too, is TSB rising or falling?
While it’s not perfect, if you’re fastidious about your data collection and know what you’re looking for, the Performance Management Chart can be a HUGE help to making sure you’re training juuuust enough, but not too much, and kicking all the asses at all the right times!
