If you’re measuring your performance regularly (hint: You should be), then you may notice that your numbers from testing aren’t linear. If you were to graph your performance over time, it should TREND up (if it isn’t, get a new process), but some measurements will actually be lower some weeks than the week before. Let’s talk about why that is, how much is good, and how much is bad.
First, I define performance in this context as a measured outcome. For most of the people reading this, this means distance over time, or speed. How long does it take you to run up that hill, how long does it take you to ski down that hill. For others, performance could be power measured on a bike. Something like 5-minute power.
Our body’s expression of that performance is the intersection of fitness and freshness. You get Fitness from training. Your body’s systems become stronger and are more able to move you faster and farther. You get Freshness from NOT training. Freshness is the absence of fatigue.
This concept probably makes sense to you intuitively. Even if you’re super fit, you could be slow if you’re also super tired. You could also be super fresh, but if you aren’t fit, you’re going to be slow. You need BOTH fitness and freshness in order to see better numbers in your performance testing.
Where this is really important for training and making decisions based on testing is that the time-scales of building and losing fitness and freshness are different.
Fitness is gained and lost relatively slowly. If you’re doing a 5-minute test regularly to gauge training, you realistically probably aren’t going to improve more than a couple seconds per week if training is going well. Similarly, it’s going to be lost pretty slowly. Sure, if you totally sit on the couch for 2-3 weeks you’re going to lose some performance. But if you’re training even 50% of your usual volume, you’d probably only lose a couple seconds a week on a five-minute test.
Freshness, on the other hand, can be gained and lost VERY quickly. It’s pretty easy to do a couple hard days in a row, or to lose a couple nights of sleep, and lose 20-30 seconds on that 5-minute test.
This means that if you’re testing regularly, and you see a LARGE change in performance from one week to the next, it’s really unlikely that your FITNESS changed that much. It’s much more likely that your FRESHNESS changed. If you are 15 seconds slower on a five-minute test, and you trained at all in the last couple weeks, that loss of performance is almost certainly because you’re TIRED, not because you lost fitness. The solution is to find where the extra stress came from that caused that fatigue, and remove it for the next time you test your performance.
