Lessons from the 2010 Season, Part 1

The accompanying chart illustrates the actual periodization of a road cyclist for the season just ending. The chart was created using WKO+ software and data from the rider’s power meter. If you are a runner data from a speed-distance device (GPS or accelerometer) would produce a similar chart using WKO+. Heart rate can also be used for this purpose but can only be done online at TrainingPeaks. (I’m not going to go into how the data points are created as the technology behind this is not the point of this discussion. For details on this pick up a copy of Training and Racing With a Power Meter by Allen and Coggan. The book also explains the running data.) Regardless of sport, the charts look similar. I want to use this one to make a few points about training for you.

I’m sure this chart is rather messy and confusing looking, so let’s get oriented on it first (click to expand it). The horizontal axis is time. Notice that the first day of the season on the left end is October 5, 2009 and the last day is October 3, 2010 on the right end. It’s almost exactly a year. The vertical axis shows the magnitude of the various metrics I’ll be explaining.

Now for the metrics. The blue line is “fitness” (“CTL”-Chronic Training Load in WKO+-speak). Red is “fatigue” (“ATL”-Acute Training Load). The yellow portion is “form” (“TSB”-Training Stress Balance).

When the blue line is rising the athlete’s fitness is improving. When the red line is rising fatigue is increasing. Notice that the red and blue lines trend in the same directions. When you train hard fitness increases and you become more fatigued. And conversely, when you back off of training fitness declines and you are less fatigued. Simple concept.

You undoubtedly understand fitness and fatigue so let’s get up to speed on form. This is simply a way of expressing the athlete’s race readiness. It has to do with reducing fatigue so that the athlete is rested on race day. That’s not quite as simple as it seems because the challenge is to keep from losing too much fitness while shedding fatigue. I’ll get to that in a later post here. There are a couple of basic concepts to be understood about form on this chart. Whenever the yellow portion is rising the athlete is “coming into form.” In other words, fatigue is being lost. When form rises above the purple dashed line running horizontally across the middle of the chart he is “on form”, i.e., fresh or well-rested.

So here are a couple of more basic concepts. The object of training is to elevate fitness. The purpose of peaking is to reduce fatigue so that the athlete comes into form. I usually try to have the athlete’s form at about +20 TSB on race day. You can see the TSB scale just on the left side of the chart.

I’ll explain the little squares with the multicolored lines connecting them and the CP30, etc labels later on. I don’t want to overwhelm you with details right now (I may have already done that, I’m afraid).

Across the bottom on the chart in black print is the athlete’s periodization. If you’ve read any of my Training Bible books you should be familiar with these terms and what the training during each period is like, so I’m not going into that again here. The vertical dashed lines in this region indicate when a training period ends and another begins. By looking above each of these periods you can see what happened to the athlete’s fitness, fatigue and form at these times.

I’ve also shown here when the athlete’s A-priority races took place (there were 3) and other significant activities (“1 week camp,” etc).

So, with all of this in mind there are several lessons to be learned from this athlete’s seasonal progression. Let’s look at three of them.

Lesson #1: Seasonal progression is never a straight line. Fitness, fatigue and form are never static. They are always changing due to hard and easy training, illness, injury, and other commitments in life. If you increase the workload, fitness and fatigue rise. Notice the “1 week camp” in late June. Here fitness rises exceptionally fast and fatigue spikes at the highest level of the year. We know the athlete was training with a very high (for him) workload. Conversely, note what happened during a week of “no training” in early September due to other commitments. There is a significant drop in fitness as fatigue drops and form rises to about the highest level of the season.

Lesson #2: Periodization must be flexible. Because of this training volatility you must constantly make adjustments to the training plan. In 30 years of creating plans for athletes I’ve coached I’ve never had one that went unchanged from the start of the season to the end. Not only must changes be made frequently, but you must also make changes that correct the course. Fitness is the most likely metric to need changing and that’s a bit like trying to turn a huge ship – it takes time, as in several days or weeks. On the other hand, reducing fatigue is rather easy – just stop training. When you that, however, fitness is also lost although not as quickly as fatigue. The smart self-coached athlete will be frequently tinkering with training to stay on course.

Lesson #3: Base fitness must be maintained throughout the season. If it is compromised then it must be regained before going to more advanced training. Notice in the chart back in February that Base 2 didn’t go well and these training conflicts continued into March (Base 3a). So we extended the athlete’s Base 2 and then repeated his Base 3 period (Base 3b). After A race #1 on June 5 we went back to Base training again (Base 3c). This was also done after race #2 and again after the week of no training. This was done because whenever fatigue drops and form rises for an extended period of time, regardless of the cause (peaking, illness, injury, other commitments), Base fitness must be regained. Whenever you see a “Base” period the athlete is primarily focused on aerobic endurance, muscular force and speed skills, as described in my Training Bible books. Without these most basic abilities anything else the athlete may do to gain race-like fitness would not produce good results. If you make a mistake in training make it on the side of too much Base training.

There are several more lessons to be learned from this chart. I’ll cover a few more in Part 2.

Comments

[Tracy]

This is a great chart and comparing it to my training it great from a comparative standpoint. Rarely do we get to see other athletes charts and I kind of get tired looking at my own. I have two questions:
1) I don't see Intensity Factor on the graph (or I don't know how to get it from the numbers) but by the huge ATL spikes I am guessing he has had several very high IF workouts? For me personally, My most intense workout (highest IFs) are barely over 1.1. My question is can you use IF as a gauge to see if my thresholds are in line / if they are changing / if I need to adjust them with a retest?

2) Can you discuss how your athlete's race performance was in relation to how "race ready" he was and if there were any lessons learned reviewing the race and of course the data post race?

Sorry for the length, the science behind this is really fascinating to me and I appreciate you sharing your knowledge

[Peter Karlsson]

Joe,

Lots of thanks for your blog.

I've got a question that's maybe not completely right for you, because of the A-race focus that goes with your profession. Anyways, here goes:

I've got no intention of racing, I have life-long fitness in mind. I understand there needs to be cyclic variations of stress/relief to train the cardio system, just as any other parts of the body, when looking at short time variations like days. However, when not competing, and not aiming to peak at a certain few times during a long variation like a year/season, are these variations really needed? Like base/build/peak/taper/transition etc.

A related thought might be the equivalent in fitness strength training vs competitive bodybuilding, where there's a similar seasonal base/build/definition cycle. But I can do without this long cycle when building strength and not aiming to peak at a certain time; life is continuous and I want to be in my best sustainable shape all year, all life. Same goes for my just started cardio oriented training I'm adding now.

So, forgive me for being a noob, but what cycles, short and long, would you recommend for someone serious and interested, but without a longing to measure against others?

Many thanks /Peter

[Joe Friel]

Hi Peter--Thanks for your comment. When I coached fitness clients many years ago the question was still the same--what are your goals? When do you want to achieve them? How will you know when you've achieved them? You may not be measuring progress relative to others (or not even to your own previous personal performances, altho that seems a more likely option) but you're measuring it relative to something. Perhaps it's a field test or a lab measurement of VO2max or a better report from your doc on your health status. Realize that simply doing the same thing day after day, week after week, etc leads to staleness and plateauing. Periodization works just as well for the fitness enthusiast as the competitive athlete. Good luck!

[Joe Friel]

Tracy--Wow! Lots of good questions. Some of which I will cover in the next part of this post. Realize that spikes in ATL are due to a high TSS. TSS is a resultant of IF _and_ duration, not just IF. Your IFs of 1.1 indicate the workout was either shorter than 1 hour (and extremely hard from the get-go--no warm or cool down) or else your FTP is wrong. I've never had an athlete do a 1.1 IF for a workout. They've done it for portions of workouts. There are lots of ways to determine FTP. One way is to look at the WKO+ Mean Max Power Profile chart. Find the 30-minute data point. That indicates your best CP30 for the season so far (use CP60 if it was 1-hour race data). There are other ways which I'll get to at a later time. Good luck!

[Peter Karlsson]

Thanks Joe,

I've got much respect for your thoughts, and looking into this long-time periodization thinking, goals, and WKO+. I've imported my brief history of files; running (pace, pulse, barometric elevation), bike (power, pulse, elevation, cadence, speed), and strength training (pulse).

I'm learning, and looking at the Performance chart in WKO+. Think I've got my head around rating workouts with the help of normalized pace (running) and power (bike).

But, there's a problem; I also do weight workouts, and during winter spinning classes (no power meter). I guess these workouts would be good to have in the Performance chart also, to better tell how Form, Fatigue and Fitness (TSB, TSS etc) moves over time.

So far I've just done some manual input to the spinning workouts, adding what I think could be a reasonable TSS. But I've got no clue how to rate strength workouts. Since the less accurate TRIMP system uses pulse + time, and could at least give some suggestion to spinning workouts, could this maybe be an idea to integrate into WKO+ when no other data is available? Better than not adding any stress at all into the Performance chart, I guess.

I do realize pulse does not work to rate common weight training; pulse reacts too slow, as you've stated.

Could you please give some suggestions to how to handle TSS for weight training and spinning in WKO+? If there's no automatic way, then maybe a manual evaluation method for TSS?

A spinning pass is typically 55 min; often 10 min warmup and 45 min lactate threshold, with a full-out at the end for about 30 seconds.

Weight workouts are about 6 excersises, 5 set/exersise, peaking at full 6-rep-all-out-strength for about 2 of those sets for every exersise. A mix between small muscle groups and large; all muscles are split to 3 workouts during one week; each group gets one workout/week.

I'd be very grateful for some suggestions.

Thanks /Peter

[Joe Friel]

Hi Peter--The only way I see to do this is to use a rating of perceived exertion (RPE) to set the workout TSS. A scale I once suggested for such issues may be found here -- http://www.trainingbible.com/joesblog/2009/09/estimating-tss.html

[Peter Karlsson]

Thanks for pointing me, Joe.

I've changed the exponential weighting on pulse in my other program that I must use to import the files (Polar Pro Trainer), so the stress scoring system there gives similar values to TSS - that way I only need to copy a number to WKO+, not calculating one.

But, I'd very much like a future version of WKO+ to automatically be able to estimate TSS when power or pace data is missing; your method is even mentioned as an article concerning WKO+ at the site, so I guess you/they are backing it up. I've seen others requesting this feature also. Maybe you could just make the program warn us before using this more simple calculation.

I'm going your way with periodisation; I realize it's everywhere. Just a thought; would it be wise to base frequency and recovery foremost out of the Performance planner graph, or by using a conventional training plan with fixed days for activity and rest, and adjusting in accordance to the graph?

Cheers /P

[Joe Friel]

Peter--For recovery I start with a fixed plan and then modify it as on the fly as I see/sense things going too much one way or the other.