Over trained or over reached
Is there suddenly a whole lot of over training going on? I've noticed a lot of cyclists lately are asking the question "Am I over trained?" You've probably noticed it too. The topic of overtraining seems to be getting lots of attention. But why now? It's the end of the season here on upper-earth. Shouldn't over training be the farthest thing from our minds? Sure, our friends down under are just in the thick of it. Maybe all those stories and queries are coming from south of the equator. Somehow I don't think so.
I think we're seeing a lot of cyclists hammering themselves into the ground trying to raise their CTL levels. It's been about a month and a half since the Performance Manager was introduced to the world. I imagine more than a few upgraded WKO+ and were shocked when they got their first look at CTL. We all read the same forum posts. We're all competitive creatures. I can't help but believe more than a few immediately set about raising CTL. I know from personal experience it takes about a month to 45 days of flogging to get that overtrained feeling.
Personally, I don't believe there is such a thing as overtraining. I think athletes and coaches like to hang the over trained label on poor performances they don't know how to explain. The cyclist put in the time on the saddle and trained hard but performance hasn't come. In some senses I think overtrained is used as a badge of honor, sort of a consolation prize handed out to hard workers who don't podium.
I think the real problem is under recovery. I can see people starting to view rest days as bad. They're finding that when they take a recovery day CTL drops. Many using the PMC algorithm today are finding out it's a lot harder to gain CTL than it is to lose it. For example, if my CTL today is 80, it takes 3 straight 100 TSS point days to raise it to 83. For someone with a CTL of 80, three straight days of 100 TSS can be pretty tough. Now, if at the end of that third workout our theoretical 80 CTL cyclist decides to take a day off, his/her CTL drops to 79. Three steps forward and four back, that's gotta leave a mark.
What about just riding?
Wow you all got a newb running circles trying to decifer what exactly your talking about. TSS and CTL's along with PMC and WKO. Maybe I'm just so young in my cycling career that I dont have to get this specific but why exactly do you make things so complicated? I read about the power meters, and yes if I could sell some dope I'd probably be able to afford one. But unfortunatly I think there are other things I'd spend that 2 grand on. Dont get me wrong someday I will purchase one, just not anytime soon. So what exactly is this CTL and TSS stuff? And what happend to just going out and riding, hammering, and yes doing some training on side, and becoming better? I assume there is a point where it is much harder to see results, and I imagine age has alot to do with it. As for now, I'll just keep doing what I've been doing, riding hard, training hard, and resting as much as possible. When it comes time for race season next year we'll see how that works out.
True words
I'm with you. I am not really a noob at this business but not an old hand either. All this power stuff is good for getting faster and keeping track of progress I think. But if it takes the fun out of ridng then what is the point?
Count me in bro. Just ride and rock out. Rest and maybe drink a beer or 3. Sleep and watch some tube. When good and rested then repeat. The quant stuff can wait, maybe forever.
It is sooo simple!
I can not believe you don't know what all that stuff is...Just kidding. Seriously, when you want to squeeze every last drop of performance out of anything (a race car, an athlete, anything) you need gages so you can determine at what point it is going to fail...then you go right to that point and hopefully win.
In a car it is an actual gage, on a bike it is a metric of some sort. All the crazy strings of letters are simply performance gages.
For a noob? yeah, just go out and beat yourself up for a while, but it won't take long and you will have built up enough fitness etc. that you will want to start a plan for improvement. And you will probably want a way to track your gains.
Some use heart rate monitors (HRMs) others use power meters (PMs). There is a whole lot of possible discussion to be had regarding the use of each.
Bottom line is you can get fast by just riding, but to be your absolute best, you probably are going to need an impartial judge of your performance (like a PM) and a whole bunch of metrics (like TSS, and CTL) that you will try to improve upon. Without these, you will never be sure if it was some condition of the environment (such as a slick trail) that slowed you down, or if you just plain sucked in a race.
CTL raising for its own sake
I definitely did just that when performance manager was released. But I knew what I was doing. What better time to see what you can withstand than this time of the year?
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