Wko+ for simpletons

After my last blog entry, my buddy Jaakko advised me to use my skills in translating the complex math of wko+ into terms that the layman can understand, to write a book on wko+ for Dummies. In fear of copyright infringement, I elected to go with today’s title :-)

There is also a little hidden meaning to today’s title. Truth is, there is no negative intent to my use of the word simpleton (or Mr Gump). Au contraire, I deeply admire simplicity in all senses of the word.

As much as I love to deal with numbers and complex theories, the truth is, I abhor complexity. Whenever looking at a data set or a new theory, my driving motivation is to reconcile it with my current view of the simple truth, i.e. to break down complexity into simplicity.

We are all familiar with the term ‘paralysis through analysis’. The corollary to this would be ‘action through simplicity’. In other words, those who most embody action (and who, consequently, generate results) do so through a simple approach – a focus on spending their time DOING the essentials rather than analyzing the inessentials. So, this brings us to today’s blog.

Somebody whose approach I deeply respect is athlete, Tim Luchinske. It seems that the bulk of Tim’s actions are put in place with the aim to bring the essentials more into focus and I’m not talking along the lines of what logbook he selects. Check out his blog to get a feel for what I mean.

In fact, it was reading his blog over the last couple of weeks that partly prompted this post. I want to distance myself from my recent posts that seem to suggest that fulfilling your potential in sport is a mathematical problem. It is not. In order to actually ‘do the math’, requires tuning out the noise and tuning into your passion throughout the day, throughout your life. So, I write this post with that intent.

That said, there are some simple key essentials that have been known to elite coaches for decades and recently confirmed by (and elaborated within) the studies on mathematical modelling of the training process on which wko+ is based. These key principles are so key, in fact, that I have witnessed, on numerous occasions, very passionate, action oriented athletes who fail to observe them consistently perform below their potential.

So, in this post, I want to provide some of the key ‘take home points’ that I have learned from wko+ that can be applied to all athletes, irrespective of whether their training log consists of a docking port for every speed and power measuring device known to man or a writing pad sitting on your bedside table.

1. Every individual athlete has an optimal ‘chronic training load’ for any one season that is the result of their training base and constitution, not their aspirations.

In other words, every athlete has a limit to the training load that they can absorb at any one point in the training season. It is important to note/realize that this number, of what the athlete can absorb over a long term period is significantly less than what the athlete can do over a short term period. It is only through long term monitoring of large scale workload, e.g. month to month workload that a reasonable assessment of optimal training load can be made.

This optimal load will also change over the year as the athlete’s base improves. While a 50hr month may make an athlete tired in the prep period. At the end of the base period, the athlete may be able to absorb a 70hr month with no problem.

Irrespective, the take home message is to stick to one given training load until you have proven that you can absorb it (6 weeks or more) before deciding to up the ante.


2. Every individual athlete has an optimal ‘ramp rate’ to build training load towards this optimal level. Exceeding this rate results in failed adaptation (overtraining)

There are 3 basic scenarios that can arise from the application of a training load:

a) Too much load



If the athlete digs too deep a hole for themselves at the start of the season, by ramping up the volume/intensity too quickly, they will exceed their adaptation reserves and fail to supercompensate, i.e. too much load will make the athlete slower rather than faster

b) Too little load



If the athlete digs too shallow a hole for themselves at the start of the season by ramping up the volume/intensity too gently, they will receive full benefit from the load very early in the training season, i.e. they will ‘peak too soon’. Obviously this is preferable to the first option as it is much easier to maintain a given level of fitness through to competition than it is to shed fatigue, get healthy and get fit if too much load is undertaken.

c) “Just right” load.



Optimal load will have the athlete arriving at maximal fitness shortly before their peak race of the year, with just enough time to taper and freshen prior to the competition.

Fitter athletes (athletes with a stronger consistency base) will generally be able to tolerate more aggressive ramp rates. However, the only way to not risk the fitness that you have accrued in the last block is to plan very moderate volume jumps from month to month until you have a proven baseline ramp rate that you have sustained over the course of a season.

3. Every individual athlete has an optimal season length before load makes them more tired rather than more fit. Exceeding this optimal season length results in failing adaptation (overtraining).

The other time of the season that the athlete risks failing adaptation is in a season that extends too long. When performance begins to drop late in the season in spite of maintained/increasing load, it is time to shut her down and take a worthwhile break. This optimal length also depends on the base of the athlete and how deep the initial hole is dug. Generally, this time period will be in the vicinity of 3-7 months.

4. It’s a lot easier to get fast by getting ‘fresh’ than it is by getting ‘fit’.

While the seasonal gains that an athlete can expect from appropriate tapering are less than those that the athlete can expect from training, the relative benefit makes allowing time for an optimal taper a key inclusion within the training plan. In a wko+ sense, an athlete can, under a good case scenario, expect a 10-20% improvement in fitness (CTL) from month to month. However, freshness (TSB) can improve almost 200% within 1 month of reduced training! This is worthwhile remembering when considering ‘doing a little more’.

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Wko+ is a tool that enables athletes and coaches to reconcile the relationship between training load and relative performance. It is especially useful as summary statistics for those athletes who experience frequent fluctuations in training load to keep track of expected fitness and to forecast what load modifications will lead to the best result. However…..

For the serious athlete, controlling variables should always be a higher priority than measuring them.

Train Smart,

AC

Periodization vs. The Basic Week

“There’s more to being a model than just being really, really good looking”
- Derek Zoolander

Wise, wise words from Derek Zoolander. As many of you know, I have been really into models lately – training models that is. I have received some great feedback from you all, including a number of elite athletes that validates some of the theoretical constructs I presented in my last piece on the off-season. My buddy, Mat wrote a great ‘real world’ piece on his experiences with the off-season on his blog.

The past couple of weeks, I have managed to get my hands on a number of studies by the big players in mathematical modeling of the training process – Banister, Busso, Morton, Fitz-Clarke etc. While these studies contain some pretty sexy series formulae that describe fitness, fatigue and performance at any one time, as Zoolander says, there needs to be more to a training model than just being good looking. As coaches, we want more than theoretical constructs. We want a ‘roll your sleeves up’ computer model that allows us to put in data from a given athlete and accurately forecast race day performance using a variety of training methods, so that, as coaches, we can come up with the optimal training program for a given athlete. Software such as wko+ and RaceDay are a step in the right direction, however, they are much more easily used post-hoc rather than as a forecasting tool. I’m an impatient kind of guy and only have so much time to spend on trial and error. So….

I spent the extra time in the first week of my off-season creating a computer model of the impulse-response formulae of Banister (1975). I am not the first guy whose curiosity got the better of him. Rowbottom (2000) used the Banister formulae to expand on Morton's (1991) study and test different training structures. He found a consistent 3-5% performance difference when using a periodized training structure vs. a flat loading “basic week” structure.

A 24 week output of these two training structures with a training load of 100 TSS/d (with average ‘Middle of the Pack’ fitness and fatigue constants of 45 and 15 resp) is shown below (k1=1,k2=2):

X axis is days of training. Y1 axis is training load, Y2 axis is performance in arbitrary units.

Note: Both of these structures have exactly the same total training load (an average of 100 TSS/d) over the 24 weeks. In the case of the first, this is distributed as a the extreme example of a flat-loading “basic week”, same load day-in, day out over the 24 weeks. In the case of the 2nd, the load is distributed as:

Wk 1: 70 TSS/d (~12hrs of easy-steady training)
Wk2: 120 TSS/d (~21hrs of easy-steady training)
Wk3: 160 TSS/d (~28hrs of easy-steady training)
Wk 4: 50 TSS/d (~9hrs of easy-steady training)

The performance difference between the two structures is predicted at 1485 units for the periodized method vs. 1424 for the flat loading, a difference of ~4%.

Now, 4% is nothing to sneeze at. Most 11hr Ironpeople would welcome a 26 minute PR with no extra training load. Seems like a good deal. So, as Joe Friel asks in his latest blog post, “what’s wrong with periodization? “ Faster times for the same training load seems like a no-brainer. However, there are a couple of caveats that you should be aware of when deciding upon whether to use a traditional periodized training plan for the 2009 season.

The most important caveat is that in almost all cases, the structure of the training load is secondary to the quantity of training load.

In other words, there are many training programs that emphasize an arbitrary periodization structure: Dividing the total load for the mesocycle into 18%/30%/40%/13% etc. As displayed above, this is often a superior way to distribute training load providing the load is equal to what would be accomplished with a flat loading basic week. This is an important proviso. If you want to average 100 TSS/d (~17hrs of easy-steady training per week) this season, but the most training that you can fit into a week (without giving up sleep, increasing stress or compromising recovery) is 20hrs/wk, then obviously the training structure, rather than the total training load needs to be amended.

In other words, to answer Joe’s question, the thing that is ‘wrong’ with periodization is that our lives aren’t periodized. If you have the job flexibility to be able to work 50hr weeks on your easy weeks and 20hr weeks on your hard weeks, without significantly increasing job stress, then you should do it. For most of us, however, this structure is not an option and, particularly as the athlete improves, they will be forced to adopt a structure that more resembles a flat loading ‘basic week’ in order to accommodate the extra load. As a footnote, some of the most successful age group athletes that I have worked with are those with the most job flexibility. In other words, if you are serious about climbing to the very top of the age group ranks, finding a job or a position within your current occupation that offers more schedule flexibility should be a high long-term priority.

Obviously, the two examples I have presented here are extremes and deal with only one ‘level’ of periodization. Even those athletes confined to a flat load weekly structure, will likely have days that they can do significantly more work (e.g. weekends) and so the load won’t be constant on a day to day basis.

Additionally, in terms of the macrocycle, serious athletes can get a significant jump on the competition by taking advantage of appropriately placed jumps in the training load via training camps.

However, on a day-to-day basis the most important consideration in determining the optimal distribution of the training load falls not so much in the realm of the mathematician, but rather the realm of the life coach. Or, put another way, look at your weekly planner first and the training texts second when constructing your 2009 annual plan.

Train smart.

AC.

****************Update 12/22/08 ***********************

I received an interesting email from a coach asking about what the model indicates regarding the frequency of recovery weeks within the schedule, i.e. if we do want to insert periodic ‘rest and test’ weeks within the schedule, how frequently should they be planned?

It is not unusual for elite coaches to implemement a ‘recovery on demand’ approach, with the exception of some testing weeks. This approach is used by Aussie Swim Coach Bill Sweetenham to good effect. That said, most coaches will generally want to conduct some tests in a ‘fresh’ state. Additionally, even with a well tolerated basic week, accumulating fatigue is to some extent inevitable and periodic ‘shedding’ of this fatigue is indicated.

Obviously, if an advanced mesocyclic program is used with frequent shock weeks, such as the 70/120/160/50 cycle, more frequent recovery will be warranted. However, in the case of a traditional ‘phase’ periodization approach, the majority of recovery should occur within the week.

I tested a number of different frequencies for the insertion of a 60% recovery week on a 100 TSS/d ‘traditional’ periodized program for an average athlete (T1=45, T2=15, k1=1, k2=2).

I found that recovery weeks more frequent than once every 10 weeks results in a predicted performance decrement if this traditional ‘basic week’ model is used. In general, it is not until the 10th week of a given phase that the addition of a recovery week will actually improve performance. For this reason, I recommend that the coach who uses this model, as opposed to a more advanced ‘stair case’ model (with pretty marked changes in volume from week to week) should only plan to insert ‘rest and test’ weeks at the end of each phase not every 3-4 weeks as needed with the more advanced step loading program.

If recovery is needed more frequently than this then it is a good indication to the coach that the basic weekly load is excessive. For this reason, the coach needs to come up with a basic week that is sufficiently moderate to only require recovery after a prolonged, consistent period of training. The mechanics of this are discussed further in my recent blog on structural consideration in planning the microcycle (basic week)

Spending your allowance wisely

“Waste is worse than loss”
- Thomas Edison

After the positive feedback on my ‘forest for the trees’ blog (it seems there are a lot of folks out there like myself who were frustrated by the lack of applicability of the PMC chart to day-to-day training), I have decided to expand upon one of the concepts mentioned, that of a fitness ‘allowance’.

Let me elaborate – if you are a good little boy or girl, and you do all of your chores; get a good quality and quantity of sleep, eat right, stretch, receive regular massages, stay organized and manage life stressors, every 3-4 weeks your body will pay you an allowance of additional fitness (we can express these ‘fitness dollars’ as additional points added to your CTL #), that you may choose to invest, gamble or spend.

Now, before I go on pointing out the consequences of your decision as to what to do with your ‘fitness dollars’, I should point out that if you are a bad little boy or girl and you fail to do your chores for the week, you won’t get your allowance for that week, i.e. if you let work stress get the better of you, if you let the quality of your sleep trail off etc etc, don’t expect to get a fitness payout for that training block.

As mentioned in the previous blog, a fair allowance (something that is appropriate for the work you do without sending your parents bankrupt) is ~10-20TSS/d every 3-4 weeks. Now, you can choose to do any of the following with this payout:

a) You can invest in more fitness by putting your allowance towards your foundation. Placing it in a savings account that offers a very slow but assured increase on the investment that you make, specifically, we are talking about aerobic base training, with the bulk of training below the athlete’s Ventilatory Threshold 1. As Colwin points out in his book Swimming into the 21st Century, this training is anabolic & builds the swimmers ‘adaptation energy’, i.e. it builds you up, while some of the other forms of training are catabolic and tear the swimmer down.

b) You can take your allowance to Vegas and gamble it on some ‘speedwork roulette’. Earlier this year I went down to Vegas to meet up with my Dad and Brother, who flew in from Australia for a fun vacation. My brother found an affinity for the slot machines while we were down there and, at various times, was ‘up’ by a good amount. This weekend was the tail-end of a month long vacation that my brother had been on and he had some spending money that he still needed to ‘blow’. By having sufficient reserve to be able to afford to ‘play big’, if he had have timed things appropriately and walked away at his peak, he could have taken home sufficiently more money than he arrived with (of course, like most of us, he didn’t and gambled it all on ‘just one more’ proverbial roll of the dice :-), but the potential was there). On the flipside, Jen and I went down there with a limited budget, a limited foundation, and so while we had fun playing the games, we simply didn’t have enough of a reserve to ever really expect a big ‘pay out’.

c) You can spend your allowance on some fun, i.e. races. Now, nobody likes a scrooge, someone who hoards their foundation, afraid to ever use any of it. After all, the point of building your fortune is not in the actual pieces of paper that lie in your wallet or bank account, but rather on the fun and freedom that they potentially represent. However, keep in mind that from a fitness perspective, any time you race seriously (as opposed to B & C races that fall more under the ‘gamble’ category), you are running at a loss. You are using fitness that will take a significant time of base/foundation training to get back. This is not to say that we shouldn’t race, after all, racing well is kind of the point. But we should be prudent in how much of our annual salary we devote to something that we know offers no return.

So, you decide to invest your allowance. Smart choice. However, just like the real world, you have options in what to invest in. Different strategies for different levels of risk tolerance and different individual preferences. You have an extra 10-20 TSS/d to invest. What should you invest in?

Easy training: Your 10TSS/d will buy you about 2hrs of easy training to add to your week. This is a very low risk way to spend your allowance. However, as explained in my last blog, it doesn’t offer the same ‘bang for your buck’ as the following investment….

Steady Training: Your 10TSS/d will buy you about 90mins of steady training to add to your basic week each month. Steady training has a solid interest rate and for most folks offers the best return on their investment.

Mod-Hard Training: A little more risk here. Your 10 TSS/d will buy you a 1hr mod-hard main set to add to your training. This strategy is probably too risky for those with a limited foundation. However, for those who’ve been at the game for a while, there is some real benefit to diversifying your portfolio and devoting some of your fitness dollars to Mod-Hard training.

Hard Training: Your 10TSS/d will buy you a 40-50min AT workout. This is a very risky investment for those with limited foundation. However, for those with some money to play around with, training in and around the anaerobic threshold offers excellent potential return on the money invested. If you ever want to be sitting at the ‘high rollers’ table, there will come a time when placing a calculated risk on expanding your foundation with hard training will become appropriate.

So, how do you know what an appropriate investment is for you? Of course, as a coach, I’m going to say that you would be best served listening to the objective advice of your ‘financial advisor’ :-). However, for those who want to keep an eye on their own portfolio, analyzing the main sets of your training each week and seeing how balanced they are across the training spectrum (see my article on appropriate balance for Ironman athletes), looking for potential weak spots or plateaus will enable you to appropriately allocate your resources each month.

Train Smart.

AC

The Forest for the Trees

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”
- Blaise Pascal

One of the interesting aspects of being a full-time triathlon coach is the number of different ways of looking at training that you are exposed to. Coaches that I have consulted with, long term athletes that I train and sports scientists all have different ways of looking at the training for their athletes. Many are on a completely different wavelength.

I have had opportunity to see firsthand the interaction between coaches and scientists at institutions such as the Australian Institute of Sport and The Olympic Training Center here in the U.S. In both cases, I have seen, to some degree a lack of ‘buy in’ from the coaches to any advice given by the scientists. In a very real way, both are speaking different ‘languages’, largely because they are working on 2 very different levels of understanding the training process.

If I had to come up with one key trait that defines the very best coaches in the world from the herd, it would be the ability to rapidly shift on a daily basis between a big picture understanding of the athlete’s development with the day to day design of training sessions that fit in with the long term goals, the athletes life constraints and the athletes day to day physiology.

Many ‘old school’ coaches specialize in the latter, they have an uncanny knack for ‘eyeballing’ their athletes and seeing what they need on any one day and coming up with the training for the day accordingly. In some ways, these coaches have a hard time seeing the ‘forest for the trees’, i.e. how each of these days are going to build together to achieve the goals of the season, the year or the athlete’s long term developmental aims. Athletes and coaches who follow this method may ‘arrive’ at a high level of performance but will have a hard time identifying the ‘trends’ that got them there and, thus, may have a hard time getting back there or getting others there. Intuition and memory are poor substitutes for long term planning, record keeping and analyses.

On the flipside, there are the more technical coaches who understand all of the principles of the tools of long term planning, who understand the nuances of the latest technology – TSS scores, Performance Management Charts etc etc but fail to optimally integrate these big picture tools to affect the day-to-day training prescription. In some way, these coaches and athletes fail to see the ‘trees for the forest’.

I had a really interesting discussion with one of my athletes, a Kona qualifier, who also happens to be a pretty darn good coach, Shawn Burke. Shawn made the point that, while the Performance Manager Chart generated by WKO+ is a neat chart to ‘keep an eye on’, esp with regards to preventing overtraining, its usefulness as a planning tool leaves much to be desired. Like the spider-monkeys of the rainforest, moving from the forest canopy to the forest floor (day to day application) is a perilous, difficult journey :-)

One of the most dangerous ‘trap doors’ of athletes/coaches who become too focused on the TSS approach to training is thinking that training load is the be all end all, irrespective of how that load is accrued. In many ways, this coaching methodology is no better than coaches who coach purely based on intuition. The objectivity of TSS is a ruse, as one coach may accrue 500TSS points in a week with 80% of their training as interval workouts, while the other may do it with base training. In order to use this tool effectively, the coach/athlete must, in the traditional mathematic sense, ‘show their working’. Failure to do so will result in the same problems as the ‘intuition coaches’ – yeah, it took us a chronic training load of 120 TSS/d to get a Kona slot but how did we do that again? What training intensity did we use? What main sets did we use? Etc etc.

So, in that spirit, I’d like to show how I move from big picture analytical and forecasting tools to the day to day individualized programming for the athletes I work with using the metaphor of the different levels of the rainforest.





























Level 1: ‘The Canopy’

First step, below is a PMC (Performance Management Chart) curve for an athlete that I work with, a Kona qualifier, who exhibits one of the highest chronic training loads (Joe Friel would call this fitness) of any of my athletes.

























From this chart we can see that in the athlete’s current build (after a 5 week “off season” his CTL has reached in excess of 120 TSS/d. This is interesting from a pure curiosity perspective but, in and of itself, of limited use to us in prescribing the athletes training for the next month, day or year. In order to get to that point, we need to ask some more questions/make some more crucial decisions. For example, what combination of volume and intensity made up this overall Training Stress?


Level 2: ‘The Understory’





Volume/Intensity Curve

This curve provides a little more information than the PMC chart as to ‘how’ the training stress is distributed. It is clear that, in the Ironman game the training load is primarily manipulated by altering volume while maintaining intensity. This is a critical training principle that I have chatted about in the past. While volume is the “big player” in the Ironman game, intensity must never be sacrificed.

The ~75% intensity number of this curve falls into a narrow range of 70-80% that I have seen among all of the top age groupers and elites that I have data on. These numbers tie in well with what I would expect based on the minimal training intensity required to elicit a training stimulus (see my ‘how easy is too easy’ blog)

Level 3: ‘The Shrub Layer’

Taking it to another level, there are many ways to create an average training intensity of 75%. For example:

a) 100% Z2 = ~75% average intensity (e.g. a Maffetone program during the aerobic phase)

b) 60% @ Z1 + 40% @ Z4= ~ 75% average intensity (e.g. a specific preparatory program for a very well conditioned short course athlete)

c) 40% @ Z1 + 25% @ Z2 + 15% @ Z3 + 10% @ Z4 + 5% @ Z5 = ~75% average (e.g. a ‘balanced’ ironman program during a build period)

For each athlete at each point in the season there is a ‘right’ combination that addresses their personal limiters and the specific requirements of the event, and, perhaps most importantly best fits within the athlete’s life.

In this example, you can see from the chart below that the athletes typical weekly breakdown during this Build was ~20% Zone 1, 45% Zone 2, 28% Zone 3, and approximately 8% at or in excess of Zone 4.



In this particular case, the athlete has a relatively high proportion of Zone 3 work in their program. This was planned and deliberate due to this being identified as a relative ‘weakness’ during the physiological testing that we performed in the early season for this athlete.

Level 4: “The Floor”

And, thus, we come down to Brass Tacks – pulling the information from the above charts to construct a ‘basic week’ that is:

a) appropriate for the athlete’s current fitness level
b) sufficiently intense to stimulate adaptation/cause fatigue
c) appropriate to the athlete’s current strengths and weaknesses.


Step 1: Create loading and unloading cycles for the next block of training.

In this case the athlete’s current Chronic Training Load (CTL) is in and around 120 TSS/d. Thus, to maintain current fitness, the athlete needs to accrue approximately 120 TSS points per day. For the uninitiated, here’s a ready reckoner to convert approximate TSS points to real world sessions:

30 TSS points = 1 hour of easy/recovery training
50 TSS points = 1 hour of steady training
70 TSS points = 1 hour of moderately-hard training
100 TSS points = 1 hour of hard/threshold training.

OK, so back to it. 120TSS points per day (840 per week) will maintain what the athlete’s got.

To freshen up, based on my experience and current data, for a race or will require 1-3 weeks at or below a TSS of 30 points below your normal training level, in this case 90/day (630 for the week) This will create a training stress balance of +5 to +15. Obviously, less fit folks will be able to afford less time at a low training level and so taper times should be reduced.

Now, to load up, to create fatigue and a stimulus for more fitness will require 2-3 weeks 10-20 TSS/d points above your normal training load. This will add 2-3 points to your chronic fitness number each week. Any more than this and (based on my experience) you are asking for trouble. After these 2 weeks you return to your maintenance fitness level for a week, regroup and summon your reserves for the next offensive.

So, in this case a loading week for an athlete with a CTL of 120 TSS/d would be 130-140 TSS/d or ~980 TSS for the week.

Step 2: Distribute the appropriate training stress in accordance with the phase of the year and the athlete’s strengths and weaknesses.

It is important to constantly keep in mind that TSS is a training tool rather than a training model (as is any coach who uses the acquisition of TSS points as their training model :-)

A summary of my personal training model was given in last weeks blog. In TSS vernacular, this can be summarized as follows:

1. Increase easy-steady training volume until ‘optimal volume’ (or the time constraints of the athlete’s basic week) is reached @ 10-20 TSS points/15-30 minutes of training per day every 3-4 week block (followed by a recovery week @ 2-3hrs/10-20TSS/d less than the prior weeks).

2. Increase the steady-state component of the basic week by using your 10-20 TSS point budget on an extra 30-60 minute main set on 3-4 days of your basic week up to 50% of your weekly volume

3. Spend your TSS budget on appropriate main sets that address the athlete’s personal weaknesses across the intensity spectrum.

In this case, during this athlete’s specific prep period, based on his strengths and weaknesses (noted above), we will initially divide his 980 TSS training load as:

Zone 1 – 20% (196 points)
Zone 2 – 45% (440 points)
Zone 3 - 30% (294 points)
Zone 4 - 5% (49 points)

Or, using my ‘ready reckoner’ from above:

Zone 1 – 6.5hrs
Zone 2 – 8.8hrs
Zone 3 – 4.2hrs
Zone 4 – 0.5hrs

Once this relationship is established, it is easy to manipulate subsequent blocks of training in accordance with observed strengths and weaknesses while keeping the over-riding aim of not ditching fitness (chronic load) until the time is right at the fore-front.

E.g. Dude’s Zone 3 power still sucks in the context of his other critical power numbers, so we choose to ‘spend’ our 20TSS points from the next loading block on adding an extra 15 minutes of Zone 3 to one of our main sets. On the flipside, if we start to see his power #’s for the long rides start to drop, we can add an extra half hour of aerobic work to the week. In this way, the athlete’s strengths and weaknesses are continually improved without compromising the general goal of improving the athletes tolerance to work, which in the end of things will ultimately limit his/her long term development.

In the end, TSS (and TRIMPS for that matter) provide a convenient way of giving the coach regular ‘aerial views’ of his athlete’s long term development. This can help greatly in determining overall progress and ‘gaps’ in the forest. In the end, though, it is still a matter of rolling up the sleeves, getting down on the ground and planting seeds in the right places. Whether by intuition or with aerial assistance, this will remain the most important task of the astute coach.