Negative TSB and questions
Well todays 90 minutes of love on the trainer after this weekends (7 hours on trainer) felt stupid easy")...well after the 40 minutes of FTP work built into it.
- Not really sure exactly where that TSB number should be but we went from a -48 to a -22, and today a -11. Still felt a little fatigued but we got er done. Skipped the built in brick run cause of the fatigue and I have a 90 minute run tomorrow morning before my shift. Love O'Dark thirty time. Its me, the tradmill, and the dry wall.....oh and music in the ears.....when I stare at one spot long enough on the white dry wall I start seeing things....must be a mental thing.......
.....
|
0
Comments
I tried to make the neg and pos TSB's correlate with my race performances but have come to realize they are just #'s and I have to go by feel. Especially if you don't include your swim and run, I think you should back off untill you FEEL fresh, not just SHOULD be fresh.
With all the intensity in EN and low CTL's, the TSB can be tricky compared to a low intensity, high volume athlete who is comparing CTL/TSB #'s at same time as you.
I enter swims and runs as well and was up to a CTL of over 164 before tapering for IMMoo in 2009 using an old school coach and was only in the 120's last year before IMC but I assure you I was just as fit as I was getting to 164 CTL using big volume (22+ hours/wk avg). So they are really just arbitrary #'s and you have to use your own judgement some times. I think you've put in more than enough work over the winter to earn some down time/missed wko's. No guilt!
Agree, cause I've read a few different articles/ blogs on TSB/ATL/ and chronic and they are all a little different.
Carl-
TSB measures one thing and one thing only.... how many TSS points you've been racking up in the last few days (per day) compared to what you were racking up in the previous few weeks. It is not a measure of how hard you are working, but a measure of the RAMP at which you are working relative to the past.
So, for example, if you ran 20 miles a day every day at the same 7 minute mile pace (or biked 100 miles a day at the same power), your TSB would be ZERO if you had been doing it long enough. But the same thing would be true if all you do for exercise is water the lawn!
TSB measures "fatigue" only in the sense that we assume that your CTL (a long-term weighted average of your TSS points per day) is something you can tolerate, and then it's compared to your CTL (a short term weighted average of your TSS points/day). If you are increasing load, TSB is negative. If you are decreasing load, it's positive. So it's really only an indirect measure of either fatigue or workload.
When you taper, by definition, TSB will become positive. It just has to! You're doing less, so the TSS/day is smaller. But again, the number isn't magic. You can get the highest TSB possible by doing NOTHING for about 10 days before the day in question...because the ATL weights the more recent days much more heavily than the CTL does. (After that, the fact that you've not been training creeps more dramatically into the CTL)
To this extent, these are just numbers. They have to be taken in context...e.g., in the first few weeks of an IM build up your TSB is going to plummet as you start accumulating more time in the saddle and on the road (and thus TSS points).
If you can observe from past history what kind of positive TSS is best for you in your taper, then you can use it for planning the future. But until you can correlate results and numbers, it's pretty much a "best guess" sort of thing....and you're better off just doing the kinds of tapers that appear in the plan and adjust "by feel" than you would be trying to micromanage the taper.
For the record, I tend to like to race at a TSB of about 25% of what my max CTL was in the weeks before, but this is more rested than a lot of people claim they like.