this is getting to be a hot topic in other sports. Data in both soccer and rugby that ATL:CTL > 1.3 increases injury risk.

I've only seen it presented at meetings, not published yet AFAIK. Drew Wattson at Wisconsin has the soccer data. Not sure where he found the rugby data he has referenced when presenting his data.

Andy

Paulo Sousa and Joel Filliol discussed the same thing on The Real Coaching podcast a few years ago; Paulo was of the same opinion that ATL:CTL was a better measure than TSB. He did quote some guideline figures that he sticks to, can't remember them now, but they'd be for elites so probably not that relevant for us mortals anyway!

Lots of papers out there now. Tim Gabbett in particular has been leading the charge. The sport science community has even belatedly woken up to the fact that it makes more sense to calculate CTL and ATL as exponentially weighted moving averages rather than simpler moving averages:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...om=/27418321/related

As for using the ratio instead of the difference, we explored that ~15 y ago on the secret eweTSS mailing list, but didn't find it to be an improvement. Of course, since such judgements are largely subjective in nature, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Great, I’ll find that specific podcast.

And Coggan, thanks for the link to the article - much appreciated

And that was because it essentially shows the same thing, and is simply an inverse of the patterns displayed by TSB:

A random athlete year plotting TSB and the ATL:CTL ratio:




The ATL:CTL ratio provides no more or less insight into training status than does TSB.

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http://www.cyclecoach.com
http://www.aerocoach.com.au

you can look at the chart in the gsheet link I provided in the OP. While ATL/CTL remain the same week to week, TSB decreases . Yes, they're a function of one another, but practical sense can be made of the ATL/CTL number for planning purposes.

I'll review the articles Coggan suggested.

Can you share some reading that would help me begin to understand the concept?

Scott

That would be Coggan's area, or a coach's area - I need to go back to listen to that podcast that spurred the Rappstar post that inspired me to check it out. My thoughts are completely observational based on my PE and wanting a number to help me plan better.

edit: not to pass the buck, but my thought is just that I want to prevent overtraining while pushing myself, and not treating it as an art. I went back and analyzed years of past training, and I went through, using the TP workout planner, and figured out the TSS for each workout in a Lydiard style plan just to see how that progresses. I'm sure I'll keep changing things up; I'll read the articles Coggan suggested and listen to the Real Coaching podcast on this topic

https://www.trainingpeaks.com/...performance-manager/

(Note that the date on the article is wrong. I wrote this to accompany the inclusion of the PMC in a WKO+ update in 2006.)

Are those CTL values realistic?

You show a CTL > 150 for months.

Oh wait, you are linearly adding TSS values/estimates for different exercise modalities. Hmmm.

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http://www.cyclecoach.com
http://www.aerocoach.com.au

Following TP’s lead there and haven’t seen/felt an issue

And for the the TSS from separate sports to add up non-linearly.... you open the door to advocating for bricks.... but then it’s suggested (Lydiard) that more continuous time doing an activity will apply pressure on capillary beds longer and they will expand more as a result.... but, do they expand more due to the continuous pressure or just total time added linearly? and if not linear, is the training stress also not linear? I don’t know. Adding TSS linearly seems to correlate very well with PE

Would you also post the link to the one Rappster posted? Many thanks. This is very interesting

I may need some help with that from others:

which podcast? https://joelfilliol.com/podcast/

and rappstar's post was talking about looking the area under the curve when looking at CTL, the derivative; will need to read back through this 7 page post at another time: https://forum.slowtwitch.com/...20atl%2Fctl#p5927344

Some pretty similar themes in Filiol's reacent instagram Q&A after WC's last week and Rappstar's observation, and this sample of Mutai's training (which is very similar to Sang/Kipchoge's training with the exception that Kipchoge doesn't take a day off): http://www.letsrun.com/...d.php?thread=8973493. you also see that with Lydiard training: the base period, hills, and repetitions stay pretty consistent - not real increases week to week beyond pace; not sure if that is a natural progression (faster pace, same TSS) or more intensity (higher TSS, same workout structure).

obviously where mine diverges is that the ATL/CTL weekly numbers force a larger weekly TSS to maintain those numbers. And I'm not exactly a consistently performing athlete, so I'll see how it goes...

Judgments does not contain two e’s

It does if you're British.

How much CTL ramp does that give you a week?

Does that mean you always are growing CTL overtime and you don’t flatten out (theoretically)?

Are you adding more time, or intensity each week to keep that ratio up?

I’m struggling to get it or how this could work for me. Maybe I’m dense tho

I just don’t have enough hours available in a week to train (and more importantly, enough sleep to recover) to get above 70 CTL

I really value my rest days (and the extra sleep that comes with it) and don’t have unlimited training hours on non-rest days

well, I'm not an exercise physiologist and I'm not a coach.

If you see, my ATL/CTL remains pretty constant. So, that means my daily/weekly TSS has to go up to keep that ratio the same. The goal is strictly pushing CTL higher in a manner that reduces the possibility of overtraining and related injury. So, to achieve that, I have to increase both volume and intensity or either, but you can also see that I have designated types of workouts on certain days of the week, so keeping things consistent. But yeah, I do find that on days with intensity, 200 TSS is going to take 180min minimum. But again, I'm not a coach. If I were to not focus so much on getting ATL/CTL below 1.45 four days/week, CTL could rise quicker... when I've done that, I don't feel I'm resting enough.

Something else I'm aiming for: getting down to an ATL/CTL of 0.65 the day before my big race..... why? because when I analyzed Lydiard 10,000m and marathon programs using estimated TSS using TP workout builder, that was common to both of them.

Also, I have several weeks with two TT's per week; why? because I've had a lot of success with Lydiard plans that have TT focused Coordination periods, and I like the idea of practicing to the point that it's easier to achieve Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow on race day; obviously if there were more races that late in the year, I'd be racing on the weekends, not doing TT's, but if it goes well, can try it in the Spring/Summer next year with races instead of TT's.....

https://www.scienceforsport.com/...onic-workload-ratio/

good little summary. I'm obviously not using the exponentially weighted ratio, which means if my volume were to drop off suddenly but then jump up suddenly, using my formula would be less conservative - worth considering.

In your google sheet you are using exponentially weighted values. That's what ATL & CTL are.

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http://www.cyclecoach.com
http://www.aerocoach.com.au

ahhh, I guess I assumed there would be, well you know, an exponent in the formula..... but very good to know, if that is the case

Except, of course, for the fact that he leaps from Banister's more complex model to simpler exponentially-weighted moving averages without ever acknowledging the source of the idea...at least Gabbett occasionally explicitly admits he got it from me.

I think that's a fair point - so I dropped them a note. Can you suggest a summary or article focused more towards endurance sports, and less on injury-prevention and more on preventing overtraining effects and optimizing race-day performance using this ratio?

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wovebike.com | Wove on instagram

Always go with original sources:

https://www.trainingpeaks.com/...performance-manager/

thanks. I do use the TP performance manager... but because I need to manually calculate ATL/CTL, I also keep track in my spreadsheet, which is not ideal, but it works. If TP had (has??) the ability to display ATL/CTL (or whatever custom figure a user wanted) on each day of the calendar (in addition to on the chart), that would be nice, but I also understand that adding such additional features to any platform gets you to a place like the current version of Salesforce... dynamic, but prohibitive in his dynamism. I also like the planner feature in TP, but I don't use it (beyond planning ahead in the calendar) due to lack of user control, such as my desire to base daily workouts on a set ATL/CTL value; but then, for all I know I abandon that in a year, so I can't fault TP.