I agree.

490 is definitely wrong. Either incorrect FTP settings, or just manually over-typing the value to brag about the CTL.

To get a CTL of 490 you would need 42 days straight of between 11.5hours (at 65% FTP) to 7.5hours (at 80% FTP)... which is clearly unrealistic.

Some Pro's get up to ~200 as a peak.

I train almost exclusively as a cyclist these days.

My workouts are pretty consistently 4-5 days week and between 60-80 minutes on the trainer, and have been for 3+ years

For me, CTL (time + intensity) is a great baramoter of how beat up my body is. Each time I inch up > 60, I have gotten sick.

So I feel like in my specific use case , CTL is very helpful in assessing “tiredness” ... but in general, my best fitness has also come in periods near high CTL. So I believe, for my training tendencies, they are highly correlated

When I was a triathlete, CTL was so convoluted based on different sports, lots of inconsistencies in training types (some weeks were huge long / slow, others had more intensity)

Eh different strokes, i still think if someone wants to discuss what it does, worth getting out of the way what it "doesn't".

:)

Anyway to stop derailing this, to the OP, i think that will be 100% personal to you and will depend on your event, which i think people have said already (maybe even Tom said that :)).

I expect that for a longer format endurance-type event, it will peak closer to race day, relatively speaking. If you're doing something with a higher VI / intensity factor like cyclocross, i suspect it would peak a lot earlier. And in terms of how high it ever gets, i think that dpeends not only on how much time you have to devote to it that year, but also how much time you have put in during prior years. This past season i started from 0 after a loooooong hiatus and it hit 75 and that was really taxing. i'm coming into the base portion at 50 right now so i expect it will either (A) go higher or (B) feel easier getting to the same point.

FWIW as a runner and a cyclist back in the day i used to plan pretty rigorously using TSS, even week to week, but now i'm not doing that anymore. but after a break, i do like to look at what the recent prior peaks were to get a good rough guide of where to start, load-wise

:=)

Fair enough.

The CTL curve gives me an opportunity to develop my fitness over a season that includes variable life stressors, periods of focus on different sports, distances, builds, tapers, etc. At the end of the season, while I “know what the numbers are,” I hope to see a well-executed season of training and racing. BTW: illness and injury results in an ugly curve.

I have been paying attention to CTL more in the last month or two as I experiment with a more rapid build and more volume than is typical for me for a 70.3 (this will be my 11th HIM). But now you guys have me wondering.

Some of the posts on this thread refer to getting FTP wrong which throws CTL out of whack (through the IF which affects TSS if I understand this stuff correctly). Training Peaks autocalculates threshold right? It is showing that 10 min/mile is my threshold run pace which is ridiculous. Can I see my bike FTP somewhere?

I am handling the increased load fairly well (10-12 hours per week). I feel really good. My CTL is at an all-time high and rising. But because of the FTP thing I'm sort of skeptical now. Although I guess the slope of the line is still relevant.

Click on your name and select Settings. You can see your zones there.

Does anyone know if training peaks CTL is pretty much the same as Garmin's training load metric? I know I can do some digging on both companies websites to determine this, but didn't know if they are calculated similarly and if there are any good interpretations of the scores themselves.

Thanks

---

Use this link to save $5 off your USAT membership renewal:
https://membership.usatriathlon.org/...A2-BAD7-6137B629D9B7

They should be. Using those terms is using Coggan and Friel's trademarked work.

No, TP does NOT auto-calculate threshold. You must enter your thresholds (swim, bike, run...power, pace, HR) manually and calculate your desired training zones. TP can be configured to alert you when it detects that your threshold MIGHT have moved. IIRC, it only does that for sustained efforts longer than 20minutes that are above your theoretical maximal capability based on your current threshold. But, it will NOT make any actual changes, unless you tell it to do so.

Actually it does, but not entirely; there is a selectable option under "Notifications" of the "Zones" tab to have TP automatically notify and update your FTP and zones when it measures a new max 20 minute effort, less 5% that is above your current set FTP. It only goes up though, not down. So when you are returning from a break and do a new test to see where you are "bottomed out" and entering the # manually will be required.

---

Matt Leu, M.S. Kinesiology
San Pedro Fit Works, Los Angeles, CA
Endurance Athlete and Coach
Consistency/time=results

That's because the number requires context, such as your ATL, TSB, and ramp rate. CTL as a general number is pretty uselss although it can give you an idea of how fit you are. What it doesn't tell you, which the other number fill in, is how fatigued you are. You can be fit like Crowie, but if you're completely fried it won't matter.

Fair enough. I'd forgotten about that option.

But, it is of extremely limited value...possibly even questionable value, for the reason you mention: It doesn't adjust downwards. And it isn't great at detecting actual changes in threshold as may be indicated under other testing conditions---eg, an actual 1 hour test.

Ah, I do remember that page. I've visited it a couple of times over the years. I played with it and it made my head hurt so I left. Now it's a question of the investment of doing the proper testing/estimating and spending the time to figure out the page for the return of the incremental benefit to my training.

Id be really curious to see what the numbers and training look like for someone like Wout Van Aert, who goes straight from cyclocross into the spring classics, which have very different preparations and physiological demands.

Did Wout for example keep doing longer endurance sessions between cyclocross races? If so, i'm curious whether that accounted for his less stellar this year (but still pretty amazing) performance during the CX season.

Or, did he take a break prior to CX worlds and then NOT rest afterwards, and immediately crank up the volume instead?

Wanna revisit this briefly to ask an ancillary question.

For those of you who track your training load, what IS your preferred method?

First off, I don't use TSS to track fitness. I do tests and periodically look at things like efficiency factor for comparable workouts to see if I am improving hte metrics that I want to improve.

But, I was using it to track overall training load, just to have a general feel for it. But I have found that TSS isn't really that great for me as a general tracker of training load and stress. For example, if I do a threshold workout and a long slow distance day, often they have the same TSS but the threshold workout leaves me much more gassed. After the LSD day, I'm generally ready to rock and don't even need rest. Similarly, the same workout on a hot day leaves me much more gassed, takes me days to recover even if I hydrate well. TSS though would be the same. HrTSS seems to correlate better (for me anyway) with training stress for these types of workouts, but it doesn't really work that well for things like sprints or anaerobic. Do enough of those and I'm pretty well spent in a way that HrTSS doesn't capture.

I have found so far that what works best for me is to use TSS for sprints and speedwork and HrTSS for all others, but curious if there are other options that people like to use, for example the EPOC based scores that some Garmin devices use.

I still think TSS is more useful than just duration because it accounts for intensity, just curious if there's anything else out there.

I have been using the HRV4Training app on my phone for about a year now. It will show me my daily resting HR and my HRV, plus a baseline of the last seven weeks. But the part I really like is to go to "Insights" then "HRV Trends". This shows a slew of trends, and at the bottom shows you as Green if coping well, yellow if it thinks you're beginning to not cope well, and orange for "accumulated fatigue. The main page seems mostly not useful, but twice this year I have gotten a week turn orange, when in fact I was just not feeling great.

So I use that as my "brake" on just looking at CTL numbers.

---

I'm closer to the feathered end of the spear than the point.

That's funny, I use HRV4T also and I love it. Great tool and it's getting better with every update.

I use it in the same way you do, in order to hit the brakes and/or move workouts around if my planned workout doesn't match physiological state.

That said, i'm still trying to find the best way of monitoring training load and stress so that i can bump up stress each week in a controlled way, while still having daily HRV readings as the backstop. I've used a bunch of different things (WKO4, TrainingPeaks, Garmin, etc.) and while they all have advantages they all have weaknesses too.

How dope would it be if there was a platform that let you make fully custom charts and reports just by dragging and dropping modules on a web platform? Because after all this time and gathering all this data, all I really want to be able to see is, by week and by month, (i) number and duration of easy rides, (ii) number and duration of medium rides, (iii) number and duration of hard rides, and (iv) duration of longest ride.

Guess things really have come full circle :)

I've started the same app about 20 days ago and look forward to correlatling the HRV with training and see how they match up.

Nice! Hopefully it's as useful for you as it has been for me, which is very useful.

Just to note, I have not necessarily found a strict 1:1 correlation of hard trainings --> lower HRV the next day, but I have found that the broader correlations and trends that the algorithm finds HAVE been valid.

And, HRV vs. baseline has been a good predictor of whether i'll have enough in the tank to do an intense workout vs. deferring the intense day to the next day or the day after, with one important caveat: race day. Race day i tend to have super low HRV no matter what because I am usually pretty jacked up from the moment i get out of bed. So, super low HRV on race day may or may not mean i'm good to go because the signal is masked by psychological arousal. I actually don't take HRV readings on race days anymore because it screws up the baseline.