I’ve been on a bit of a fact finding mission since yesterday regarding this supposed TSB range of -10 to -30 which, according to a blog post by Joe Friel is the optimal zone to not stagnate with training.In the experience of folks here, do you find this to be the case? I’ve done some workout blocks this year where I’ve gone in and out of that range into more of the grey zone (and my best blocks were doing base in January and Feb, where I spent 2 months, save for a recovery week, exclusively in that -10 to -30 range). If one is consistently training, but in the 0 to -10 range or bouncing between that range and below -10, are people really in danger of not creating enough stress and making certain fitness adaptations versus being able to stay below -10 for sustained periods of time of a few weeks? Just trying to wrap my mind around this as I approach future training.
And just to be clear, I’m just talking about bike PMC, I’m not multi-sport.
It’s something you need to figure out for yourself to some extent. I hadn’t seen his comments about that range but I’d normally try to keep my athletes in -10 to -20 initially until I figure out what they can handle. One elite needs to be above -10 before going into a key long set or it will end in tears, another can still execute solid sessions at -40 (granted, this is a new to my program athlete whose data history is corrupted so we’re not totally confident of true CTL yet).
For myself - I need to stay around -20 for decent periods to make improvements, -35 is sad training, -40 is can’t get out of bed without lift equipment.
I woudn’t class consistently higher than -10 as training. But I like to have athletes cycle up to that point so that we can then stack a few solid days without going into the pit.
Total, which means it’s not directly related to the OPs question as swimming can distort things a bit.
The last couple of years for me have been no running and only a little swimming in summer and the numbers for cycling only have still behaved exactly the same as when I was tri-ing
Of course, it all relies on accurate thresholds in each discipline.
Thanks for that perspective! I follow trainerroad stuff pretty religiously and do the majority of my riding indoors. So Dec-Feb I kept my TSB in that negative range from -10 to -20 using their SSB1 and 2 HV plans, and only recovered during the last week of each respective plan. By the end of Feb I was up to a CTL of 86. My FTP went from 275 to 295 by the end of this 12 week period. I then went into the sustained power build (also high volume) and followed it super closely as designed but my TSB never really dipped in the 8 week period and rarely went below -10. I bumped my FTP up 5w in each of the 4 week blocks of the program, so by the end of April my CTL was 87 and FTP set at 310.
And then I did another block of the SSB2 program but my TSB hasn’t really dipped super far until this past weekend where I did 150miles of gravel racing, and got my TSB to nosedive to -43 lol (I was able to ride for 90mins the next day at a real gingerly 100w). I’ve been doing some shorter power training for CX following a lower volume plan and just filling in other time with endurance stuff and not super high stress (and I had family vacation which cut significantly into time for about 3 weeks in July) and only focusing on the quality of the short power workouts and not really sweating the CTL and TSB stuff. So when I saw that blurb from Friel, I just started wondering if the reason I was so successful during the base phase was because of keeping a good steady level of stress and not hovering too close to the freshness zone. The sustained volume build yielded some improvements, but I wonder if I didn’t really adapt as well as I could have because the stress balance wasn’t really dipping enough, if that makes sense. I have my last phase of my CX preseason training starting next week for four weeks, I may have to try and see if I can really keep the TSB below -10 and see if I can observe any differences.
Anyhow, thanks for weighing in, I may have to think a lot more about this stuff and avoid training in this fresh-ish state all the time