How To Manage Training Load
Before we dive in: let’s take a different approach to the word stress.
There are two categories of stress:
Distress is “bad” stress that what we normally think of
Eustress is good stress! Eustress is a creating a just manageable challenge or introducing a specific stimulus that brings about a positive change.
For endurance sports, there is a fine line between these two and we want to avoid that tipping point!
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We know that racing has certain physiological demands, which place stress on the body. One way to look at our plan is to build up our capacity to manage the total physiological demand of the race.
However, the body doesn’t necessarily comprehend what a “race” is, so in training we are simply increasing our ability to tolerate a heavier physiological stress load, whether we try to use that ability in a day, a week, etc. Mentally, we might want to focus on the race on building up for the race. However, we should also understand that we have to train in order to handle the stress load of more training. Endurance events are milestones; we don’t get there by skipping steps.
An important reminder: While we can isolate our exercise stress in measurement, training stimulus and response are both 100% influenced by stress from the rest of your life. More on that in future installments.
Keeping the big picture in mind, let’s bring some math in!
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What Are My Workouts Worth?
I use a software called Training Peaks which has a great way to conceptualize and measure this training stress. Understanding the basics of their system will enable us to manage our workout load more effectively.
Here’s the reason: as we mentioned when reverse engineering our goals, we can think of racing and training in terms of Duration or Intensity, but it’s really the combination of the two that shows the difficulty.
Training Peaks quantifies this combination and calls it: Training Stress Score (or TSS), but personally I like the term Stress Points because it’s more fun. In either case, it’s a time-at-intensity weighted score for your workouts. The harder OR longer you go, the more Stress Points you get.
Your hard is different than mine, so these scores are based on your individual “Functional Threshold” which should be roughly equivalent to your Anaerobic Threshold. Theoretically, this is the pace, heart rate, or power that you could sustain for one hour.
If you push above this threshold, it increases the weight.
Below it, it decreases.
This matches the exponential rise in lactate beyond aerobic threshold (which is confusing because we already talked about anaerobic threshold, but stay with me! Lactate is a topic for another time!).
To simplify:
One hour at an EASY effort = 50 points.
Half an hour at a HARD effort = 50 points.
And
One hour at a HARD effort = 100 points.
Two hours at an EASY effort = 100 points
The formula is slightly more complex than this, but it’s a close enough example to apply it to racing.
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