I was recently able to add an additional day of training to my schedule. I’ve been doing a low volume 3 day a week race training for crit racing (I’m track racing, but crit seemed the closest option). I added an hour easy ride on mondays to the schedule.
The thing is, whenever I do the monday ride I end up with a yellow the next day and my anerobic workout gets changed into a shortened endurance ride. The first two times it happened I realized that I ended up going over the target TSS and IF for the ride, so the suggestion to tone it down the next day made sense.
I was riding outside and it’s hard to find a non-hilly route that would keep me on my power targets, so today I decided to ride inside so I could nail the targets. I did.
But I checked my TR app just now and it’s still suggesting that I change tomorrow to a short endurance ride.
And tomorrow’s workout was actually already turned down from what it was initially set. I can’t remember what the original workout was, but it went from a hour ~6 anaerobic workout to a 30 min 3.1 anaerobic to a 30 min 1.1 endurance.
It’s weird because I would have thought that if I did the suggested monday workout and hit the targets without going over then the following day’s workout would have been fine. I walk a lot and do heavy strength training workouts twice a week, but neither of those are new factors.
What should I do here? I feel like I added to my volume, but I’m losing my specialty workouts and some of the volume from the workouts being turned down and shortened. I know red light/green light is a suggestion and I can override it, but I want to understand where I’m going wrong.
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Hey @cschmitz!
This is a good question and raises an important question that most of us have found ourselves asking at some point or another- just because we have time for more training, should we?
The answer to this depends on your training history, how flexoble your schedule can be and how you are responding to your current training load.
Last week was a big week for you. You did 5 rides, including a race, which is likely why you started this week with a Yellow day. It was more training load than you are used to. The extra endurance ride was just too much on top of all of that.
When adding extra Workouts, it’s important to conisder how they fit within the broader context of your training over the last week or so and how this will impact your ability to complete the key Workouts in your Training Plan. The focus should be on nailing the Key Workouts, as these are what will make the biggest impact on your fitness. You should ensure that any Workouts added over and above the key Workouts don’t interfere with your ability to complete those key Workouts.
It would have been sensible to skip the extra Workout this week, or move it to another day where it is less likely to interfere with your key Workout.
For example, if your schedule allows, it woud have been better to do the extra Workout on Friday instead of Monday this week. That would have given you a day to recover before hitting the next key Workout again on Sunday.
Does that make sense?
Let me know if you have any questions!
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Hmm all of that does make sense and yeah in retrospect I get eht the extra yesterday may have been skip worthy based on last week.
Thanks for the explanation!
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You’re welcome! Here if you have any other questions 
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