Joined TR few months back, tried to follow the low volume build up plan for 3 weeks. Experiencing fatigue and could not keep up with my usual weekend tempo group ride. Backed off from the plan and use the trainNow option instead.
Trying again now but this round Masters Short Power Build(LV) as I am 49 this year. 3 weeks gone, same fatigue during weekend rides.
Is this real fatigue that i should drop my vol/intensity further(but LV already lowest 3-4 hours per week) or just simply my body yet to adapt to polarised training and i should hang on to get through this stage.
Could be fatigue. How is your fueling and nutrition? Also any stress, work balance and life we need to consider including when youâre doing your workouts, ie morning, afternoon, evening? Doesnât sound like youâre sick, right?
Also after the summer and earlier training, did you take a break or jump back into it?
Are you doing the group ride on top of the plan? Most âtempo group ridesâ would be considered a hard day so Iâd start by either swapping one of the planned workouts for the group ride or changing it to endurance and then adding the group ride in.
Work/life/nutrition normal, but i donât really fuel during workouts(beside water) since mine is LV plan. 60-75mins per session & 3 sessions per week. only start my work out around 9pm, home by 730 for dinner with rest.
3 workouts per week. Initially was additional then i changed one to a group ride. Currently, most weeks are 2 sessions of mixing between SST/Threshold/VO2. 1 week/month of 2 x endurance. Some sessions are manageable whereas others tough but still able to pull through. But comes weekend, usual tempo group rides usually fatigue at 50% mark.
Are you saying that youâre doing 2 hard workouts PLUS the group ride (which is also a hard workout)? If so, it could be that you need to move to a Masters approach with only 2 hard efforts (so one hard workout plus the hard group ride plus one easy workout).
Also, what training were you doing before you moved to trainerroad? Is it possible that you need to work more on your Base before going into Build?
I know you said youâre not fueling your workouts because theyâre short and right before bed, but are you at least fueling the group ride?
Were you new to riding before you joined TR a few months ago? If so, it could be fatigue. It adds up, and caught up to me when I was progressing from 3-4 hrs to 5-6 hrs a week. Didnât seem like that little amount should do it, but I was going hard all the time.
What do you consider normal for nutrition (are you trying to lose a few pounds)? You might try a gel at the beginning or halfway through your âtempoâ ride.
working out late at night is likely to prevent you from being able to get to sleep for hours. Fatigue will build quickly if youâre not sleeping quality and quantity has been affected.
What are you training for exactly, and whatâs the timeframe you have in mind?
Per @Pbase , whatâs the reasoning for jumping straight into a Build phase without a prior Base phase (particularly if youâre northern hemisphere-based?)?
Why not create a longer plan with Custom Plan Builder that takes you through into the spring, say 5 months+ duration, with a very moderate ramp rate (Training Approach) to begin with, which takes account of your weekly hard outside ride as one of your weekly intensity sessions, with the goal of letting you build up your fitness very steadily over the months without battering yourself with a load of immediate intensity as may be happening currently.
Youâre pushing 50, so youâll have the downside of not recovering as well as youngers do, but youâre still sufficiently young to have the disadvantage of being full-on busy with work, so you donât have the luxury of a retired personâs emptier schedule to accommodate training and managing fatigue more easily.
Structured training should allow you to get fitter, but as a middle-aged person you need to be very canny about easing your way into it so that fatigue levels are contained. With a high-priority weekly fun ride, this can be even trickier, as youâve experienced, but it is doable. Generally take a conservative approach, paying very close attention to fatigue as the arbiter of what you do, and aim for a longer-term payoff.
You are 3 weeks into a new plan. Sounds like you havenât been doing structured training before this. So you are doing more than what you were doing before. You are going to feel some fatigue. Let your body adapt. Be realistic and make sure you are prioritizing your recovery. It will improve, but takes more than 3 weeks. Be patient. Developing fitness is a long game.
By looking at your training history I am not surprised youâre feeling fatigued.
There are a few things that stand out:
Ramp up in volume (how many days a week you ride).
On Saturdays (before your Group Rides on Sunday) youâre going out on some pretty long rides 2-6 hours.
On Sundays, your Group Rides are 2.5-5 hours long, and our fatigue management is flagging these days as Red/Yellow days.
Given the above, it sounds like we need to ease down on volume and add it back slowly over time. For this, I would recommend:
Rest on Saturdays and only do long group rides on Sunday and keep the rest the same.
Or, swap one of your Interval days to be the Group Ride on Sundays and move the Endurance workout to Thursdays. (And potentially also skip the Saturday ride as this seems to be making you tired on Sundays).
You can DM me and we can figure it out together if youâd like! Here are also instructions on how to edit your weekly schedule [Click].
FYI - a lot of riders are now taking in 60 to 100+ grams of carbs PER HOUR, so for your long weekend rides, you might see massive performance improvements just by significantly increasing your carb intake.
Thanks for your suggestion, only got more active past 2 months for weekend rides. Normally, itâs only on Saturday. Now i am slowing down the pace for weekend rides(fatigue) and taking those more as endurance rides.
Still new to TR software, you can see most of my outside rides were auto sync via garmin to TR. Should I preset my weekend ones as group ride in advance for system to read the data better for post ride AI adaptation or it wonât make any difference?
If you know that on given days you will be doing the Group Rides, you can either swap one of the scheduled workouts to be a Group Ride, and the nice thing with this is that you get recommendations on how to tackle the ride. Or manually set a recurring Group Ride workout card.
Both these options will automatically match with the workout file that gets uploaded from Garmin. If you were to just upload the ride and not match it to anything, the system will still read the workoutâs ride data and make adjustments as needed.
The only time when you will for sure want to match an outside ride file to a workout card is when you are completing a TR structured workout and youâre following the instructions. This way, you get your Progression Level credits for performing that workout.
Itâs very little carbs for 2.5-5 hours tempo rides. At 150w tempo your body use about 100g of carbs per hour (adjust for your power). My guess is that with the training during the week you come to the group rides with lower reserves than before, and therefore feel more fatigue.
Dang, yeah if I was doing a 3-5 hour intense group ride Iâm eating a decently large breakfast (70g of carbs minimum) and then probably bringing like 90+g of carbs to eat per hour in the form of drink mix, gels, blocks, and maybe some bars if I think there will be chill sections.
Even at moderate powers youâre burning like 400-500+ calories per hour. So if you start at 8am and go for 4 hours youâve not only burned around 2000 or more calories through the pedals but you also start to miss lunch. So if you have a âlight breakfastâ and 2 gels (usually like 20-25g of carbs per gel) your several thousand calories in the hole by the end of the ride.
Not only is this not great for your performance in that group ride but itâs also becoming increasingly clear that calorie deficits have health and recovery impacts not just on a daily scale but on a more acute scale. So doing a huge ride in the morning and then having a massive dinner to compensate 7 hours later might mean your weight stays the same and that youâve stayed calorie neutral across the day you still spend like 11 hours in a fairly severe energy deficit. This has impacts on bone health, cortisol, glycogen recovery, soreness, physiological adaptation, etc.
