Hiya,
Thanks for listening 
Stupid question but if you are knackered from a week / weekend of work is there a training stress score measurement that you can assign to a a day, my job is both manual and long duration in nature so haver bursts of little sleep and poor diet and then back onto a routine.
THis weekend I have had 2 x 3am starts and by the time I hit the sack its 11pm at the earliest. Clearly this is a work life balance progress but it allows me to spend the rest of the week with family etc. I have had a heavy couple of weeks on TR which are going well, but does training when I am already bushed add to TSS or just not work like that ?
I work in the sports events industry so most peoples leisure time is my office hours.
During a typical work day I might cover 25-30K steps
stu
I wouldn’t classify work effort as training load, since it’s a different kind of stress and isn’t going to improve your cycling fitness.
What I do is use an app called HRV4Training. There are other similar apps out there. Heart rate variability (HRV) is a good indicator of overall fatigue, state of recovery and readiness to train. You do a 1 minute measurement each morning, using either a HR strap or the phone’s camera to measure HR via bloodflow in the finger (I use a strap, found the camera method too inconsistent). You then get an overall recovery score. The good thing is that the app will automatically sync up with Strava, TR, TP, Garmin, etc to get your training sessions and TSS, and also allows you to capture details about non-training stress e.g. record your sleep quality, whether you’re sick, if you drank alcohol the night before, etc. This means that over time you can figure out how much those things are impacting your recovery, and adjust your training accordingly.
I’ve found it pretty useful. My recovery fluctuates in line with training, but then you can also see the impact of illness, having a few too many beers, long haul flights, work stress, etc. Some of the results were pretty obvious - really confirmed the important of sleep to me. Some were more of a surprise - travel takes a much bigger hit on my body than I’d realised, even when it’s travel that I’d thought was fairly low stress (e.g. business class, day time flights, sticking to soft drinks, etc). In terms of actionable data, it’s helped me to back off the training when my body isn’t up for it, whether that’s caused by work stress, oncoming illness, a big training session, etc.
I have been trying to avoid paying for that app now for a couple of weeks
I notice that a few people are using them with the sats finger monitor I wonder how accurate they are and whether over bluetooth they transmit everything we need
Work effort shouldn’t be classified as training load because only sport specific stress will make you fitter, while any type of stress will make you more fatigued. Whether you want to track fatigue through subjective or objective metrics and make decisions on your training based on that is up to you, but extra fatigue in your life is just going to make you more tired and negatively affect your training. Pros are so good not because they train 40 hours a week, but because they recover perfectly for the other 128 hours.
Completing sessions when you are already tired from work will decrease the effectiveness of the session and make you more fatigued which is the unfortunate reality. Training as an amateur I find is about trying to find the maximum workload you can achieve within the limits of your life, and it takes quite a bit of trial and error to achieve this, and normally it is isn’t exactly what is prescribed in the plan.
Sorry that isn’t more helpful, but really just be careful about doing workouts when you are tired and try to accept (it is really hard to accept) that during those really hectic points in your life your training is going to suffer. Some long term planning and knowing when these points can pop up is useful as you can plan training loads into and out of these periods to minimise the effect.
Also worth mentioning, that if say you know that for 1 week you will be super busy at work and you decide to take that week as a rest week, it is likely that that rest week won’t actually be that effective as you will have tons of work stress and as you say, 25-30k steps per day is just not going to help you recover, just don’t assume because you aren’t on your bike that you are recovering either.
Hope that helps in some way.
This is why I was wondering about TSS… the whole concept of if its not on Strava… ( training peaks etc) it doesn’t count actually it should count towards the stress of the training load.
If you look at doing a race that’s 50 miles down the road that starts at 0900
Register an hour before
30 minutes of finding registration parking
Hour+ of driving
Hour of coffee and car loading, kit checking,
Pre race nerves so light sleep
Busy day on the day before squeezing life in
Your up at 4am when you normally rise at 7am and and your knackered before you start.
This will add to your stress of the day and so means more excertion than just your race.
If you could score the fatigue in stravastix or training peaks then you can modify the following workouts accordingly.
As I am at the end of base phase I took the decision to simply turn off and not train, I could have squeezed it in, but I didn’t Ramp test tonight and I am not really in the mood or ready for it.
Stuart
It’s a one off payment and pretty low for the basic app, well worth it in my opinion. Has definitely helped me to maintain a better balance of training through periods where work and life are getting in the way.
Sometimes for work I do a lot of back country hiking with a pack that weights 25-45 pounds. My coach has me track my HR while hiking and log it into training peaks as a hike so that he can monitor the added TSS. Works well. I think if you are doing any physical labor unrelated to the legs, I wouldn’t track it. Just my two cents.
I’m an ironworker so my job is full of long days and tough work. It definitely wouldn’t be trackable beneficial TSS. I found it hard to even recover on recovery weeks. Id take the week completely off from riding. That may be the only reason to track it if there was a good way.
maybe I am missing the point but the graphs In training peaks and elevate show fatigue. fatigue should be part of the calculation not only from training