Hah. I think even this is overthinking it, and underestimating the lack of available guidance on the topic…
If you’re having a negative outcome from training…how would one decide if it is due to too much work, or too little?
It’s almost always too much. If you’re informed enough to ask the question you’re much more likely to be overtraining than under
Totally agree. Plus, if you undertrain, you live to fight another day. If you overtrain, you get to work your way back over days or weeks. Consistency is King. Better to undertrain and keep training consistently than to crash and burn and have to start over.
Have to disagree. Most people don’t burn out… It gets hard and they quit. Most would actually be better by doing more.
Lol. Yeah. Hard disagree.
That’ll be - at least in part - because …
drum roll
… we still don’t fully understand the mechanisms that cause fatigue.
Given the above, it’s hardly a surprise that fatigue management is more of an art than a science.
“Most” train 3-4 days a week (maybe)? How do you overtrain on that? Lol.
By constantly making those weeks harder and harder and never taking a break because they get made fun of for not working hard enough
Who is making fun of people for working out three times a week? We all are just doing what we can when we can. I agree that consistency is key and if doing less to stay consistent is what you need (and in a way is actually “doing more”). Where I disagree is in regards to burnout on three days a week working out 1-1,5 hours. I just don’t see how that is physiologically possible but I know you feel different and that is ok.
If those three sessions are all high intensity and someone is time constrained, that usually indicates they are also recovery constrained. It’s very easy to pick too hard of sessions. Most people would benefit more from doing one less interval per session but instead do one more
My sense is that it’s possible when tied to life factors. For me stress in one area bleeds to another and I just have bad training weeks of distraction. I know it’s not so much that the cycling itself had made me burnt out but it’s just a bad week or bad weeks overall and trying to push through it no matter worse and feeling stress from poor workouts makes things less fun and then aggravating.
Agreed!
Unpopular opinion: “Life Stress” is a fad/myth.
Stressing about work or how to put your kid through college is not the same as increasing your calorie expenditure by tenfold through exercise, for hours on end. Not even close.
Do you not find it much more difficult to recover from a hard session when you have a lot of work stress? Or vice versa, if you’ve major family stress, it’s really difficult to complete a hard session?
No, I’ve never noticed a difference at all frankly. I havent ever really seen an explanation as to why it would matter either…it just seems like one of those things that has materialized out of thin air and been accepted.
Hard agree it’s not “the same”. 
Hard disagree if you’re downplaying its signficance. 
I’d go a step further. Not downplaying - dismissing completely.
I’m certainly willing to be proven wrong of course. But I’d be shocked if there were anything other than personal anecdotes out there on this topic (which of course is the only thing I have to contribute as well of course…).
To expand on this a bit further…I would go so far as to say that there are other, real factors that affect training that tend to correlate with life stress, but that life stress is irrelevant.
Like…death in the family. Very stressful…but…the 4 days of missed training probably had a bigger impact than the stress of an out of town funeral.
Super stressful week at work? Doubt it matters in the slightest. What WOULD matter? Staying up till 1am drinking 4 double bourbons every night because of it…
Fair enough.
I guess I just find it absolutely plausible that if stress can literally kill people, it can probably affect their ability to progress their threshold intervals.
Maybe it’s not so much the stress itself as its symptoms (eg poor sleep) that cause the problems. 
I can’t persoanlly say that I have ever noticed overall life stress impacting me on the bike…if anything, the bike helps me deal with it.
I can say that the opposite is very much true…overall stress / fatigue on the bike can absolutely impact how I deal with overall life stress (i.e. I overreact to relatively small things).
I also don’t think my personal experiences are enough for me to completely dismiss the idea that life stress can impact performance for others.
Agreed. I’m certainly not claiming I’m “right.” I have zero evidence to support my opinion. And hell…I’m bad at identifying things like this…so IMO my personal anecdote counts less than others lol.
It’s just…humans have a very deep need to explain failure, and manufacture reasons for it, even illogical ones. My sense is that this is one of those. People don’t like not knowing.