Coming back from Covid

Caught the rona over the holidays which then became bronchitis. Just getting back on the trainer after a month off (except for a couple ill-advised attempts to ride outside).

How do I recalibrate my workouts?

I think guidance is to start super easy eg recovery or very low endurance efforts and extend workout length from there over a few weeks… I’d actually ignore power and go on HR (if you know your zones and have an HRM) or RPE if you have a good awareness of your effort.

When you are confident you’ve recovered and can bounce back from the easy rides above, you can try a few intervals by feel… and if you recover well from those you can eventually do a BT to reset your signature. But again, wouldn’t think that’s a good idea from day one…

Get well soon! My wife, 2 children and I all have been Covid +ve this last week, luckily (with vaccinations) minor illness, for me 7 days off the bike, first easy workout today.

For me I think its the second time, I got very ill early 2020, was never confirmed as Covid (was before the official outbreak began) but I am fairly confident it was in retrospect for a couple of reasons. That time was 100x worse, violent chest infection, heavy fevers etc. I had poor concentration for several weeks after… For me I just had to take it right back and ride easy for while with no goals except enjoying the outdoors (which given at the time it was one of the few reasons we were allowed to leave our house in lockdown wasnt hard to motivate for), fitness loss wasnt too bad, by the summer I would say I was back to pre-illness fitness levels and busting hard intervals regularly again

Thanks, I was thinking more about how to reset my fitness signature or adjust settings so I get better suggestions from the XATA

Understood. Maybe I’m conservative, but I think that you actually don’t need, and probably should not follow, XATA so early in your recovery.

If your signature was on optimal decay it may be OK to follow XATA endurance workouts (filter for endurance, or set athlete type to century rider for a while… or slide the freshness feedback slider to the left), but even there I’d still go by feel rather aiming to complete specific workouts… and if you really value the structure, start with half a ‘workout’ for example… and if too hard, reduce intensity by 10% within the workout…

And when you are back and ready to go all out, a breakthrough will ‘fix’ your signature, you shouldn’t really need to adjust anything.

Hope that helps.

Same with me, lost about 2 weeks of training (Though fairly mild case). I have Xert set to no Decay, FTP still went down about 15 watts, other values didn’t change much. First couple rides were outside just going on Heart Rate, which was quite a bit higher then normal. After a few endurance rides, I’m back to doing 3-4 star workouts, with a slightly lower power curve, mainly just TP is lower. You may find you need to adjust the improvement rate, as your training load has dropped quite a bit. Had mine at Slow and up it to Moderate-2 to get back to my old training load.