I rode my bike for 3 to 5 hours last week on Saturday, and this week on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday (today). So basically every other day.
Every time I went out for a ride Xert wanted me to do intervals. I did those some of those intervals on Saturday and Monday (didn’t fill the high buckets entirely. It was a cobbles ride and that was hard enough as-is), and also on Wednesday and Friday (where I did fill the XSS in all 3 buckets, and even did a lot more low XSS than demanded).
Last night (Saturday on Sunday) at 1am Xert showed me that I needed to do a 200 XSS endurance workout. Today (Sunday) I started my ride at 1pm. When the Magic Buckets synced on my Garmin I got … intervals with even more high XSS than the previous ones this week.
It seems that unless I ride every day, as soon as I have 1 day off the bike, the next day is intervals. 4 interval sessions in a week (and nothing else) seems a bit excessive, no?
I’m following the Moderate - 1 improvement program with a focus on 6 minute power and I did 15 hours this week.
edit:
I just checked the planner and it added yet another interval workout, for tomorrow. My current training status is “very tired”.
Thanks Joris. Could you share more information? What program are you on? What intervals did it offer? Your status is Very tired now but what will it be tomorrow? Doing high intensity intervals, if that’s what you normally do, a program may get you to do the same but build on it. Provide more details with screenshots.
Note that doing a small amount of high intensity intervals more frequently may be exactly what’s needed for continuous improvement. If you are on a plan, then you might see more variation.
Thanks! Big rides! If you click on the gear icon, you can hide/show other pieces of information like High and Peak Training load (HTL and PTL). If you’ve been doing a lot of high/peak intensity in the past, Continuous will just keep adding on to that and so, yes, you can see high intensity when your status is blue. Most days you were blue at the time of the training it appears, doing big rides every other day. But this might be typical for you.
You can experiment with sliding Recovery Demands to the right and you’ll see that many of the “Fresh” rides are now “Tired” or “Very tired”. So you might be just on “this side” of fresh, if you get what I mean.
Btw, note that freshness isn’t a linear scale given there are 3 dimensions to manage. So you can go from Very tired to Fresh for example. That happens when different systems recover at different times during the day.
What do you mean by that? If it sees in my historical data that I did this before the system assumes I’m capable of doing that in the future?
That’s usually how I ride. If the weather is good I might do 2 rides in the weekend, but we had rain on Saturday.
That last one was something I was wondering about and is a bit hidden by the system right now. There is this “global XSS” that is counted differently for 3 systems, but ends up in 1 total. However we all know each of those have different fatigue impacts (e.g. 6 points on high XSS might fatigue me a lot more than 300 purely low XSS points) but the system doesn’t really communicate how it handles all those systems together. Right now I see 1 number but I don’t know how the decay for those separate values work.
If you’ve been doing 1 minute at 300W everyday for many months, can you do 1 minute at 300W tomorrow? Would that make you tired? Would you be improving?
Add HTL to your weekly stats to see how much High XSS you’ve been doing daily on average. You would need to do that every day (or 2x+ a bit more every other day, 3x++ every third day, etc.) just to maintain HTL and would need to do more to see improvement.
Continuous ATP is essentially “Put me in continuous Build phase under my control at a ramp rate and target Focus Power I configure.”
If calculated form is fresh/blue, HIT will be recommended at or close to your selected Focus Type (currently 6- minute power).
If form is tired/yellow, endurance will be recommended.
If form is v.tired/red, rest/recovery will be recommended.
At 4 status stars level (your 15 hrs/week) you should be able to ride lots of HIT as often as your form is fresh/blue. That doesn’t mean you have to but if the prior activity’s recovery load did not push you into red/yellow for more than a day the system says you are recovered enough for more HIT.
Xert is unique in that it calculates low and high/peak recovery loads. Unless an activity pushes those numbers up high enough a rapid return to fresh form is to be expected (red to blue instead of red to yellow to blue).
In your case notice all of the activities in those two weeks are 2-1/2 to 3-1/2 diamond Difficulty below your 4 stars status level. IOW well within your current capabilities.
Also take a look at the avg XSS/hr on those rides which provides insight on their Difficulty rating.
On the 13th you did short Hard ride of 100/.66 = 152 XSS/hr. The following day is yellow.
On the 21st you did a long Difficult ride of 248/3 = 82 XSS/hr. The following day is red/yellow.
The other rides are <75 XSS/hr. I.e. a Moderate rating. Difficulty Rating ranges from Easy (<45-50) , Moderate (50-75) , Difficult (75-110) , Tough (110-150) , Hard (150+) .
Assuming you do feel fresh from your in-between rest days, it’s up to you whether you ride HIT or not on all blue days. Same if you want to perform traditional blocks with a recovery week.
You control that through choices you make and by adjusting Improvement Rate to suit or change Focus Type to raise/lower intensity.
If you prefer an automated phased progression with periodization, consider changing Program type to Base-Build-Peak or generating an XFAI Goal plan.
, Moderate (50-75)