Hi,
On one of the podcasts, Scott, Dr Chueng and Armando talked about managing your freshness by making sure you have a mix of green, blue and yellow stars in your calendar. I am looking for some comments on my calendar in December because by the end of the month I have felt pretty tired. I didn’t have any green, but I had a good mix of yellow and blue. I look forward to hearing some comments and guidelines on managing freshness and fatigue.
That looks like a lot of yellow. Also I notice you have quite a few ramp tests on there, I suspect that the ramp tests aren’t identifying your signature correctly. Therefore everything that follows on from that may be a bit off.
I have been in the yellow despite taking days off and it is unusual, I feel great but is there a way of checking whether there is a fault with my numbers to see if their is a bug in my data, as constantly in the yellow since the 27th of December, yes it was a long ride but I have taken days off to recover
Please advise
Hi Speedy_Squirrel,
Thanks for the comment about a lot of yellow. Sounds like you think I should have a little more blue and green mixed in.
With regards to the ramp tests, I did a ramp test and then a 30s sprint at the end to try and get some data at the other end of the fitness signature. I think I heard Dr Cheung say that should be a good approximation.
Thanks again for your feedback.
Next time you ride outdoors, warm up for a bit, then try the following, 4 or 5 times 30seconds on (really on!) 15 seconds off, then try and ride just above your threshold power for as long as you can until you start to struggle to hold the power, then do an all out sprint. This usually results in a gold breakthrough for me, never had less than a silver and should give you an accurate signature. If you are still seeing lots of yellow after that, try using the freshness slider on the planner to alter your status or look at your improvement rate. If you keep on riding whilst yellow, Xert will only prescribe endurance workouts.
Hi Angela,
my understanding is that we should use the “freshness slider” to adjust for the way we feel vs. what the model is showing.
The stress/recovery time constants seems to be identical for different individuals, but a younger athlete would recover faster, and other factors affect recovery (life stress, etc)
If you move the slider to the right you will see more ‘green’ in your calendar.
With that said I don’t see a breakthru in 4 weeks in your calendar, so maybe your fitness signature is stale and may need to be refreshed, as recommended in the other reply from @Speedy_Squirrel
I love how you name the workouts to show what type of session they are 
I agree. I wish that the workout titles/names were more useful. I don’t understand why seemingly arbitrary names are used for workouts across several different training platforms. Random words and song titles don’t correlate to the actual workout so it’s difficult to look back at a history of workouts and easily figure out what was done. Perhaps this is done by design to overcomplicate things?
Naming a workout by its intervals doesn’t convey information on what it will do for you. The XSS, Focus, Difficulty Score and duration are what you should be looking at to understand what the workout offers. A distinctive name helps make the workout memorable and identifiable. Song titles can be both motivational and memorable.
You make an interesting point @GeoffC, however I was actually referring to workout I shared a screenshot of - that appeared to have a completely random name
Perhaps it is my memory that is insufficient then. Personally, I’m unable to remember what the workouts actually involved by looking at a song title.
Review XSS, Focus, Difficulty Score and duration to understand what the workout involved, not the workout title. If we put all this information in the workout title, it would be redundant.
Hi johnnybike,
to make a long story short, that file name was automatically generated by Xert when I downloaded the .fit file. At some point I deleted workout by accident and uploaded the .fit file. It isn’t an actual workout name in my library.
Thank you for getting back to me, I will give it a go and hopefully that resets my fitness signature
