hi there, I’m coming from Trainerroad where I was following a relatively difficult plan, and now it’s been a couple weeks without any recovery week (6 weeks). Consequently, I decided to take one and change my goal to taper. Is it the right setting? I’m asking because it has been 2 days without a workout with a 54 XSS deficit and now when I look at the proposed activities, it is proposing me to do Bring me back to life, which is a 87XSS rouleur type of workout. Since I am in recovery mode, should I only do an active recovery or should I go with that type of workout? Also, one of the reasons I want to do a recovery week is because I’m always in the yellow zone each day, is this good practice to come back once in a while to the green color? (something I never had). Many thanks
Hi David,
First off, welcome to Xert! Glad to hear you’re reaching out and trying new things!
In Xert, you won’t automatically follow a more traditional 3 week build, 1 week recovery like many people are accustomed to in other programs. But don’t fret, you’re doing it exactly right!
The idea with XATA is that you set your ramp rate to something that is sustainable/achievable to you based on current training load & available training time. It’s hard to create a one-size-fits-all plan for athletes because their starting training levels are likely different. Other plans can’t/don’t know that but Xert does. This explains why an athlete with a Training load of 25 might find a week with a ramp rate of +5 on the edge of overreaching, whereas an athlete with a TL of 130 might find not find a week of +5 Ramp Rate all that difficult. So you’ll need to play around with the Improvement Rate to find what works best for your training status and time availability. However, when you start noticing either that 1) you’ve been yellow status for a large number of consecutive days/weeks or 2) you have an XSS deficit and you’re feeling too tired to continue training, those are often signs that your current Improvement Rate is set too high and a recovery week may be in order.
The recommended workouts will likely be looking at your athlete type and target event date when recommending workouts. Its possible that you’re either in pre-base, post-event, or somewhere in the Peak/Taper phases. Don’t feel like you need to do Active Recovery rides all week, but that makes a good starting point for the rest of the week. When I do true recovery weeks, I’ll filter the workout options to include workouts < 2.0 difficulty and Endurance focus. There will be other workouts that are relatively low intensity and good for recovery besides the active recovery series.
Hope this all helps/makes sense! Cheers!