I have increased my TL every week for the past 12 weeks and am starting to feel sluggish and less motivated. I need a recovery week. For a non-racer, 57 year old, what should this look like? I was thinking of cutting back my weekly XSS by 25% and keeping my efforts around LTP. Does that seem like a reasonable approach?
I have this question too as there doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for incorporating rest/recovery which is increasingly important as we age. In the articles I’ve found, the story seems to be that if you follow the Xert recommendations you shouldn’t need a recovery week. I find this to be more than a bit suspect TBH.
You could use the freshness slider to give Xert some feedback or change your improvement rate to maintenance or lower.
Other way is to just do what your body is asking and take days off or as you suggested just go easy (the freshness slider will do this for you too)
As an example I just slided my freshness to -15 and I got this
My opinion…why fool with sliders for one week? Just cut back 25%-50%, depending on how tired you think you are. LTP rides make sense.
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At age 83, I expect I’m double the age of most of ya’ll here 
and given that I’m 12 weeks out from abdominal surgery, I need all the data-based help I can get. So, I measure my recovery every AM. If I fall within the HRV zone of 80% and above the AM following a workout the preceding day, I have the option to train that day based upon those data. When/if my recovery value differs from how I feel, I have the choice to follow the recovery % or not. I use the software Morpheus for the M5 HRV data acquisition device. I got it at www.8weeksout.com (I’m not a paid advertiser for them!). I’ve been using it for 4 years or so. I will add that I know nothing of cycling beyond how to ride a bike. Most of my recent history has been with HIT strength training protocol. When I was in my 40’s and 50’s, I did very many marathons and several ultra-marathons, so I’m not new to high intensity exercise. HTH, Anthony
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