This is alongside CTL... Chronic Training load
It's good to know the difference and what these components mean so you understand and know how your training, recovery, and consistency play a big role in these numbers.
Let's quickly reflect on what CTL is...
Chronic Training Load.. a measure of your true fitness. It’s an ongoing average of your daily training (TSS load) specifically looking at the last six weeks or 42 days of data points.
This ultimately shows your long-term training load and gives a trend line of where you are going.
A positive (upward) trending line shows an increasing training load and decreasing (downward line) shows a decreasing level of incurred training load.
and to note that, you want to have moments of lower intense/deload or recovery weeks so you can continue to build your fitness.
your fitness line cannot always keep going as well as have big spikes
we want to progressively load you up and then take some time off so your body can soak it all in and benefit from the training and recover to come back stronger.
this prevents overtraining and becoming run down to where its no longer fun
and you no longer see fitness gains.. maybe even a decline
Acute Training load
provides a measure of how much an athlete has been training (again, taking into consideration both volume and intensity) recently, or acutely. It is calculated as an exponentially-weighted moving average of daily TSS (Training Stress Score). so this is a lot shorter of a time period than the 42 days from CTL. if you have also seen your colorful PMC (performance Management chart) on training peaks... ATL is that pink line
ATL is your near-time training load, that is tracked (usually) over a rolling seven-day period. This is why it's very "jumpy". Acute Training Load is a relative time-based number dependent upon the cumulative workload you have recently undertaken. ATL takes no consideration of the type of training you've undertaken, it only records the total workload.
I love this quote...
for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Just as we can track workload, we can track direct levels of fatigue caused by that workload. This is our Training Stress Balance. also known as TSB... a combination of your CTL and ATL that equals your overall balance and your TSB.... Form
it's either Negative or Positive
When it's negative, it means you have been doing a lot of workloads and accumulating a lot of both ATL and CTL. this IS GOOD! to some extent though! you don't want to keep accumulating a negative form as your body cannot simply keep up.
Acute vs Chronic Training Load analyzes the balance between the athlete’s Acute (short-term) and chronic (long-term) load.
It indicates whether short-term and long-term training is in balance and alerts you to situations where the load is changing too quickly. The long time constant for CTL means that data must be collected for a fairly long period of time before the Performance Manager calculations can be considered accurate. The Performance Manager concept is especially useful when attempting to reach peak performance on a particular date.
In practice, this entails deciding how much ATL, and hence CTL, should be reduced so as to result in an increase in TSB.
TSB is training stress balance again
Achieving this takes learning yourself and time.
It also takes knowing how to measure and periodize your training to cater to your growth and development.
and again, thats why I am here as a coach
I don't just strive to give workouts and make you go hard.
my goal is to build you up through nutrition, psychology and strategic training that leads to everlasting growth as a person physically and mentally
So with that extra knowledge let's train hard and get stronger!
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