[gregclimbs]

Moving this over from the mountaineering forum:

My partner and I were having a discussion about what activities I log and “count” towards CTL values.

I have been riding my bike to/from the gym for climbing and S&C sessions 2-5x a week. And have been doing vinyasa yoga (flow) 2-3x a week.

Training peaks usually gives yoga around ~30hrTSS. Riding into training (bike has powermeter), works out to ~5TSS in (downhill) and ~15TSS riding home (uphill).

Just curious the UA coaches perspective of “is this just gaming the CTL system” and artificially raising CTL or is this training load real?

And if the latter, I do not see a way in TP to exclude these activities from CTL calculation, did I miss a feature flag somewhere on the activity?

Thx!

Topic

[Jane Mackay]

Jane Mackay on November 4, 2022 at 5:55 am #72302

Greg, load is load, whatever the purpose of the activity. The body takes no notice of how we frame it mentally. That includes emotional, psychological, things like travel — in other words, stress of any kind. Recording the activities you mention, especially since you perform them regularly and not just once in a while, will give you a truer picture of not only your CTL but also the TP metrics Fatigue (ATL: how under-recovered you are) and Form (TSB: how ready you are to go out and perform). Those latter two have an inverse relationship so if you’re not paying attention to them, it’d be a good idea to at least look at them weekly and get an idea of your patterns, both in themselves and in relation to CTL and in relation to how you actually feel.

[Jane Mackay]

Jane Mackay on November 4, 2022 at 5:58 am #72306

For something like the vinyasa yoga, you can estimate the TSS — when you’re done, does it feel like 30 TSS? Vinyasa is quite physical, but there’s also the breathing component, which activates the parasympathetic nervous system, so maybe it doesn’t feel like 30 TSS to you. It’s a good idea to establish a couple of baseline TSS efforts so you know what e.g. a 50 TSS workout feels like to you. It might be e.g. a 1hr run on rolling terrain when you’re feeling pretty good.