Emanuel, I hear your concern.
First I want to address that it’s normal to have a few days where we are feeling overly fatigued, just as it’s normal to occasionally feel great – like the workouts are too easy and you could do much more than the prescribed load.
saulj’s recommendation is great: start back in as prescribed, but be cognizant of how your body responds. I would add: When you have a bout of extra fatigue it’s important to consider “under recovering” just as much as “over training”. For many athletes, their gains might be more affected by their ability to manage their recovery more than their ability to do the workouts. Try the sessions as planned, but pay attention to how you are feeling and moving in these workouts. An organized endurance training program is characterized by feelings of low level fatigue. Try not to let it get beyond that right now.
Like saulj said – if you only missed a few days, you can continue as planned on the schedule and see how it’s feeling. In a transition period or early base period, there’s no need to “make up” days. But once an athlete has missed several workouts, maybe a week, they can’t pretend that they did the workouts and jump right back in the program. Once it’s a week or more, the athlete should be thinking about how they might step back to a previous week in the program.
A rough guideline for athletes that train consistently is to not worry about a missed day here and there if the total *monthly* load isn’t diminished by more than 5%. That assumes that the program is well-calibrated to you and that there aren’t too many extra sessions or extra sources of stress like a major business trip or project completion.
If monthly volume is diminished by more than 5%, it’s wise to start thinking about stepping back and making sure that the training volume is being layered on at a reasonable rate from that point.
Since this program design is pretty new to most of the participants and we are in a transition period, it’s probably ok to allow for up to 10% diminished load. Your subjective interpretation of how the training is affecting you is probably more relevant than a specific metric at this point. With months (or better yet years) of training logged in TrainingPeaks, you could give stronger consideration to the training metrics to guide your decision.
I suggest jumping back in, and paying attention to how you are tolerating everything. Most likely, you responded appropriately with the extra rest and your body will be happy resuming the training. Good luck!
