Strength Workout CTL – Include rest time?

  • Creator
    Topic
  • #50935
    jonathan.elwell
    Participant

    Hello everyone,
    I’ve in week 7 of transition in the 24 week mountaineering plan, and wanted to check something about how I’m adjusting CTL in TrainingPeaks for strength sessions.
    In the article on CTL ‘fudge factors’ it says:

    4) For the TftNA general strength and core workout I give them a TSS of 50-70/hour.
    5) For the TftNA Max Strength with core warm up I give these a TSS of 80-90/hour.

    Is that meant to include the rest time as well? For the general strength/core its only 30 seconds rests between sets, but the Max strength which I’ll be starting soon calls for anywhere between 1-3 minutes rests between sets, so I wasn’t sure if that was intended to be counted as time in that fudge factor.

    Thanks!

    Jonathan

  • Participant
    Reed on #50944

    Yes, those should include rest time. For strength training, the key pieces to modulate are repetitions, load, total volume (e.g. reps X sets X weight), rest intervals, etc. Translating that into a single “training stress score” metric is fuzzy at best. I’d suggest thinking about it through the lens of “how hard was that workout, and how long will it take me to recover from it?”

    As an illustration, diving into the numbers – a 45-minute Z1 run might translate to ~45 training stress score. Arbitrary units, intended to be a way to bring together these varying types of training stress. Zone 1 is pretty low-intensity, something like 0.6 intensity for 0.75 hours x100 = 45. If you are fit enough to recover from that in less than 24 hours, and be completely ready for your next workout, you might have a “chronic training load” of ~45 or so.

    If you do a 1-hour max strength workout, that’s probably going to take a couple of days to recover from. Plugging in a number of about 2x your chronic training load should be a reasonable estimate and be useful to try and help quantify your short-term fatigue.

    Participant
    jonathan.elwell on #50945

    Thanks Reed! That’s helpful. I have seem some of the other posts saying to go of of recovery time, I think part of my issue is being relatively untrained I’m not yet very attuned to what ‘being recovered’ means to me. I did a strength routine last night and feel soreness in my legs (not really my core or upper body though) – but I had some soreness the past few days before that anyway.
    What would you consider ‘recovered’ – no soreness? Feeling like you can readily do the same workout again?

    Participant
    Reed on #50972

    Recovery takes different forms and different amounts of time… I know I can go out for a 40-minute run day in and day out. I did two long workouts on a rowing erg over the weekend, and overdid something. I trained Monday and Tuesday, and then took yesterday off entirely. I’m still not entirely recovered today, but feeling good enough that I’ll head out for a run later on. If you listen, your body will tell you a lot.

    Participant
    jonathan.elwell on #50973

    Got it, thanks! I am definitely working on listening to my body, I’m sure that will improve as time goes on. Thanks for the input!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.