Planning for recovery - or not!

This article by Andy Coggan in cycling forums:

Sorry for the really long post....

provides an excellent counter to the mantra of planning for "time off" to recover.

To summarize planning for time off leads to loss of fitness. The optimal plan is to always optimize your workouts to do the maximum amount of work that you can without over training. As that leads to the optimal adaptation for your sport.

This can be done on a daily basis, if you don't feel up to the planned ride then stop. Don't over extend.

More importantly by monitoring TSB (Training Stress Balance, effectively CTL-ATL (Chronic Training Load and Acute Training Load)) you can plan your workouts to not get to an over training situation.

Especially for us older racers, any loss of fitness (for example over winter) leads to a long period of negative TSB where we try and get fitness back.

I'm going to try and follow this advice later this year. The last two years November and December have been bad for weather in Vancouver and I have effectively gone down to CTL of about 30-40 (3-4 hours riding a week! mostly at the track).

While the track racing was fun in the fall series while coasting the CTL down to 30, the winter series was exceedingly painful and depressing (trailing the B's, not being able to keep up in points races..!!) while building CTL back up.

This year I hope to have a CTL of about 100 by fall (currently 85) and I'm going to try and maintain at least a CTL of 70 over winter by training on the Computrainer. This should allow me to enjoy both the fall and winter Wednesday night races and be in shape for the Escape Velocity Spring series in March.