Managing the Load

Things are coming back around on my training and I am starting to feel a percentage better. Of course the real test will come this weekend if I can get out for a ride.

Now that I might be back on track I have to remember that eagerness to progress might be as bad as being a slacker. There is a balance to training, recovering and adapting (progressing). Just as there is this magical area that many cyclist call Sweet Spot Training, which is a zone where the largest physical effect may occur, there is a sweet spot in balancing many other factors in living, training, recovering and adapting. In the category of living most of us that are not paid athletes and have to balance work, home, financial and general living stresses that can impede recovery. After the living category there is the training category, which is training stress loads. Between those two types of stresses the body will be able to tolerate “x” amount of load and beyond that it is likely for injury, illness, over reaching and/or mental burnout if those heavy training loads continue.

In order to increase the ability to train more we need to manage living stresses as much as possible by trying to manage those loads. Working a lot of overtime will obviously create more stress load, getting into financial debt will create more stress load, not sleeping enough hours will create more stress load and so on. So we can potentially manage some of those external living stresses.

Next is managing training stresses. Of course you could take the safe route and add a very light training load and your incremental progress will be ultra slow, but if you are like me and suffer at the other end of the spectrum from an over eagerness to progress you may not be patient. Like me you create too much overload as I have once again experienced for the millionth time in my training history. So the eagerness and the love of training have actually hurt my efforts to progress. The guys at Science of Sport have once again hit this very subject on a blog entry concerning training errors and mention “zero to hero”, which seems to be the same characteristic of not being patient and trying to overload training stresses. Injuries, illnesses and mental burn out from being over zealous will and create a situation that may require unexpected time away from training altogether. The equation in my mind is train, recover and adapt. Finding that sweet spot that creates the right amount of training stimulation to progress with consistency over a longer period of time without injury or unexpected time off from a general breakdown is crucial.

I do not have a power meter, but I can understand how valuable a tool it can be to help a cyclist measure or find that sweet spot and train effectively with enough stress load, but also help pull the reigns back of an over eager desire to excel. Using a power meter is like speaking the truth about your training load. Used properly it will inform you if you are training too much or too little. It will help you stay right in that sweet spot.

For additional perspective on this subject concerning see the following at Science of Sports.