Training & Nutrition - Tired when training?

Say you're scheduled for a "regular" 2hr distance ride the day after an interval session. Should you be slightly tired? ie., is being in a constant state of slight fatigue necessary for the periodization schedule to work effectively?

Yes and yes. Emphasis on the slight. Of course you'll be tired the day after a hard interval session. The trick is to keep the HR down on the distance ride the next day. Keep it down in zone 2, even though you'll want to go harder. I try to ride on the flat the day after intervals. But that zone 2 ride is very important. If we say that interval day was Day 1, you should feel better after training on Day 3 having done the zone 2 ride on Day 2 than you would have not having done it.

OTOH, don't get too tired. If you feel you're seriously getting fatigued, like irritable, having trouble sleeping, legs just won't go, you're doing too much for your present base conditioning level. You can take your morning resting heart rate (MRHR) every morning to keep track of your exhaustion level. If your MRHR goes up 5-6 beats after an interval session, that's normal. But it should come back down the next day. If it stays high, you need to back off and do some zone 1 until it comes back down.

I'm starting to notice when I've overdone it because I wake up a lot in the middle of the night...

Well, if my legs don't feel like they need a recovery day after an interval day, I feel like I wimped the intervals. So I say yes. But I'm chronologically advantaged. In general, I agree with comments above. Irritability and wakeful nights tell me I'm tryin' too hard.

My thinking was that since you really only grew fast twitch while resting, the whole reason why we do distance training would be moot if we rested too much. After all, we're trying to induce slow twitch hypertrophy and train the aerobic system.

That's why fat guys who sit on the couch are capable of 3 secs of really high power.

You should feel it after intervals. I usually schedule a 2 hour endurance ride after a rest day. But with racing every weekend, the amount of intervals done during the week is down.

I have been riding since november and I have less than 1500 miles in my legs since then and I am slightly fatigued regularly. However, the level of my fatigue has decreased as the number of miles increases (with periodization). While I can not answer the second part of the question, it nevertheless seems logical to me that fatigue is not dependent upon the periodization schedule but is simply an integral part of endurance training.

So, fatigue is a given and everyone has stated effective means of discovering unproductive fatigue; the next question then is how much rest is too much? Cause I was more fatigued prior to cycling my a$$ off each week. :rolleyes: