Originally Posted by
rubiksoval
If having a daily plan works, it works. Just like not having a daily plan works. I went from a Tues threshold/Thurs vo2/Sat group ride race with Wed/Sun long steady rides for years while in college when my life revolved solely around riding, to what I've done for the last 6 years. I had success with both. I had more much more success with the latter, along with other things.
I'm not a fan of PMC. I don't think it correlates nearly as well as people were led to believe, and I don't think it shows nearly the information that some want it to show outside a set of very general parameters. You can jack CTL way, way, up, get TSB positive, and still suck at any number of performance metrics. Conversely, you can have amazing performances on low CTL, or low TSB, or high TSB, etc., etc. It's just a few pixels of a larger picture. And since it's based on NP, it needs fairly accurate numbers and can be skewed during certain blocks of specific work (notably work with very high repeated 30-90s max efforts). I can't even begin to figure out how a hr PMC would be more useful other than a very general descriptor, which I'd expect no one with more than a couple of years of riding experience would actually need. In the south, a HR PMC is virtually useless. CT:L would skyrocket in summer and TSB would be in perpetual negativity solely because of heat/humidity impact. And the bigger you are, likely the worse that would be.
Anyway, all that to say, I may have 2-3 key workouts I know I need to be able to hit in to be sufficiently prepared before a specific event. If I can build up to those and complete them, it matters not whether it's on a Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday, whatever. We write training plans to fit into an arbitrary schedule of time, not necessarily because our biochemical processes are primed and ready to go.
IME a HR-based PMC is exceptionally accurate and useful. I feel just like what the numbers show. My guess is that's because HR reflects physiological stress, which is what the PMC is designed to display. The other part is that with HR, I can record skiing, snowshoeing, running, hiking, spin bike, weights, stepmill, etc., adding all that to my CTL. Trying to do that with only bike power would be a total crapshoot, worthless.
It takes experience to interpret what one sees, but not all that much. My second season with it, I knew what to do. You can't have a perpetually negative TSB and my summer HR's are pretty much the same as my winter ones for similar activities. I heat train here, specifically going out in the hottest part of the day if I can, riding in Eastern Washington, etc.
I've been moving my CTL up by 3 integers/week because my recovery is a bit slow. I get cooked if I try to drive it up faster than that. However, the higher my CTL, the better my recovery.