Managing Rest Days Question
 

Assume that you are on some kind of 'training plan' with a goal/important ride/event say in 6 weeks. It is day 'n' and your plan calls for a rest day. And you can tell that there is built up fatigue and you need a rest day.

HOWEVER, day 'n+1' will be a rest day regardless - the plan doesn't call for one but there will be no room for a workout of any kind on day n+1.

So what do you do on 'day n'? Do you just make it an 'active recovery ride day'. Do you try to do the day n+1 workout as best as you can, knowing that you will have a rest day following? or ??

Just curious - thanks.

dave

I guess it depends on the cause of built up fatigue as you say. If it's a considerable amount, take the two. Or, maybe do some off the bike easy exercise. Easy swimming maybe?

Having said that, I find rest days the most challenging. Housework is just not as fulfilling.

This is a basic issue with canned training plans, you are going to get workouts scheduled on days you can't work out. I'm not sure what the answer is, my workouts are scheduled according to my time available.

I think if I were in your shoes and I knew in advance that I'd be unable to do a workout on a scheduled day, I'd probably add a little more to other workouts in the preceeding week.

But if you need rest, you need rest. Trying to do a workout when you're fatigued is counterproductive. The only caveat being that sometimes I feel tired before I start a workout or ride, then once I'm underway I feel fine and perform well. So either don't move the workout up at all or if you decide to give it a try, just abort if it's not going well.

Re: The Bold

I wonder how to apply this (probably typically correct) principle. At some point rest instead of more work is correct. OTOH, I don't think that anyone would say that "I am in the middle of a workout and am fatigued, so I should stop now".

So how tired do you need to be so that 'nothing' is better than something (particularly when 'nothing' will inevitably be followed by 'more nothing'). This is probably an example of a place where a dedicated coach would be quite helpful.

dave

That is exactly what I would do. If its an interval workout and I couldn't make my power targets, I would 100% abandon the work-out, just cool down and then stop. The exception to this would be a work out in which the power target of a particular interval is not 100% vital- for example, I might be instructed to do a set of intervals with alternating high/low targets but be told in advance that its holding the lower power target that's important, its ok to decrease the high target by X percent if necessary.

I also just last week aborted a road ride early, I was planning on a 3-4 hour ride, started out feeling a little tired, didn't feel any better after 90 min, so I called it a day and went home, only got a 2 hour ride in. My instructions for Fri/Sat were 10 hours total of tempo riding on the road. I did 2 on Friday and 5 on Sat. Coach has not gotten my data, but I had a great ride on Sat and I'm sure he's going to be happy with it.

The point is riding when fatigued is counter-productive, it only does harm. I guess maybe the question becomes how do you distinguish what you feel during a tough workout from the counterproductive "I shouldn't ride" fatigue? Easy on the trainer- you can't hit the targets, just stop. The road is a little more of a judgment call. I probably *could* have managed a 3-4 hour tempo ride last Fri but I could tell the way I was feeling that I wouldn't be able to follow that up with a 5-6 hour tempo ride the following day, that's maybe just a little bit of an experience thing. The Sat ride was on the course for an event I'm preparing for, so it was more important to me to be relatively fresh for that. It also helps that I kind of have an idea from the workouts coach has scheduled for the week what he's expecting as far as a weekly training stress goes, and I kind of know now what I'm going to produce on some of these rides. So I know I can cut Friday short, ride better on Saturday and it will probably work out as he intended.

Haha and for me 'nothing' is certainly not inevitably followed by 'more nothing'. I did not hire a coach to motivate me, I'm completely self-motivated. If anything, the coach is there to keep me from doing too much. I am way more prone to counter-productive over-work than I am to doing too little.

I will say that one positive thing about having this coach is that when I was trying to follow a canned training plan from a book, I was constantly wondering if each workout was appropriate for me. "Is this workout too hard for me?" Then if I was struggling with it, I would wonder if I should modify. Likewise, if a workout went well, I'd always be wondering after if it was too easy. At first with this coach, he would send me these workouts and I would think 'this is a pipedream, no way can I do that for 2 hours'. And then lo and behold, I could. Now I don't have to think about it, he just tells me what to do and I do it. Then you pay attention to what's going on and you start to get the gist of it. It really a huge luxury compared to a canned plan, just not having to worry about overall arc of the plan.

^Yes, that would be so cool! I suppose it took me about a decade to be able to self-coach constructively, and it's still not the same. I have just one one data point: me. I don't know what I don't know, what's outside my box. I agree with HP entirely. On the road though, I can test myself fairly easily and do. After I warm up for 1/2 hour - hour, I should be able to power up and hit my HR numbers for that RPE. I don't have power, but with experience HR works quite well. If I can't hit my numbers, I change the workout, either cutting it short or cutting the intensity. Knowing just what to do takes experience.

All that being what it is, I really enjoy that feeling of powering up the engine and seeing the result, whatever it is. Sometimes I can see I need more food. Other times I need more water. Other times I need more rest. Most times it's just what it should be.

In the OP's specific case, most times I would go for a workout on the n day and rest on the n+1. You can usually take more punishment than you think. However if the numbers weren't there, that would be a signal for a short ride and then a rest day. When I can't hit my numbers, it usually takes me more than one day to get it back, but then I'm old. So I'd usually take a rest day and then an endurance day and then see how I felt - have another go at it and see what the numbers were at the appropriate RPE. IMO it's not just the numbers, it's how gassed you are when you're hitting them.

I totally agree BTW on powering up the engine & seeing the result. I have had days where I felt a little tired going into a workout but never to the extent that I didn't feel ok at least giving it a try. The road ride last Friday was the only workout I've actually modified in 10 weeks with the new coach. He just does such a good job scheduling these workouts that I now go into all of them pretty convinced I can do them, even if I go in with tired legs. That is very powerfully positive on a mental level, so I start with confidence & somehow it almost always comes together and at some point during the workout my legs don't feel tired any more. It's interesting.

I also feel 100% ok about the idea of abandoning a workout because I've got this super high training load almost all the time, >100 CTL and most of the time a negative TSB. I don't think I've seen a positive TSB since the beginning of the month. All of which is just short hand for saying that I have tons of volume, it would just be a blip to miss a workout. It's probably a different thing for people with less training volume, missing one workout would be a bigger loss.

Envy. I'm trying to gradually ease up to over a 70 CTL, though of course with hrTSS it's not the same as power and maybe my power TSS would be higher. I'll bump it up a few numbers and then really feel it and have to level it off for a week or so, then try another bump up. I was at 45 in early November.

Well I wouldn't have too much envy. Its just a number that somewhat describes some aspect of your training. There's lots of reasons it could vary from person to person- for example you might ride your tests harder than me (wouldn't surprise me), I could have a falsely slightly-low FTP. Or you might spend more time warming up or cooling down than me and therefore spend more time in easy zones. But even more than that, I don't think a super-high CTL is the right thing for everybody necessarily. I have it because of these long endurance events I'm training for. I know you do similar, even though I'm not sure of your exact thing. Honestly I think numbers like CTL are not really for comparison between people as much as they are for tracking progress in an individual.