With my racing season about to officially kick off, it is sufficient to say that I've been training my ass off (along with my teammates). This is the time when all the winter riding in cold and windy conditions will hopefully pay off. I've paid close attention to my Performance Manager Chart (using WKO+ software), and I've stuck closely to my initial plan for a training season, so I'm hoping for some decent results.
Recently, myself and a few teammates have been discussing the charts, so I figured I'd take some time to share what I know about them (they can definitely be difficult to understand at first). The pictures below are my personal chart from this training season so far (November 28 - April 8).
Some quick basics: The purple line is my "Acute Training Load", or basically, the recent stress load. You can also think of it as today's workout. When you upload a ride into the software, the purple line reacts rather abruptly. The blue line is my "Chronic Training Load". It is a general representation of how fit you are. As you can see, it reacts much less drastically than the ATL. The goal is to keep the blue line trending upward throughout the season. The yellow line is my "Training Stress Balance". It shows how "fresh" I am. Notice how the ATL and the TSB pretty much oppose each other, which makes sense. The harder the workout, the greater the stress.
If you look at the above chart, you can see that I trained for the first 3 months (which was generally aerobic base training), then had a period where my CTL (blue line) flattened out a bit. This was a rest week. Notice how all of my lines came back together as I got "fresher". Yes, I lost a tiny bit of fitness, but this is how recovery works. I should perform good here, since glycogen stores should be back up, muscles are recovered, etc. Then, you can see that I hit the training hard again, with a 4 week build period, and my CTL continued upward. Notice how the lines all separate again.
I'm currently in my second build period, and about to begin a rest/taper week to head into a big couple weeks of racing. Notice, however, that throughout the season, my CTL continues to trend upward. This is the important part. It shows that I'm gaining fitness throughout my season. If my chart would start to go downward, I would immediately know, and could adjust my training schedule accordingly. The only other thing that I want to point out (below), is that after a rest period, when my lines were intersecting, I felt amazing. In fact, I felt so invincible on my bike, that I had an incredible workout, as evidenced by the large spike in my ATL that day.
One important note, is that according to Hunter Allen (who co-wrote the book "Training and Racing with a Power Meter", raising your CTL greater than 8 points (the numbers on the right) in a week, will lead to illness or injury. I can say that I came close to that one week, and I did indeed end up sick. Thankfully, though, I already knew (from a Carmichael book, I think), that a common cold literally has no detriment to training performance, as long as you can suck it up and tolerate the symptoms while on the bike. Which is exactly what I did, and thus, did not lose any time training.
I hope this helps to make the PMC a little more clearer (to my teammates, at least). I know that Golden Cheetah has a similar chart, using different terminology, but I haven't used it enough to remember what their lines are called.
