Speaker 1: Hey guys, Justin Coyle here from Nero Coaching, and in this video I'm going to be explaining the three ways that the average cyclist can use their training load metrics to improve their cycling. In this video, I'm going to be talking about mainly these three metrics. So if you don't know what they are, pause this video, go and do a quick Google and then come back and I'm going to explain how you can use them. If you're on TrainingPeaks or Strava or some other platform, they might call them fitness, I think TSB is called form, and then TSSB should be the same. So athletes mostly, I find, use CTL as a training target. They're trying to hit certain CTL values each week, and for the average cyclist, there are much better ways to gain value from these as opposed to just trying to build them as high as possible. So first way that you can use your training load metrics is to find your optimal TSB for performance. So what you're going to do is, I want you to go back and find the three best days you've had on the bike, the days where you've either a training session or a race where you felt amazing, and then I want you to find what your TSB value was going into those sessions and see if there's a trend. So I've got three dates open up on my calendar, and I'm going to show you this process for me. I already know that I perform slightly better fatigued, but I want to see how the TSB numbers stack up for this. So in my calendar, three dates. The first one was recently in July, I was doing a series of one-hour efforts and overloading them each week, and three or four weeks in, I had this amazing day. On this Friday afternoon, I hit a PB, I put about 10 watts on the efforts I'd been doing in the previous weeks, and I just felt amazing. So we're going to go to the day before. Now in today's plan, I've got my daily load values toggled on so I can see them for each day, and it's this value down here I'm looking for, which is the third one in these training loads, and it's this TSB. So after this session, on the previous day, the TSB was negative 15.7. So that's the first value. The second date I have was in 2019 at the Tour of the Great South Coast, which was a stage I won. I know, a little self-indulgent, but I did feel really good on that day, so I'm interested to know what my TSB was going into that. So the stage was halfway through the race, and you can see that I'm going to go to the previous day. So it was this stage here on the Friday again. So previous day, TSB value after that stage was negative 8.9. So I was going in with a TSB value of negative 8.9. Third one was the New South Wales Criterium Championships in 2020, another race I was just attacking. I felt like I could make any move I wanted, and it was going to work out, and I felt really good. So it was on this one on the Saturday. So we're going to go Friday. So this ride was a pretty solid pre-race ride, two hours, 150 TSS. And then the TSB value going into that race was negative 6.4. So those values, again, looks like a bit of a trend there. I'm ranging from sort of negative 15 to negative 5. Somewhere in there is when I've found previously that I've had my best leg. So what I might do is if I've got a target event or training session or race coming up, I will try and get my CTL into that range, and I know that's going to give me the best chance of having optimal performance. Now that's me. That's my range. Everyone will be different. So I encourage you to go find your three best rides and see what yours is. Yours might be negative. So I know a rider like Sam Hill on Nero, he performs really well when he's fresh. So his pre-race rides, I'll go out and do two hours with efforts. He'll go out and do 45 minutes at 100 watts, and he comes out the next day flying. So for him, his range might be positive 5 to positive 15. So you need to find what works for you. So the second useful way of using your training load metrics is by using your CTL as a measurement of detraining. So instead of doing what most people do and use CTL as a measure of fitness or as a training target, which I really don't like because as most of you probably know, you can improve your performance and your power output without having your CTL go up, and you can also have your CTL go up without really improving your performance. So I don't like CTL as a measure of fitness or improvement, but I do find it really useful in periods where you're not specifically building or trying to improve your performance in one specific area. It's good as a general measure of how well you're maintaining your fitness. So an example for me is this is something I've been using in the past couple of months. Sydney's been in lockdown. I haven't been going out and doing sessions to try and improve my power output in specific areas, but I am trying to slow down the detraining process because in a couple of months' time when there's racing back on, I don't want to be starting from scratch. So I've been checking in on my CTL each week to make sure that it's not dropping too fast. So jumping onto my calendar, back in July, I got to a peak CTL of sort of 100, high 90s to 100, and then we went into lockdown and I went into basically a maintenance period or a staving off of detraining. And then all I'm doing basically each week is coming in and using CTL as a measure of how much I'm detraining. So I'll walk you through quickly each week. If I just take Sundays for example, Sunday the first week going into the maintenance period, I dropped to 93, then it dropped to 92, 87, then I moved apartments this week. So there was a big drop, so bang, it dropped down to 78, that was pretty brutal. Then the next week, 79, week after that, 76. And you can see now it's hovering in this sort of high 70s. So I know that each week, if I can just keep my CTL in between sort of 75 and 80, when I then go and start training again, I'm not going to be starting from way down low. I'm going to be starting from a decent level. The third thing I like athletes to use their training load for is using the training stress score to guide their recovery. So we know that TSS is a good measure of the amount of work you've done in a session and therefore how difficult it will be to recover from. So I'm going to give you some examples. Now these are just general TSS bands and also general recovery principles or tools. These will entirely change for you depending on your experience level and what you like to do for recovery. But these are just an example that I might do. So if I'm coming home, I'll check my TSS on my Wahoo and if it's less than 150 TSS, I'm pretty much just having my recovery shake and carrying on my day as normal, not thinking about recovery too much. If my TSS is 150 to 200, then I'm thinking probably about and planning to have an extra recovery meal. So if I do a morning ride, I'll come home, recovery shake, probably have lunch and then I'm thinking about maybe having an extra bowl of cereal, fruit salad, yummy yummy, or toast, a little extra meal in between my main meals. If I'm in that 150 to 200 TSS band, and this is sort of that habit formation is kind of what I'm getting at, is what are your habits based on the TSS you've done. So 200 to 250 TSS, this is where I'm probably going to pull out the massage gun at night and just stick that in my legs and I find that helps my legs feel better and it's also just a nice habit to get into when I really feel like I've earned that extra sort of assistance with recovery. That's sort of the third level. Now if I've done more than 250 TSS, then I'm starting to think about things like having a nap. So if it's a weekend ride, maybe a Saturday morning, go out for like four hours and smash it, four or five hours. Then I'm trying to schedule in the afternoon, can I get 20, 30 minutes to have a lie down and have a proper nap. Yeah, those TSS bands will change for you. I'm sort of a more experienced rider, so those ranges are going to be bigger, less experienced, you know you might drag those down a bit. So you might be thinking about okay, over 80 TSS, you're starting to bring in those recovery habits. So those are the three alternative ways of using training load as opposed to just the stock standard, I'm just trying to get my CTL as high as possible, which I don't find that productive. So hopefully that's been useful and as usual, any comments, leave them down below and I'll get back to you.