The Craft of Coaching, Live Q&A: Managing CTL
Coaches want to see CTL, or fitness, on the rise. But there are times in the season when CTL will go down. Joe Friel explains why this is critical.
Coaches want to see CTL, or fitness, on the rise. But there are times in the season when CTL will go down. Joe Friel explains why this is critical.
Video Transcript
Joe Friel [0:03]:
CTL is really something that is definitely going to be going up and down throughout the season. It’s going to be going down whenever you’re resting. If you’ve taken…what you should be doing frequently, probably every three or four weeks…you should be taking some days away from heavy-duty training. It doesn’t mean necessarily days off, although it could involve days off, but CTL is going to fall during those times.
So if you’ve been averaging something like, let’s say, 70 TSS per hour in the several weeks you’ve been going through your normal training and now you come to a rest break, you’re going to take a five days of reduced training, maybe a day off, and then half the normal duration you normally do during this time with low intensity, it may come down to something like 60, 50, 60 TSS per hour. And that’s quite alright.
That means the CTL line is going to drop on your performance management chart. But that is alright. It should happen. If it never happens, there’s a problem going on. It’s got to go down at those times.
The other time it goes down is when you’re peaking for a race. When you’re peaking for race, CTL must go down. All we’re trying to do is control how rapidly it goes down. That’s a whole ‘nother topic. Which I’ll not go into right now because we haven’t got time to really to get it get into detail.
Rob Pickels [1:21]:
Yeah. So, I mean, basically the concept is sometimes you have to take one step back so you can take two or three steps forward.
Joe Friel [1:27]:
Exactly right.
Rob Pickels [1:28]:
Right. Awesome.