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| With Training Peaks, you can get all sorts of charts set up. This one shows the longest ride I have completed in any given week, going back over the last 6 months. For folks interested in longer sportives, this sort of information is important. You can't train for a 5-hour event just by doing "hard" one hour rides! |
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| Yes, I know I am old and unfit. This is my "top" feature - the Performance Management chart. Blue is fitness, purple is training load, and yellow is "freshness/tiredness". The chart shows my cycling figures for the last 180 days PLUS the dotted section to the right is a prediction of where things will go in the future. If I enter planned future training sessions it will count those in, too. The point? Well, in just 6 days time I have a local charity sportive, and I want to be rested enough, but not too rested! The chart can be customised as required, with different time periods and any combination of a wide number of sports. I regularly use a version of this chart that shows both my cycling and my running added together. I think of it as a "cardio fitness" chart. After all, that bit of cross-training still develops the heart and lungs! |
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| Training Peaks has a height correction feature. And, unlike most other programs, you can see the effect BEFORE it happens! For the activity shown, I was sitting on my new turbo trainer. So obviously my elevation didn't change. But I forgot to switch the GPS off on my Garmin 310XT, so the file shows the elevation all over the place. Indeed, this pic shows just how inaccurate GPS is for elevation. The proposed elevation correction is shown in red. Clearly, the corrected heights are about right, because I was on a stationary trainer! If, on the other hand, you are going off road, you might not want the files corrected. So it is good to have the correction feature, and it is even better to see the effect before you apply the correction! |
Informative graph chart for bike training. But i am not clear about the training graph chart. Can you you clear me please.
ReplyDeletethe purple line is the actual training (exercises) you do.
Deleteso every ride I make shows up as a spike on the purple line.
heavy training (long and/or fast and/or "hard" rides) cause bigs spikes in the purple line.
This causes tiredness (the yellow line goes down) and fitness (the blue line goes up.
If you do it wrong you end up very fit and very tired at the start of a big event.
So the secret is to rest a bit before the big event, because you will only lose a tiny bit of fitness, but you will be much less tired at the start of the event.
see how the purple line (training) goes down rapidly near the right of the graph, and the yellow line (tiredness) rapidly goes up? That's me resting up before my big event.
Notice how the yellow (tiredness) line improves (goes up) MUCH more rapidly than the blue line (fitness) drops.
The underlying theory is why training makes you fitter and faster ;-)
Everyone agrees that you don't want to do a very hard and long training session the day before a big event. That is obvious! Beyond that it is about working out how many days rest you want to take before an event. Is 2 days better than 3? is 7 days better than 2?
Personally I find somewhere between 7 and 14 days to be about right, depending on how much training i have been doing - if I have been training very hard for many weeks, and I am pretty much exhausted, then I find 14 days is best.
The Training Peaks graph really just allows you to put absolute numbers to that sense of tiredness you feel.