I’m sure many of us are wearing activity trackers of some sort that provide us with a daily recovery/readiness score. My current choice is Whoop and, since I’ve recently returned to Systm, I’ve been thinking about how to utilise the data from the former in order to maximise the effect of training with the latter.
In particular, my chosen plan (All Purpose, medium) has me doing a couple of intense sessions a week and the rest Zone 2/3. What I’m mostly wondering about is whether there’s any value in doing the most intense sessions on days when I have got a green recovery, irrespective of whether it’s the scheduled day. I guess this approach is one of the fundamental intentions of a recovery/readiness score, but then there must also be logic behind the scheduling of workouts within the Systm plans as well.
Obviously we’re all different so what works for one may not work for another, but I’m interested to hear from anyone who’s played around with this about whether they’ve noticed anything meaningful either way.
The way I interpret the plans, especially long ones (12 weeks) is it’s about the accumulated load over the weeks and months – that each week should work you X hard, and that each successive week should load progressively until a recovery week. Of course there is logic to the order of days (long rides on the weekends, days off the bike after intense rides), but that’s general rules of thumb meant to work for most people most of the time – it’s certainly not personalised.
So based on that I make adjustments, swapping days based on how I feel, what days I have to go to the office, etc. In terms of noticing anything meaningful, the main thing I notice is I am more consistent in my training if I make it work for my schedule, rather than berating myself and getting discouraged for not doing it perfectly as prescribed. That consistency is what makes the progress.
Richie, I am very involved in WHOOP, having used it like seven years. I’ve also used several system plans. I would try to follow the plan regardless of my WHOOP score. Perhaps that’s a reason why later in the plan things would start to fall apart.
You may not be aware, but within WHOOP, there is a SUF group. I am currently the only member as the others have left. I have asked WHOOP company about becoming the group admin. If you joined, we could follow each other’s strain/recovery as often as you like. if interested, the Sufferfests code is. COMM-1D8884.
like @rinaf says the order of the sessions and the amount of time in between is to give the body time to adapt and recover between sessions so that you can consistently do quality work over the course of the plan. They are rules of thumb that you may need to adjust, like e.g. from a physiological perspective, if you have Vo2max intervals scheduled, they are not going to be productive if you’re not able to get the power up so you’re better off calling it a day, riding endurance, and doing the intervals the next day.
I kinda think that the only way to know whether the Whoop is a better guide for when to go hard vs. the rules of thumb plus your subjective perception is to try it and see what happens?
from memory, despite what the wearables business says, i do not remember if it’s been demonstrated that hrv actually correlates all that well with readiness in a given day, vs. if trends over time (e.g., a week or two of lower than average scores indicating you need to back it off) are more meaningful. If reality is the latter, your plan might not work as expected. But again, why not try it and see?