Fitness Isn't Performance: The Truth About CTL

Cyclists often treat CTL like the ultimate measure of fitness, but that's only part of the story.

In this episode, CTS Head Cycling Coach Adam Pulford explains what CTL actually measures, why performance and fitness aren't the same thing, and how to use your training data to peak for races instead of chasing a bigger number.

HOST

Adam Pulford has been a CTS Coach for nearly two decades and holds a B.S. in Exercise Physiology. He's participated in and coached hundreds of athletes for endurance events all around the world.

​​Free Cycling Training Assessment: https://trainright.com/cycling-training-assessment-welcome/

Interested in working with a coach? Schedule a free consult: https://trainright.com/coaching/cycling/

Self-coached athlete? Check out our TrainRight Membership: https://trainright.com/membership/

Find more free resources here: https://trainright.com/blog/

Resources:

• https://trainright.com/what-is-chronic-training-load-ctl-and-how-to-use-it-to-improve-performance/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
• https://www.instagram.com/p/CW9JtfcFodT/?img_index=1

Transcript

Why CTL Can Mislead You

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I've seen cyclists chase CTL numbers for years only to completely miss the fact that their performance isn't improving at all. Your blue line on training peaks, known as CTL or chronic training load, can also be called fitness because it does a pretty good job of showing how much training you're doing for a long-ish period of time. However, this is not the end-all be all indicator of improvement, especially if your goals include racing, increasing speed, and getting on the podium. You have to understand that fitness is not performance. Fitness is important because it builds capacity for some later time. But performance has to deal with more than just riding your bike around, accumulating TSS points. Performance means increasing power, increasing speed, having proper timing, being efficient with your efforts, and arriving fresh on race day. I'm Adam Pulverd, Head Coach of Cycling at CTS. We're one of the biggest coaching companies in the world. We've got over 70 professional full-time coaches, experienced in working with athletes ranging from the Tour de France to the Olympics to your local gravel race, the group ride or charity ride. If it's got two wheels, we can coach you for it. And we're pretty darn good at the running and traffic side of

CTL And TSS Made Simple

SPEAKER_00 1:12

things too. To understand what I mean by fitness is not performance, let me explain what chronic training load is and how it relates to other key metrics. I'll also explain when you should chase CTL and when you shouldn't, all with the pursuit of finding your best performance of the year. To do that, I need to explain something called the performance management chart. So here we see the performance management chart. In this case, we're just using my data, my boring old data, uh, since I can share this uh freely and no one really cares all that much. But the the main points to show you is your CTL, ATL, and TSB. I've also got some performance overlays here. We'll talk about that too, maybe here in a minute. But chronic training load, this is that CTL or that blue line that we also talk about being fitness, is your TSS per day and it's a weighted average for 42 days. What all that means is it's the net effect of your TSS per day for about three months. Recall that your TSS or how many points you get for each training session all hinges and is based around your current FTP, uh, how hard the normalized power was on the day, and you get points associated with each workout. 60 minutes at FTP equals 100 TSS points. You can scale up or down from there depending on how intense or not intense, how long or short an effort was, and you start to get these points. So chronic training load takes uh your average for the past 42 days. It's a weighted average, like I said, and it gives a pretty good indicator of how much training load and how many training stress score points you're accumulating on roughly a three-month uh rolling average.

ATL, TSB, And Ramp Rate

SPEAKER_00 3:06

ATL, on the other hand, is acute training load. This is the same thing, but for a week. Okay, so TSS per day for a week, it's a weighted average. So that the net effect is roughly two weeks. Okay. This is why we call this fatigue. If we do a bunch of training, like when the pink line spikes up here, here, and here, we get tired. Okay, but it boosts up your capacity and it builds that blue line, it builds your your CTL. And so if we induce fatigue over and over and over, the blue line or your fitness goes up. And then when we take ATL down, we don't do as much training, CTL can go down. That's how these two aspects work. Training stress balance is the best way to describe this, is to show how you're adapting to your training and gives us insights on how fresh or unfresh you are. Really, the best way to kind of interpret this is with this zero uh or homeostasis line here going across the screen. If TSB is at zero or uh going up, we could say that the athlete is fresh or getting fresher. When TSB goes down or it's low, you could say that the athlete is fatigued or is getting unfresh. Now, there is a lot of interpretation um based on how the athlete actually performs with that, but that is kind of the net interpretation of how I apply it to my own coaching practice and and how that training stress balance was built. It's essentially looking at are you increasing your ramp rate, which is here, which is you're increasing your TSS uh per day for a week or so, and are you increasing fitness? So when ramp rate goes up, TSB is going down. When ramp rate goes down, TSB is going up. And we look at this for uh how the athlete is adapting and how fresh are they. And so we have chronic training load, acute training load, and training stress balance that really make up the performance management chart. And this performance management chart tells the story of the athlete's training and their responses to the training. In particular, those responses can be shown

Reading The PMC With Peak Power

SPEAKER_00 5:28

with peak performances. The last thing I'll show are these peak performances here or the top five, uh, the top five highest average powers or me max powers for five minute, 20 minute, 60 minute normalized, 60 minute average power, and a five-hour me max power. The way I like to show this to my athletes is just to s just to tell them when they are performing at their best. And we can get key insights into this over the course of the season. In this case, I haven't super tested or or or done a huge race, just some local races and some fun uh ripping here and there. Overall, you could say that my strategy thus far has been riding my bike, having fun, and staying fit. And that would probably be uh some of the best extrapolations of this performance management chart right now, even though we can see that I had some peak performance early on in the season. I've decreased CTL and volume. You can see here I'm still performing quite well, relatively speaking, across the last part of the

Fitness Vs Performance And CTL Anxiety

SPEAKER_00 6:32

season. So let's come back to fitness versus performance. Like I said earlier, fitness builds capacity for later when you need it to push more power and develop speed for the races that you have coming up. Performance for most disciplines in our sport focuses on the need for higher power outputs, pacing yourself wisely, good timing at the sprint, and translating your power into speed. Fitness certainly helps get you there, but fitness is not specifically performance. And even though we call CTL fitness, that's not the perfect term for it. But that term is also emotionally charged. Fitness carries a lot of connotation with it for athletes. A high number, I'm fit. A low number, I'm not fit. And any number from your peak that's lower, you can start to ask the question, am I losing fitness? When you look at metrics and numbers linked to emotional words without more context, you can start to spiral. Then you double down and you do more training, more volume, and you chase more CTL. This is not always the most effective strategy. Additionally, we all need to understand that if you have been training for years, there's some deeper fitness going on in your body than what shows up on training peaks. Love CTL, but it's not perfect for showing year-to-year fitness. Again, it shows load from training stress scores as a weighted average over the past three months. So if we're going to call it fitness at all, we might be better off calling it current fitness. But even that is limiting, so I'll stop there. The main point is that we need a metric to measure consistent training load or fitness over time. CTL works pretty darn good for that. So many athletes, coaches, and softwares use it or something similar to call it fitness. Vecta, for example, uses something called load 8, but the timeline is an eight-week time frame. But all of these is only measuring current trends for the past several months, not years. If you've been training for years, you probably already know this by now, and probably already know you don't need to be chasing CTL all the time because everyone has a cap on what they can hit within a season. CTL will plateau for everyone, but that doesn't mean performance will. That means masters, amateurs, and pro tour riders alike will plateau in a season and in life with their CTL. It's just those groups will have drastically different plateaued numbers. Here you see some ranges of CTL for different groups of riders, from amateurs to pros, for an example. Because CTL is time dependent and there's only so much time in a day, in a month, in a year, we'll all run out at some point because we need to sleep and do other things in life. When you train regularly, you'll get up to a sustainable, predictable CTL and usually maintain that for a while. This is what I mean when I tell athletes who are just starting out that we need to maximize your weekly volume for several weeks before doing anything else, really. We just need to build fitness for later. And this is also what we do each year of a base building phase. At some point in every season in every athlete, we need to decrease CTL in order to increase performance. So when should you chase CTL and when should you chase

When To Build CTL On Purpose

SPEAKER_00 9:52

performance? Let's talk about when to chase CTL first. You need fitness. There's times where you need to chase CTL, driving that blue line up, and this is best done in your base and build phases of training when you're training to train hard later. Or it could be in the second half of the year after a mid-season break when you're building to another big race. The best times to chase CTL are months or several weeks away from a big event. Fitness gives you that capacity to go hard, rest, then do it again. And oh, by the way, adapt more quickly. Those of you who may have gotten your feathers ruffled a bit when I said fitness is not performance, you can start to cool yourself down here because I'll admit, you can't have performance or at least high performance or lasting performance without some decent fitness. Fitness begets performance. Every week, month, and year can build on itself layers and layers of fitness, then performance. And you need to see through the metrics in order to understand this. And each year we can put in a new batch of fitness. I call this putting hay in the barn for later. We maximize volume mostly with zone two and some zone three, cadence drills and some other stuff, in the base and build one phases so that we have a solid base of fitness to start chasing more power as we get closer to the race

When To Let CTL Drop For Speed

SPEAKER_00 11:12

season. Now let's talk about when to chase power. This is in your build and peak phases of training where you're taking lots of that big fitness you built up and start to use it to intensify your training. This will make you more powerful, durable, and resilient. And it'll make you faster. A well-built program likely decreases volume when it increases intensity, shifting some of the stress from the aerobic to anaerobic. And when this happens, CTL will come down a bit. This is normal and this is fine. Recall that when CTL goes down, so does ATL, only ATL goes more quickly. So you're trading some fitness for freshness in order to make some bigger power for speed. For all my athletes, with the exception of maybe some grand tour athletes or some crazy ultra endurance folk, they usually race best after peak fitness or peak CTL is achieved, and CTL has come down some, ETL is low and TSB is not in the toilet. Remember, most athletes get emotional about CTL dropping and they try to keep it high year-round for the sake of just a high number. This is wrong. I want CTL to be high at first, ideally for a long period of time before we drop it down and race. And here's a good example of that. A PMC showing a good stable high CTL, then it drops and the athlete comes back with a peak 20-minute performance. This may be too much of a drop for some, but a good example of how you don't need peak fitness in the same time period to have peak performance. Letting go of some of that CTL gives more bandwidth, more energy, more focus to hit the hard days hard, then some extra time to rest on the easy days. Race legs are there, you're hungry to go for it versus tired from just logging more miles. When you do training like this, raceform will be there longer and the body is stronger to hold up throughout a season. That's just the reality of a good annual plan and execution of it. Fitness is needed to make good performance, but you usually sacrifice some CTL to have that peak performance. However, the whole point of this video is to help you understand that if you want to go fast and perform well at your key race or even a certain period of time, let CTL go. Freshen up, shake the fatigue off, and capitalize on that hard work that you've been building up for so long.

Off-Season Reset And Final Takeaways

SPEAKER_00 13:40

Let's talk about when to chill. Finally, there's a time period where you let a pretty good amount of CTL drop for a while. This is that transition phase or the off-season. I'll have my athletes take three to four weeks away from hard training or even regular riding, just letting their bodies and brains recover from a season of being on it. For high volume riders, this could be as much as 30 to 40 percent of their peak CTL. For amateur or time-crunched athletes, I won't let them dip that low as they don't need that much time off. So maybe it's more like 20 to 30 percent drop of CTL from the peak CTL. For now, don't get too hung up on the exact percentage because that will be pretty individual or should be for your situation, and it is for mine. So the key thing is to not get worked up about keeping CTL high year round. You want to chase it for a while, then chase power as you manage freshness, and at some point you just let it all go, only to rebuild it again and keep layering on your fitness and performance year after year. Finally, in closing, CTL is not the end-all be-all metric to emotionally tire fitness journey to. Honestly, there shouldn't be just one. And if you think of it like that, you're setting yourself up for extreme failure. Use the other key metrics I mentioned here today together to tell the story of your training. Monitor your performance as you get into the heart of the season and focus on driving that power up in the way of mean max power, speed, and skills. Usually CTL will drop during this time, exchanging fitness for freshness and energy. When you're more fresh, you can build more speed and power. When you have more speed and power, you're going faster, you're having fun, and you're positioned well to get on that podium or hit your targeted goals. And that's how fitness and performance work together. If you've been chasing the CTL dragon for too long and you want to change it up and find some more performance, you know where to find us trainride.com. Coaching, camps, consults, and more. Thanks for watching and listening today. We'll see you back here for the next one soon.