Training load charts have a reputation for being something you need a sports science degree to read. You don't. There are two ideas underneath all of them, and once you have those, the lines mostly read themselves.
Two ideas, not twenty
Acute load is what you've done lately, roughly the last week. Chronic load is what you usually do, averaged over the last month or six weeks. That's it. Everything else is a way of comparing the two.
Load itself is time multiplied by how hard it was. An hour easy and thirty minutes hard can come out about the same. Strava's effort score works for this, and where there isn't one, heart rate against your max does a fair job.
Is this week too much?
Put this week next to your usual and you get a ratio. Around one means you're training like you normally do. A bit above one is how you build. Well above it, especially when it stays there for a couple of weeks, is when niggles and colds tend to turn up.
A common rule of thumb puts the comfortable range somewhere between 0.8 and 1.3. Treat that as a guide, not a law. A rest week will sit below it on purpose. A training camp will sit above it on purpose. What you're looking for is the jump you didn't plan.
The jump usually isn't one heroic session. It's an ordinary week plus a long weekend ride, a club run you didn't plan to race, and a swim set you pushed because you felt good. Each was fine on its own. Together they were too much.
In LankFit this is the Training load balance chart: your last 7 days against your usual 4 weeks, with the sensible range shaded.
Fitness, Fatigue and Freshness
The other way to show the same two ideas is three lines. Fitness is the slow one: your load averaged over about six weeks. It climbs when you train consistently and drifts down when you don't. Fatigue is the fast one: about a week. It spikes after a big weekend and drops after a few easy days.
Freshness is fitness minus fatigue. Below zero, you're carrying more tiredness than your fitness can soak up, which is normal in a building block. Above zero, you're fresh, which is what you want on race day and not for months at a time.
Coaches often call freshness form. We don't, because in LankFit form means something else: how close you are to your own best.
Don't try to keep freshness high all the time. A block that never dips below zero is usually a block that isn't asking much of you. The useful pattern is a few weeks of building, with freshness sliding down, then an easier week where it comes back up.
The thirty-second read
Look at three things and stop.
- Is fitness going up over the last six weeks? If yes, the block is working.
- Is this week far above your usual? If yes, was that the plan?
- Has freshness been deep below zero for more than two weeks? If yes, an easy week is overdue.
What the lines can't see
Load is only training. It doesn't know you slept four hours, moved house or had the flu, unless you tell it. Log illness and injury and LankFit shades those days on every chart, so a dip in fitness has its reason sitting next to it instead of looking like you went soft.
And if a point on the chart looks odd, click it. You'll see the sessions behind it, which usually explains it faster than any theory.
The lines also start from whatever history you give them. With only a few weeks of data, your usual is still settling, so read the early weeks loosely. The more of your training is in there, the more the comparison means.