Performance Management Chart: Strengths and Weaknesses
When you first start training with a power meter it is easy to get lost in all the graphs and charts and metrics. A power meter is useful for different aspects of training. It can be used to guide training, but also to observe training and racing. Let’s dive into the magic and the blind spots of how the power meter quantifies your workload over time.
Introducing the Performance Management Chart (PMC). With one glance at the chart, a trained eye can get a pretty good idea of an athletes workload over the previous weeks, months and years. Without being too technical, here is an outline to help you with a practical understanding of the PMC.
PMC from 2018, professional cyclist
The basics:
Training Stress Score (TSS): A quantitative measure of how hard the workout was. 100 TSS is equal to 1 hour at Functional Threshold Power (FTP). (Red dots)
Chronic Training Load (CTL): This blue line generally reflects the accumulation of training over previous weeks and months. It doesn’t go up or down very quickly, but responds to weighted TSS values. Can be considered “Fitness”, but has blind spots (see below).
Acute Training Load (ATL): This pink line reflects the training load over a shorter period of time. It goes up and down quickly. Consistent training will produce a moderate ATL. A hard training block or race will produce a spike in the ATL.
Training Stress Balance (TSB): This orange line is an indication of level of fatigue. It is the inverse of the ATL generally, and goes up and down in a similar fashion.
Now take another look at the PMC. Can you see a picture? Are you lost? The basic philosophy behind the PMC ties into some basic training fundamentals. Overload, recover, repeat. There are general rules, but nothing that is can be deduced for every rider at all times. During different training goals at different times of the year, the PMC has different rule. For an example, winter training usually reflects a steady upward trend of the CTL with rest weeks sporadically. Then, when race season starts the CTL will rise and fall more quickly through a race and recover protocol. The ATL can go crazy over some hard events, especially multi-day.
It is important to remember that the PMC is a tool, and one of many for making training decisions. Here are some things to watch out for.
Life stress is not factored into the equation. Whether it is personal stress or just other manual labor, it can add up.
There is no single metric that guarantees improvement. A rise in CTL is great, but is only relevant if you spent that stress in a productive way.
You need to make sure your FTP is set correctly, erase an outlier data, and you have all of your workouts uploaded.
First and foremost, get out there and have fun! Good luck.
