𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐫𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐮𝐩 𝐭𝐨𝐨 𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐥𝐲
Training stresses your body, encouraging it to adapt.
But it’s a balance. Stress the body too little, and it will not adapt; stress it too much or too quickly, and it will break down instead of adapting; stress the body correctly, and sustained long-term improvements are possible.
And the stresses are cumulative – as you continue to train, you continue to encourage adaptations.
Your training load is the sum of these cumulative stresses. Monitoring your training load helps ensure your training is productive, and that you minimise injury risk.
𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐋𝐨𝐚𝐝 𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐬
Your Stress Balance indicates whether your training is productive, with a negative (but not too negative) score indicating productive training.
Your Ramp Rate shows if you may be adding training load too quickly, replacing ‘the 10% rule’ with a metric based on your training volume and intensity.
𝐑𝐚𝐦𝐩 𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐞
Ramp Rate is the week-on-week difference in your Chronic Training Load or your 42-day weighted average (depending on which set of metrics you’re using).
Why week-on-week? Because Long Runs will tend to impact your training load more than shorter interval sessions or easy/recovery runs.
Using a week-on-week calculation will ‘smooth out’ any fluctuations caused by your workout mix while still producing a useful metric.
𝑺𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅𝒏’𝒕 𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒃𝒆 𝑹𝒖𝒏𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝑷𝒐𝒘𝒆𝒓?
For more about Ramp Rate, see Training Load Progression in the Facebook group Palladino Power Project.
