Sustained negative TSB

[thassman]

What is your experience in regards to sustained negative TSB. I never tracked it before, but can see i have just had 20 days with a negative TSB, mostly doubble digit numbers. During the last 3 weeks i had a few AR days, but now I feel that i need to come up for air. I feel that a TSB of eg. -20 lets me feels much more tired after many days of sustained negative TSB, than when just beginning to dig the training hole. Is there any golden rules, for how long you should allow yourself to have negative TSB ? ctl 74 ftp 290 77 kg

 

[swampy1970]

How many rest days per week do you have?

If you're focusing on building FTP and not doing much very high intensity work then it's not to bad to be negative TSB for long periods of time. Even with very hard 20 minute efforts (for training purposes)you don't need that "freshness" that a positive TSB will bring. Just keep an eye on how tired you feel, how the motivation is and keeping your FTP value honest in whatever program you're using to track all of this.

When you move to blocks of training featuring several sessions per week of the higher intensity efforts such 5 minutes and less then you'll probably struggle to keep racking up ATL in sufficient quantities to keep TSB negative for a very long period - say 6 weeks and if you do manage it for that period of time you're either due for a break or ready to reevaluate your values for FTP to ensure than you're tracking ATL, CTL and TSB correctly. For work like this it'll pay to ensure that you stay reasonably fresh otherwise it'll end up being hard mentally and physically to do the work properly.

 

[lanierb]

No big deal in my opinion, as long as TSB isn't crazy negative.

 

[thassman]

Going forward, i will have 2 rest days per week. The last couple of days, i have allowed my TSB to get positive for todays race. But i felt terrible, no snap in the legs and maybee some mental tirrednes. I Think i will go for a rest week now.

 

[thassman]

Just to follow up.
I rested hard, harder than for a long time.
It gave me a double digit positive TSB

Saturday i did a 40min crit with a steep ~35sec hill, it was a stand-and-punch-it type of hill.
laps where 2km, laptime around 3 minutes.
NP for the 40min, was for me a whopping 336w, maybee its time for retesting FTP ? or are 40min to short a duration to base any conclusions on ?