Fitness planning with Crickles – UPDATED

UPDATES

What is written below correctly describes the Planner functionality but there are a couple of new updates since this was written, namely:

1. Forecast method. For athletes for whom Crickles has uploaded at least a year of data there are two new Forecast methods for projecting your exercise load. The method described in the post below is now called Average based on Date range. The first new method is called Trend. This takes your average CSS per day from exactly one year before the forecast period (which is from now to your chosen Target date) and scales this up or down according to your current v. last year prior exercise load. The advantage of this over the Average method is that it accounts for both seasonality and year-to-year trend, which are typically very significant factors. Like the Average method, this generates ‘per day of week’ exercise load that you can adjust to suit your training programme. The second new method is called Repeat block from the past. When you choose this you’re prompted to enter a Start date to repeat from. Given this, the actual exercise loads that you incurred from that start date are projected forward from now to your Target date. For this method the adjustable per day of week levels do not appear. This enables you to see exactly how your Fitness, Fatigue and Form will evolve between now and race day if you repeat a training block from the past.
2. Taper periods. The default taper periods described below were taken from analysis of the tapers of successful marathon runners prior to a marathon. These allow for a substantial amount of recovery and lead to very high Form levels on race day at a cost to Fitness (which is the point of tapering). These defaults have been changed to levels that are recommended for (and typical of cyclists) – a two week instead of a three week taper and of more modest extent. Of course, you can freely set the Taper levels as you see fit and this only affects the defaults.

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The Crickles Fit-Fat tab shows you how your Fitness, Fatigue and Form have evolved based upon the Crickles model for Cardiac Stress. Now, you can also use the new Crickles Fitness Planner to anticipate how Fitness, Fatigue and Form will respond to a training programme geared towards an event. This is accessed on the Planner tab.

Entering the data

When you first visit the Planner you’ll see that the sidebar changes to the following:

Target date defaults to today + 3 months. You should change it according to your fitness planning horizon – say the date of your next significant athletic event. (It won’t accept a date less than one month into the future.)

The Sundays to Saturdays fields in the CSS Regime section are populated with your average CSS (actually your ‘extended CSS’ or XSS) for each day of the week sampled over the Date range. In this screenshot, I’ve extended my Date range back to 01/01/2015 to get a longer-term sampling period. You should adjust these numbers to reflect your planned training programme over the period up to your event. It’s best to do this using typical observed CSS values from the Activities tab. For example, in my case my usual park loops on a Wednesday or a Saturday park run will each score me about 40 CSS points; an hour on the turbo will typically get me 80; and a weekend club ride or equivalent might score about 320. Of course, if I want to increase my Fitness I’ll have to do more than I’ve done in the past!

The three Taper period fields enable you to specify how you plan to step down your exercise in the three weeks leading up to the target date. The fields are pre-populated with typical percentages – e.g. a reduction to 70% of a normal training week in the third week before the target date – and you can change these if you wish.

As you change all of these values the charts will change accordingly.

What you should aim for

The general aim of a Fit-Fat-Form training programme can be summarised in three principles:

1. Add training volume to increase Fitness
2. Taper before your event to flush out Fatigue and hence increase Form
3. Don’t take on so much exercise load that your Fatigue gets to unhealthy levels.

Of course, there are many other important factors too such as working on strength and flexibility, managing any medications you may be taking, and balancing non-exercise factors such as diet, workload, travel and sleep; these lie outside the scope of this tool.

There is no established science on correct or optimum levels for Fitness or Fatigue. However, you can see if your own Fitness is increasing, staying flat or falling. Regarding Fatigue, the charts show you two useful levels as horizontal dashed red lines:

• What is a high Fatigue level for you. This is calculated from your 90th percentile of Fatigue over all of your data on Crickles.
• What constitutes a high Fatigue level for all of the athletes on Crickles. This is calculated from the 90th percentile of the 90th percentiles of each Crickles athlete.

Each of these two levels is marked on the Planner chart. As a fact of statistics, most of us will find our own high Fatigue level lies at a smaller absolute value than the high Crickles Fatigue level. When you train hard and do tough sessions you will occasionally push yourself beyond your own high Fatigue level. However, when planning a training programme if you see that your Fatigue levels are sustained for several days at a greater negative level than your high level, and especially if they are also sustained beyond the Crickles high level, it would be prudent to build in more recovery days.

So with reference to the three aims of the Fit-Fat-Form programme given above, you want to see that:

1. Your Fitness at the target date is higher than it is today
2. Your Form at the target date is comfortably positive – ideally at levels of 25 or more for the days leading  up to your event
3. At no point during the course of the programme is your Fatigue hanging for days on end below the high lines, and especially not below both lines.

Example

The longer you give yourself to train, the easier it will be to meet all three of these training goals. Over three months it is certainly possible, and over a longer period it is easier. To take my numbers given on the input panel above as an example, if I project forwards based on no change except for a taper period I’ll find that my Fitness at the target date is lower than my Fitness now, while my Form will be much higher/better: both effects are simple consequences of the taper period. However, if I increase my average exercise load on Sundays from 131 to 250 while leaving all other values the same I’ll get this:

My Fitness increases by about 10%, my Form is nicely high leading up to the target date and although my Fatigue sometimes dips below my own “high level”, it never stays there for long; moreover, my Fatigue never falls below the “Crickles high fatigue” level set by our hardiest athletes.

A final thought

There are limitations to any model and, as I’ve noted, there are important health and fitness factors that are not addressed at all by this kind of model. However, the Crickles methodology for assessing cardiac stress is robust and can be applied consistently to any form of exercise (although the estimate quality is reduced when heart rate is not captured). Furthermore, if you set a CSS-based exercise programme using this approach and stick to it then – as a mathematical fact and not just with the vagueness of an estimate – your Fitness, Form and Fatigue on the target date will be exactly as they were projected to be at the start of the programme!