Physiological load

TrainAsONE analyses your fitness and response to exercise (and rest) in many different ways. Following from this it is able to produce a summary value to represent the overall stress a workout has imparted on your body. This is easy for us humans to understand and provides a single value estimate of the effectiveness of an activity:

• Too low: then your body has not been stressed enough and will not make any adaptive (performance improvements) responses. If this level of exercise is maintained, your body may go into a period of ‘de-training’
• Too high: then the body has been stressed too much and a consequent increase in recovery time is required for your body to recover. If persistent inadequate rest is allowed, over-training sets in and performance (and health) will suffer
• Just right: your body is stressed by just the right amount to induce performance enhancing responses that will be near-peak at the time of your next training session

But what value is just right? TrainAsONE will determine the ideal for each workout for you and this is stated with the planned workout (presently this is displayed within square brackets after the workout distance).

With respect to running, the primary factor that affects the amount of load that a workout imparts is your speed, i.e. the faster you go, the higher the load. In addition, environmental factors such as incline, temperature and wind can have considerable effects. Consequently, you should slow down when:

• running uphill – It costs over twice the energy consumption to run up a 20% slope
• running downhill on gradients approaching 40% or more -This isn’t just to prevent ‘jarring’ your knees!
• running in high temperatures and humidity – Obvious really?
• running at low temperatures – Yes running in the cold has an effect on your running too, but at an ambient air temperature above 0 degrees celsius it is too minimal to worry about, but below freezing… start to slow down
• running with a head or side-wind

TrainAsONE can automatically adjust the paces of your upcoming runs according to the temperature (based on the weather forecast) and predicted incline changes (based on your running history). This is called Temperature and Undulation adjustment within your Profile.

If you elect to turn off temperature and/or undulation adjustment, your TrainAsONE paces are specified assuming that you are running under ideal conditions: flat level terrain; an ambient air temperature of 16 C; a relative humidity of 50 to 60%; and no wind. If you are not, you might need to slow down.

There are numerous other factors that have an effect (for example, solar shortwave radiation) but we won’t go into those now…

So if you notice that you have significantly different measured loads compared to those scheduled, you’re probably overdoing it and should be adjusting your future pace accordingly. If in doubt, just ask us and we can advice.