Adjusting Your Training Stress Ramp to Improve Immune Function
Since the racing season is effectively on hiatus until further notice, how does that impact your training, and more to the point, your training stress ramp? Ok, so what is a training stress ramp?
Firstly, we really ought to give a primer on what training stress is, and how we measure it. As biological organisms we, like all other things, maintain a certain equilibrium with the outside environment. You can see this pretty plainly in, for example, the heavy coat of a polar bear as an adaptation to the cold environment in which it lives.
This defines and governs the general evolutionary process, but this also happens on a more transient scale and micro level. We are constantly changing and adapting to our environment and the unique stresses that it creates, and this phenomenon is actually harnessed and directed through specific training.
A quick example: If you concentrically move the elbow joint with a heavy dumbell multiple repetitions and through multiple sets - and you have made it a recent habit of being a sedentary couch dweller - you will likely get sore in a couple days, a process we call Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, or DOMS. We’ve all experienced this at one time and one form or another. It is simply damage to a muscle caused by exceeding its normal capacity. It has put the human organism in a state of disequilibrium.
We all know what happens after the soreness dissipates and we continue to lift that dumbell consistently. Eventually that bicep muscle responsible for that concentric movement becomes stronger, it becomes more fatigue resistant, there is more protein synthesis, and often the muscle fiber itself will grow larger to gain more concentric force. We describe this process through the Stress/Adaptation Model. In a broader sense, our body, in a remarkable ability to adapt to its environment, has increased its capacity to resist the stress of external stimuli.
The same principal applies to endurance training. There is a saying that, “If you want to become a better writer - write!” I often say this to someone who complains that they can’t climb well. If you want to be a better climber - climb. It is this Stress Adaptation model at work. You are working close to or above threshold. Your body produces excess lactate that can’t easily be repurposed as a fuel for continued aerobic metabolism, you tire and slow down. Do enough riding, and specifically, do enough targeted training through intervals and that internal strain leads to an eventual adaptation. Your lactate threshold improves and moves closer to your terminal VO2 max output, and your VO2 max will improve.
An effective training plan manipulates this stress adaptation model. You want to apply enough hard training and progressively add more strain, but you cannot do too much or you reach a state of overtraining, where excessive strain in the form of too much high intensity or too much volume too soon, or a combination of the two, lead to decline in performance - and fatigue, psychological burnout, the long term inability to recover and, what is particularly important to us at the moment, a suppressed immune system.
And this is where a training stress ramp can allow us to apply some data visualization to our overall training load; to closely monitor our training to keep from overtraining or overreaching, which, although some overreaching is needed to reach a peak before a key event, also contributes to a suppressed immune system.
So, to get back to the idea of a training stress ramp, one of the tools we have at our disposal is the Performance Management Chart that is included in TrainingPeaks. Another analog is the XSS or Xert Strain Score that is part of the Xert cycling power analysis software, and they both are similar and based on the same fundamental principle.
Both are ways to measure your current training as measured in stress points in relation to a historical baseline of your past training or fitness level. It is a means to visualize if your training is trending upwards, downwards or holding about steady compared to what you have been doing previously. If that training stress trendline ramps up sharply, you’re ramping up the total amount of training stress and, concurrently, decreasing your freshness and potential ability to recover. A steep ramp rate may also increase your susceptibility to infection and decrease your immune response, which is especially relevant now.
There are sometimes reasons under normal circumstances to ramp up your training. Overreaching temporarily can help break through fitness plateaus or help with the peaking phase before a major event, but it comes at the cost of a higher than normal susceptibility to upper respiratory tract infections and a generally suppressed immune system. An upper respiratory infection is exactly what COVID 19 is, and with no real races on the immediate horizon, any peaking strategy now is wasted, so why risk it. Better to refocus on a slow build and maintain fitness and health.
A better strategy when using the PMC chart to visualize your overall training load is to maintain your current level of training. Let’s look at three examples.
Here is client #1. When the social distancing imperative hit, his training dropped off a cliff. He described his motivational state as very low, and because of the nature of his vocation in the healthcare field, the pandemic hit him hard psychologically. The change in priorities is understandable, but I would recommend adding some maintenance trainer sessions and one or two longer rides on the weekend depending on responsibilities to family and access to routes with fewer people. It is important to maintain that one activity that does strengthen immunity and improves one’s psychological well being. In this particular case, I would add one day of longer steady state intervals that don’t exceed threshold power and reduce the number. For example, if I had him doing 4x8 min intervals at 100-108% of threshold power, I would reduce them to 2 total intervals at 90-100%, especially with his most recent training layoff.
Client #2. His motivation is still full gas even though the early part of the racing season is cancelled. He is just starting to round into form, his CTL is the highest it’s been since the end of last season ...and the weather has been great. We recently see a big trend upwards with his Acute Training Load and for him it’s important to reign in his exuberance just a little bit. I had him doing short, very high intensity intervals in the 30 second range at 150% of FTP. Those are out for now. I consider those more of a higher stress/peaking style of interval, and the very high strain and high breathing rate just put him at risk of getting sick. For him, going to steady state intervals at below threshold is a better interval day strategy, and I’m reducing the duration of his longer rides by 25% for now.
Client #3. Not too hot. Not too cold. She was having a pretty aggressive build when this all hit, and the avoidance of group rides and busy bikeways has made her training a little more sporadic. Still, a kind of holding pattern is not a bad approach to maintaining fitness and a healthy immune function during the pandemic. I still have her doing one a week trainer intervals and some riding outdoors on weekends, but I’ve reduced the total duration of the rides. In the initial weeks she took several long breaks from consistent riding you can see with the aggressive drop in ATL. I would add a little more consistency to avoid the peaks and valleys, but overall, this is not bad.
As a general rule, I’m counseling clients to not only avoid chronic states of hard training, but also to avoid those really hard days. Even one really hard training effort can leave you immunosuppressed for several days afterwards.
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