Fitness and freshness on Strava

daniel_b

Hi guys,

recently took out the Strava premium subscription, and was intrigued by the F&F figures.

I train for approximately 7 hours a week, and have been working hard for the last 3.5 weeks, both at home and on the Velodrome.

My current overall figures are:
Fitness: 52 (In brackets +1)
Fatigue: 54
Form: -3
So I am guessing that means my form is a fair way from optimum?

On Friday, after my last hard workout, those figures were 54\72, so assuming that means my form was -18.
Before my last FTP, these values were 48\83, so I am assuming this gives me a good indicator that I should be able to increase my FTP Value.

That would kind of tally, as I feel fairly fatigued at the moment, but I now have 3 'easy' rides to do prior to a planned FTP on Wednesday, so am assuming that Form figure will go into a positive value before that point?

Am I right in thinking that to peak\taper for an event, you are looking to get this Form figure into double figures or thereabouts, or am I over simplifying it?

Sorry, I appreciate I could spend time reading up on it, and researching it, but with a young family I struggle to find the time to devote to such research, and would rather just get on the bike, like I will be doing at 06:00 for a 2 hour workout tomorrow!

Thanks

Dan

avalanche_expert

In my experience with fitness & freshness on Strava, it seems that during normal riding/training, my form is usually into negative fiugures. Say -7 to around -14.

From what research I have done this seems to be quite a healthy range if you are pushing yourself hard. Personally if my form starts to head into -20 ish and below I know I’m over doing it, as I just don’t feel like I have my usual get up and go. My performance starts to suffer. After a couple of easy days my form generally heads back up into positive figures. You’ll notice with a bit of time that the more you push yourself your fitness number will increase and your form will decrease. If you ease off the training your fitness figure plateaus or drops off, but the form goes back up.

Ideally you want to try and keep your fitness number going up whilst not becoming too fatigued. When tapering for an event it is better to get your form back up into around +7 or so even if your fitness drops off bit as you’ll be much fresher and stronger for your event.

I personally find the fitness figure a bit meaningless as I don’t seem to feel or perform any differently no matter how much my fitness has number has increased. I can however very much tell when my form is off and I’m feeling tired. The form figure seems much more beneficial to me.

Of course this data is only as good as the data you are inputting. I only use heart rate, which sometimes hasn’t worked when training indoors during winter or if my HR battery has failed. So the data isn’t 100% accurate. Using power meters as well would be even better.

daniel_b

Thankyou AE, that's really helpful, and exactly what I was hoping for :-)

Looks like it could be pretty useful for planning ahead when I have a big event, and to aim to be looking at a positive figure just before it.

bobmcstuff

The fitness and freshness stuff in Strava is a heart rate based implementation of the standard TSS power-based method. So you can use the published literature on that as a guide to help you understand the Strava charts (bearing in mind TSS from power and relative effort from heart rate will not match up exactly).

https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/why- ... ng-metric/ - this is about how quickly you can increase fitness (chronic training load, CTL). There's loads of stuff on there.

As above a slight negative form is fine. When you are tapering for an event you want to allow the form to rise but not too much- small positive is supposed to be best. Normally the advised way to taper is to keep the intensity but reduce the duration so you stay sharp but the overall load has gone down and you feel fresher.