CTL and CIL decline :(

Alejandrosdog

looking at the Bike CTL and CIL chart in WKO4 I chose for the first time the past workouts option.

Ive no idea if i should be depressed by this but every year is very slightly lower than the year before almost imperceptibly until this year. MUCH lower than the previous years and yet i feel like im training properly and in a more structured manner than any time in the last 15 years.

Clearly I havent been training at a volume or intensity that im used to.

Is this inevitable decline or should i increase frequency duration and intensity and HTFU. Oddly i have a higher FTP than this time last year by almost 20 watts. And i feel fresh and enjoy my rides more.

does this make sense to anyone?

Alex_Simmons/RST

How are you performing? Are you enjoying your training and goal events?

What matters with these overview charts is more the shape and trends than the absolute numbers.

shirley_basso

Enjoying?

maryka

If your initial FTP was way low then you would have generated more TSS for the same effort, so more CTL etc. over time.

More info needed as to why the volume and intensity seem to be "lower". The nature of the numbers means that if your FTP is off, then it will skew everything else that's calculated using your FTP number.

joey54321

I wouldn't worry about it unless there are other reasons to worry/ CTL is not a measure of performance.

If I wanted to get a really high CTL i'd ride every group ride going, if I wanted to get better at cycling I would spend more time to structured interval training.

OnTheRopes

If you do lots of base or long group rides then your CTL will climb quite fast. However it has to plateau somewhere. Mine went up to 127 by early base 3. However it then plateau'd in fact slowly dropped down and continued to drop into build 1 where it stabilised around 100. I won my first 2 races and my CTL stayed flat although intensity was way higher.
I have just had a couple of weeks in Majorca and CTL has climbed again to 120 but this will no doubt drop again.

remember that CTL is affected by duration and intensity so that long slow rides with a little intensity will give you more CTL gain than short duration interval training. However the interval training will make you faster.
Don't obsess too much about your CTL , the PMC it is only a guide and you need to interpret the data based on experience.

Alejandrosdog

Alex_Simmons/RST wrote:

How are you performing? Are you enjoying your training and goal events?

What matters with these overview charts is more the shape and trends than the absolute numbers.

I’m overweight and not getting dropped on the hills.....
And I am actually enjoying the training almost to the point of enjoying the work and difficulty so I suppose it’s all good.

Alejandrosdog

Thanks for the comments from everyone,

I appreciate them.