The spO2 business still sounce like baloney to me but WTF do I know. If someone can produce an actual study linking blood O2 saturation to training fatigue (or whatever it allegedly tells you) in a consistent way, I might buy it. Till then, I'll continue to assume it's pseudoscience.

Edit: the basic search I've just done is not reducing my skepticism.

it only works in Europe.

Just trying to be helpful. Lots of things out there to study. You may have to wait a while. Would there be any negative impact for you to record morning HR and SpO2?

So last year I was in the feed zone chatting about this same stuff with a mom. Her kid was a Cat 4 14 year old at the time.
They decided to use the same trainer and same methods. He's now a 15 year old Cat 2. Same stuff.

3.5h of xc is a $h1t-ton of time. it is pretty damn hard, to ski hard for much more than 2h...and your first time out.

why do you think it does not contribute to bike fitness? if you are skiing hard, it requires a significant aerobic engine (and depending on how you hit hills & such it can take huge vo2).

were you just touring/shuffling your feet...or really skiing? if the former, it was probably 3h of low endurance. if the latter.....

did you wear a HR strap? might be good for you to do sometime, then feed it into a system that will spit out hrTSS to give you a ballpark.

fwiw, i skated on saturday for ~2h, moderate intensity...about 120TSS. classic skied on sunday ~1h45m.....much lower TSS. if you're not doing so already, you may be a little surprised at how high your HR can be during "easy" skiing due to the nature of it (muscles in all 4 limbs firing), and due to generally lower economy (esp for amateur skiers) vs efficiency on the bike which doesn't vary as much.

morning HR, i find, is a relatively poor indicator of one's rested state, esp as it can change based on the season (e.g. off-season vs in-season).

spo2 attempts to add another layer/indicator. i've used it in high-altitude (above 20,000') climbing situations, where it can carry a great deal of meaning...life-or-death.

personally, i find HRV overnight to be the best indicator i've come across to integrate both training stress and life's other stressors to become predictive of performance.

IME, CTL, and TSB are good at quantifying what has been done but not so great at predicting performance.

ymmv.

doge...super easy to fake an spo2 sensor, y'know. try 10" of pressure breathing. i could get mine from 70% to nearly 100% in less than a minute. it can get boring waiting out a storm at high altitude.... :)

Blasphemy!

Actually, they are best used as a workload/fatigue metric, with a fair bit of knowing individual response and what contributed to the number. It's counting up the pots and pans at the end of the meal.

Agreed. No question they are great at quantifying what has been done (although we all know that 100TSS does not always equal 100TSS, depending on how one got there).

TSB doesn't do a great job at telling when someone is recovered and ready for me, or for a peak performance. That's where the art comes in.

I actually think those measures work better for professional athletes than amateurs, as professionals have a life built around the sport, whereas amateurs have many other sources of stress and/or activities that rob them of proper recovery.

A personal interest of mine in my own performance and in working with others is attempting to more accurately quantify recovery. Some stuff I've found comes close than anything else--dealing with overnight sympathetic variations in HR that is not something that can be faked/controlled.

I'm sure someone has found that CTL/TSB alone works perfectly for them, but IME that would be rare.

I also totally agree that TSB isn't a great indicator of performance and how well rested one is. I also agree that that's where the 'art' comes in in understanding one's own body and what it needs to perform well. Happily, my coach and I have been experimenting in the off season to find out good rest schedules before races. I think we finally nailed it going into my last FTP test.

Somebody on here recently said that they thought skate skiing might improve bike fitness more than cycling does. I don't know about that, but I enjoy skiing a lot and I think it can be a quality workout.

I wear an HRM and estimate TSS from time in HR zones. I backcountry ski so it's hard to do intervals (if you think it's hard to keep the power on cycling downhill, try it skiing downhill) but I will do easy skis and hard skis. I consider it a similar workout to MTB.

3:30 is a long time. My longest ski last year was 2:45, which I did a couple times, once for 80 TSS and once for 180 TSS. The harder one covered twice as much ground as the easier one. I'm totally comfortable crediting 180 TSS for a ski hammerfest, pretty much all the same parts hurt afterwards that would have hurt after a similar effort on the bike. Maybe a bit more in the hips/abs.

This is a 22 hour week. I think this will be the most I will ever have ridden in 7 days, and I have 2 weeks after this in the block. I'm curious to see how this goes, I'm slightly terrified.

It's great for bragging on BF! :)

raining this morning, 3*20' on the rollers then commuting on my fg.

Yeah, mine was -24.6 after Sunday ;)

Are you faking it or are you changing it?

I can't remember with taking blood pressure systolic or diastolic goes down vs sitting it doesn't - if you are fatigued, while not the case if you are not (did that work?). Basically it is different. I've been told hydration is the primary cause, and cell hydration. I read Francisco Moser said in an interview he used his morning BP to determine how hard he was going to train that day. I started doing it and found I only got real meaningful numbers when I knew I was fatigued anyway.

I know you are trying to be helpful. I'm just saying that I think it's pseudoscience and don't have a lot of reasons yet to believe otherwise. An anecdote about a kid going from 4 to 2 in a year using the same methods doesn't mean jack squat. I'm not saying this coach is ineffective, only that their effectiveness has nothing to do with pulse oximetry. Any training plan is a combination of many inputs. Not all of those inputs are necessarily important, but because of the way our brains work, if we are successful while doing a certain thing we are very inclined to overrate the importance of that input while disregarding the rest.

Now, would it hurt to make these measurements? No, but I've got about a hundred different things I'd rather spend $50 on, and one of them is my savings account.

This is a major part of why I don't buy it. You can get a different arterial saturation number - enough to influence your training decisions, based on what you've said - because you yawned during the check, or took a deep breath or two. When it comes to deciding on interval sets you'd just as well flip a coin.

Doge takes helicopter parenting to a whole new level.

hard to say --i'm not sure where the line is in this circumstance. if i don't drink water for a day to go up a hill faster (possibly misguided), have i faked my weight or changed it?

typical spo2 devices are measuring at the fingertip. the device would read higher with a little pressure breathing, so did that mean that more saturated blood was circulating to my fingertips? how long would it last? did it result in a material performance gain?

i don't know--it was all a bit of a game at the time, but we did use it to detect more serious issues (e.g. 50% and below) at elevation...stuff that can get you killed rather than the difference between 95 & 98%.

the device measures SOMETHING...but point-in-time measurement is a potential issue depending on one's goals. continuous monitoring is another matter.

FTP test this morning. Was missing that extra "oomph" I needed to hit my goal, fell 4w short.

I did make a 20' pb though, if only by 1w :)

nice

Today is leg day (lifting). Is it weird that lately I get more motivated to lift heavy things than riding for 2-3hrs at z2?

I'm in serious pain, like hobbled. Sunday I did a rock scramble with my kids, totally not strenuous, but walking down off the crag my left quad started to hurt. Yesterday I did a lot of box jumps, and afterwards both quads were sore enough that I took an Aleve. Didn't really think about the soreness for the rest of the day.

This morning I went MTBing. Felt totally fine for the first 20 minutes, which included a short climb. We were riding pretty hard. On the descent I dropped the seatpost and was in a crouch for maybe a minute. Coming out of the crouch both quads cramped up to where I couldn't pedal. Any contraction of the muscle was intolerable. Both quads, on the meat of the muscle, both inside and outside. No pain at all when not contracted.

I limped back to the car, took a couple Aleve, drank a bunch of water. Two hours later I am still walking like a cowboy. Doesn't feel like an injury - not localized enough, no pain at all when not contracted, and pain disappeared completely Sunday and Monday evening. It feels like bad cramps, but with no real physical cause. I'm wondering if maybe it's an illness presenting itself. I guess I'll stay off the bike for a day or two. Bleh.

I'm the same way. z2 is also super boring so I get motivated to do anything else in comparison

Well, poo. Surgeon wants shoulder immobilized for 4 weeks. Using the trainer is approved assuming I don't put weight on the arm. Good times ahead.