The responses here match what I've been seeing for as long as I've been riding - everyone responds to recovery days differently. Regarding strength training, while I don't deny the importance of it, I haven't noticed a difference in seasons when I have done weight training (deadlifts, single-legged squats and abdominal exercises) vs those when I haven't, such as this off-season as I'm fighting a bit of "runner's knee". I've been in this game for a long time, and trying to figure out how to properly recover continues to be BY FAR the most difficult part to get right. I took yesterday off completely, which is a rare thing, and today my legs were, unsurprisingly, flat as I did a 50-minute SST session. My CTL is almost always between 100 and 130, which means a weekly TSS of at least 700 pretty much all year. That being said, it makes me wonder if the root of the problem is that I never have a FULL recovery period, which would probably mean 4-5 days of extremely easy recovery days, or perhaps even more. While I'm not suggesting that every single recovery period needs to be a full recovery, maybe having a couple full recovery periods each year will allow me to recover from training blocks better during the next several months? It's just so psychologically difficult to do a full recovery period where you let your fitness decline on purpose and hope that you'll come back stronger.