A good o'l Strava Comparison – Fitness and Freshness

Start waving your bits now… Been using a heart rate monitor for a month or so now and looking at these numbers and wondering how high they go and how they compare so here’s mine, whats yours?

Fitness: 45 (I feel fitter than when I started)
Fatigue: 80 (def feeling fatigued right now)
Form -35 (seems to be just one less the other, I guess zero is the sweetspot)

Training peaks has similar metrics, and I get the impression the calculations are close.

CTL = Fitness = 42 day weighted average training load
ATL = Fatigue = 7 day weighted average training load
TSB = Freshness/Form = CTL-ATL

So Form is the difference between what you’ve done this week vs what you do on average. The point of them is to get your fitness increasing over time and using Form to understand when you need some time to recover. If it’s very negative, you need to recover in order to get fitter. “Very negative” is quite personal. I’ve hit -58 when I took a week off work to put in a big block of training.

If you are peaking for a race, you want form to be positive – about +5 to +10 according to some people.

I find it hard to get fitness/CTL above about 85, work gets in the way.

Fitness 47
Fatigue 66
Form -19

Or with the free Stravistix plugin…
Fitness 90.5
Fatigue 123.2
Form -32.7 (overload)

Did my biggest ever single ride yesterday (50 miles) and the most climbing I’ve done in one ride (~3000ft), legs were heavy on way home and a little today, hence commute had no extentions!

I think more negative than -10 on Strava’s form is like over -30 in Stravistix, not a place to be for very long, take it very easy and grab a rest day or two.

I think you need to be using an hr for a good few months before it’s useful.

I stopped premium as didn’t feel it reflected my form that well

thanks for the explanation beej, makes more sense now and good to know about peaking, i’m not training for anything, just trying to get myself in better shape really.

In the past I have felt fatigued a lot, the HRM is actually helping me to take it easier, for example, I have a big climb to get to the trails near me, now I take it easier if I know I’ll be riding a lot the next few days for example, seems to be working.

Currently…

Fitness: 55
Fatigue: 51
Form: 4

Best ever…

Fitness: 84
Fatigue: 112
Form: -28

IMHO – It’s useful, but in order to build good form, you need to do lots of mid-distance rides but not go into the red too much. It certainly prefers distance over elevation, as this year I’ve already done 47,630m but only 2,303Km.

^^ To some extent this is the same as CTL/ATL/TSB on TrainingPeaks. They both value volume over intensity to some degree so it depends what you’re training for. Big long rides then it’s more helpful than for 45 minute CX races.

Currently

Fitness/ctl. 117.4
Fatigue/atl. 135.7
Form/tsb. -2.2

Highest in last 180 days

161
146
-1

Was overtraining and got ill!

Fitness 59
Fatigue 50
Form 9

Stravistix:
Fitness 56.9
Fatigue 42.6
Form 14.3 / Zone: FRESHNESS

Started some structured training today, so will be interesting to see the difference in 11 weeks time, if I manage to stick with it.

Haven’t ridden for 4 weeks due to elbow injury.

Fitness 25
Fatigue 1 (woohoo!)
Form 24

Last date I was riding regularly it was…

Fitness 55
Fatigue 61
Form -6

Assuming it is the same as CTL/ATL/TSB as beej reckons, these are my current Golden Cheetah stats.

CTL/fitness: 99.6
ATL/fatigue: 128.6
TSB/form: -29.0

I’m quite pleased that I’ve managed to get to nearly 100CTL during uni exams, although I don’t think it’ll go much higher over the summer – too many races to peak for to maintain a high CTL.

Fitness 83
Fatigue 103
Form -26

I’ve just started week 3 of 8 of my structured build plan, previous highest fitness was 81 in late august of last year.

Wrong time of year to be asking for willy waving purposes 😉

To put CTL into some sort of context, it’s roughly equivalent to your daily TSS. So if your CTL is 100 you’re banging out 100 TSS a day. Most weeks I average out at around 50 TSS/hr (which is around the middle of z2). So to get my CTL up to around 100 I’d need to consistently be averaging 14 hr weeks.

Fitness: 66
Fatigue: 92
Form: -26

Fitness was up into the mid to high 80’s at the tail end of last year so need to work my way back up to that sort of level!

How’s it worked out? I was kinda assuming it’s using your own history as a benchmark? Can it be compared between people?

I’m at 27 and 18, so I’m the least fit person on STW, woop woop!

Fitness 63
Fatigue 47
Form 14

No real idea if that’s good or not

I’m thinking it can’t be easily compared between people.

Currently I’m about 26 on fitness which is not far short of my best ever, and a/ I’m not the unfittest person on here and b/ I’m not as fit as Njee. Even if he hasn’t been riding much.

By comparison I’ve been stalking padkinson slightly (only since he posted a request for routes near where I live and then it appeared he might be quite good) and he’s riding and placing well in NPS at elite level, and he’s got a score of 100. Which may well be true. But then others seem to be approaching similar levels and I’m not convinced we’re all elite level racers on here. And then there are some with numbers in excess, so they must be the pro roadies hiding on here.

(I know this thread is probably self selecting, so there may be an above average response from the fit boys). And also I realise that it favours volume over effort as noted above, but the most use I think is to track your own rather than compare against others.

Fit: 25 (not been higher than 34 in the last year)
Fatigue: 25
form: 0

No idea what it means even after reading the help.

32 fitness
58 fatigue
-26 form

Absolutely not idea what this means at all.

How’s it worked out? I was kinda assuming it’s using your own history as a benchmark? Can it be compared between people?

It’s just a measure of overall training load, derived from Training Stress which is based on personal FTP. So my “fitness” of 80 might be very different in real life to your “fitness” of 80. My FTP might be 200w, yours might be 400w.

It is comparable in that it gives you an indication of the volume/intensity that the person is performing relative to their own capabilities. So someone with a CTL of 100 is able to manage more relative load than someone with a CTL of 80.

There’s obviously a lot more to it though and it’s as much how you achieve that CTL as what the value is that’s important. As someone on another forum said, if it was all about big CTL then Audax riders would be smashing everything 🙂

28 FITNESS
52 FATIGUE
-25 FORM

Feel fatigued as I did the Evans King of the Downs at the weekend as prep for Maratona. Never been higher than 37 which was good enough to comfortably beat the Marmot gold medal time for my age group.

Currently 16 from a high of 133 😡

Just not arsed at the moment

ATL 90.7
CTL 100.4
TSB 10.7

That’s off about 13 hours a week so long term IF is about 0.74.

Doesn’t look like my fitness has ever been above 40!

I’ve used my HRM 5 times this year, last time was at BOTB at the end of March.

Stats. Ready?

Fitness – 2
Fatigue – 0
Form – 2

Bam.

101
147
-46

From stravastix

how accurate is this? I hardly ever appear to be +form except after periods of illness/ off the bike.

I ride/ commute most days…

Don’t like the strava one based off HR – it massively overvalues some rides and undervalues others.

Have a strong coffee before riding = bigger score
Go out riding later in training block when HR is suppressed by fatigue = hardly any score.

Also, miss one ride with power/hr and your chart is screwed as you cant manually enter it = one of reasons I cancelled my premium.

Currently 73 fitness 60 fatigue 12 form (ooh a plus form! I did feel good this morning)

Best recently was just before I went on holiday when I was 84/101/-17

When I got back after doing 3 days on the bike on holiday my form was a mighty 28!

After the highland trail 550, and not doing much since, I’m now at CTL 115 ATL 39.6 TSB 68.6. I should be flying, but I’m still knackered!

Fitness – 33

Fatigue – 40

Form – -7

Like most, I have no idea…

Using HR massively overestimates this in most cases.

Using for MTB rides with lots of short sharp efforts (even with a PM) underestimates all this by the way it is calculated.

As with anything you have to listen to your body and not blindly take “numberz” at face value but I do like these measures as a motivator for improvement and balancing recovery.

Currently I’ve been off the bike for ages so am at 0, 0, 0. When riding I was around 90-100 “fitness” with similar “fatigue”, FTP tickling 4w/kg… now I can’t manage a ride to the corner shop 😉 🙂

By comparison I’ve been stalking padkinson slightly

Only just seen this, got a proper blush on, after checking outside the windows for blokes hiding in the bushes with binoculars 😉

Resurrecting this thread a bit, all these numbers aren’t based in reality, they’re only an approximation to assign a number to real physical effect of training on your body. As such, there’s lots of different ways of arriving at these numbers, so comparing between two people using different programmes is like 2 people comparing the temperature where they live without specifying units, one using Kelvin, the other degrees Celsius – one says 300 and they other says 27.
I.e – stravastix seems to come up with massively high TSS on all of my rides compared to GC or trainingpeaks.

Differing power curves between people make TSS (hence CTL, TSB etc.) a flawed approximation for comparing riders as well. For example, I’m much stronger over a 5 minute duration than >20 minutes, hence I can produce more power for less stress over 5 minutes than Trainingpeaks thinks I ought to be able to for someone of my FTP. The opposite would be true for someone with an exceptional FTP but less impressive anaerobic power.

Worth noting that the supposed ‘limit’ for professional cyclists’ CTL is 110-150, so some of the posts on here are a bit dubious (including my own, for the reasons above).

My freshness/fitness/form data in Strava and Stravistix is pretty screwed up after my Bluetooth HRM messed up two rides on the spin, including my trip to Butser Hill on Sunday.

Strava form says -31 and Stravistix -43, but I feel nowhere near as bad as how I felt when overtraining back in February.

And I’m off to Butser and back again tomorrow morning! 😆

I’m not outside now. I was earlier though; nice pants BTW.

68/65/3 at the moment based only on heart rate, was 71/90/-19 recently. Bannister’s original model for endurance sports was designed for HR. It also used specific parameters for each athlete. Strava does not. If you’d trained how I have this year, you’d have the same FFF. Anyway, 3×400+/1×200 km periods with intensity from racing has seen a meaningful climb since January (39/32). I’ve increased by about 5 points per month, but 80 is probably the steady-state for this training load.

I haven’t used PM readings, because the noise from some of the Powerpod readings affects the readings occasionally. Looks the same though.

Thought I’d randomly update my Stravistix scores…

Fitness 104
Fatigue 116
Form -12

My figures are just off heart rate, by and large my Bluetooth HRM has behaved since July, when a couple of big rides for me did not get a HRM reading.

The rate of Fitness progress has definitely slowed down from mid June, but then my rides have changed. Back then, my rides were ~45 miles tops, with an intensive mid ride blitz up 5 cat4 hills. More recently, I’ve increased my ride distances up to a one-off of 85 miles, but at the cost of having to take it easier when not climbing a cat4 or smaller climb.

On the one hand doing more miles feels great as an achievement, but just like the few social rides I’ve done including the 85 miler, they haven’t helped me get any fitter. It’s not just the Stravistix fitness guide telling me this, I’ve seen it in my segment times (especially on cat4s), time improvements have been few and far between.

The Stravistix fitness trend calculation currently has a major failing (IMHO) in that it doesn’t seem to be possible to set starting values for CTL and ATL. If you have been exercising regularly, these should be non-zero, but unless there is HRM data logged, Stravistix starts from zero.

In this case, CTL and ATL build to your “real” steady state values exponentially over a couple of months. This gives the impression of increasing fitness(CTL) and shows a much lower Form figure (due to the artificially low CTL), giving the impression that you are deep in fatigue / over-training, even with your normal level of exercise.

It’s easy enough to prove this in Excel where you can add missed data, set appropriate starting levels, etc.

I also think that the Form calculation differs from the original work in that it uses “today’s” ATL and CTL, whereas it should use “yesterday’s”.

(See Andrew Coggans’ post)[/url]

Just got back from hols, so am currently:

Stravastix (based on 6 weeks of data):
Fitness 42.1
Fatigue 39.5
Form +2.6

Excel (calculated as I think it should be):
Fitness (CTL) 67
Fatigue (ATL) 43
Form +30

It’s an amusement…

[barely disguised boast]just hit a new low: freshness -95[/boast]

Still not my highest fitness. But fatigue at 156.