The plan is not the training

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Here is a question that sounds simple and is not. What was your training this week?

Most of us answer with the plan. Three hours endurance, a set of threshold intervals, a sprint session, a long ride. That is the prescription. It is what we asked the body to do. But it is not actually the training. The training is what the body experienced when it did the work. And those two things are not the same.

That gap is the whole point of a study by van der Zwaard and colleagues. They make a clean distinction that is easy to nod along to and easy to forget in practice. External load is the physical work performed, the speed, the power, the distance. Internal load is the body's response to that work, the heart rate, the perceived effort, the cost. External load is what we asked for. Internal load is what it cost to deliver.

The work itself was done with speed skaters rather than cyclists, eighteen of them, tracked across two full seasons, with velocity standing in for external load and heart rate for internal. But the idea does not belong to skating. Swap velocity for power and it is your training file.

The finding worth your attention is this. When the researchers reduced each session to a single summary number, the kind of one-figure training load score most of us live by, the numbers could barely tell the session types apart. An interval day and a tempo day came out looking almost the same. The summary score flattened the very differences that matter. But when they looked at how heart rate and velocity actually moved together through the session, using a method that maps the full relationship rather than averaging it away, every session type separated out clearly.

In plain terms, the single load score hides what is really going on. The relationship between what you did and what it cost you holds far more information than any one number on its own.

That is not a workout you can go and do. It is a shift in how you read your own training. And it changes the question you ask of your data. Not just how much did I do, but what did that work cost me, and is that cost moving in the right direction over time.

Because that is where it gets useful. Watch the same external load across weeks. If a session you have done before starts costing you less, lower heart rate, lower perceived effort for the same power, that is the signature of adaptation. You are getting fitter. If the same work starts costing you more, a higher response for the same output, that is the early warning. Fatigue, poor recovery, something brewing, stress piling up off the bike. The goal was never just to track load. The goal is to understand the relationship between the work and the response, and to notice when it changes.

What to do with this

If you race or ride hard group rides: Stop reading your training as a list of completed sessions and start reading it as a relationship. Pick two or three benchmark efforts you repeat often and watch the cost, not just the output. The same power for a lower heart rate and a lower effort score, ride after ride, is the clearest sign your form is genuinely rising. The same power for a creeping cost is the sign to back off before the data forces you to.

If you ride big hours: Volume is where this lens earns its keep. Your easy rides should feel cheaper over a block, not more expensive. If your steady endurance pace is quietly costing more heart rate week on week, the volume has tipped from building you to grinding you down. The number of hours did not change. What it cost you did. That is the thing to act on.

If your time is capped: You do not need fancy software for any of this. A repeated session and an honest perceived effort score will do most of the job. The point is to stop judging a week only by what you got through, and start asking whether the work is costing you less or more than it used to. That single question will tell you more about whether your training is working than any weekly total.

van der Zwaard S, Otter RTA, Kempe M, Knobbe A, Stoter IK. Capturing the complex relationship between internal and external training load: a data-driven approach. Int J Sports Physiol Perform. 2023;18(6):634–642. doi:10.1123/ijspp.2022-0493.

On my mindWhen the numbers say fine and the rider feels destroyed

I had a call this week with someone fairly new to structured riding. A few years on the bike, only a handful of hours a week, eats clean, fuels the rides, does the sensible things. And he was getting flattened. Not during the rides. After them. An easy hour in zone two and he would be wired but tired by the evening, flat and zonked the next day, sometimes hit by a wave of hunger hours later. Two rides a week was about all his body would take. A third inside two days was out of the question.

He had chased it properly. Bloods, all clear. Iron, fine. A heart monitor, a glucose monitor, a stress test booked. Nothing turned up. A previous coach had drawn a blank, and you can see why. Every number looked reasonable. The power was there, the heart rate was there, the load on paper was modest. By the file, nothing was wrong.

But here is the thing the file could not see, and it is the same idea as this week's study. The work he was doing was small. What it cost him was not. His external load was modest. His internal load, the response of a system not yet used to any of this, was enormous. He was not failing to handle training. His body had simply not built the capacity to absorb it yet.

That changes the prescription completely. The answer for a rider like this is not a cleverer session or a bigger week. It is smaller doses, more often. Thirty or forty minutes, easy, frequent enough that the body starts treating riding as normal rather than as a threat. You build the capacity to absorb training before you add more of it. Tighten the fuelling window around the rides while you are at it.

So if you are newish, or coming back after time away, and you feel wrecked by rides that should not wreck you, you may not be broken. Your system may just not be adapted to the load yet. The numbers can read perfectly fine while the cost is quietly through the roof. Shrink the dose. Raise the frequency. Let tolerance catch up. Then build.

Damian