Training Load

Training load is a single figure standing for how much a session cost you, worked out from how hard it was and how long it lasted. It exists so that an easy two-hour ride and a hard forty-minute run can be put on the same scale and added together.

Most methods weight intensity heavily rather than linearly, because an hour at threshold costs far more than two hours easy. Some are built on time in heart rate zones, some on power against a threshold, and the numbers from two systems are not interchangeable even when they look similar.

The reason to track it is the pattern rather than the value. Load accumulated over the last week or so is what you are currently carrying, and load accumulated over the last month or so is what you are prepared for. Raising the first sharply above the second is the shape that precedes most overuse problems, and raising it gradually is what training is.

What it is not

It is not a measure of how good a session was. A high load is only useful if it was planned and if you recover from it, and the figure says nothing about whether a session did the job it was meant to do.

Where you see it in FitnessSyncer

Where a connected service reports a load figure it arrives with the activity and is charted over time on your Dashboard, where you can put it beside your sleep and your resting heart rate in Compare.