How Hard Did I Actually Train This Week?
I am a terrible judge of my own training load. Training Load in ulTrain turns your recent sessions into one honest read: Fresh, Optimal, Fatigued or High Load.
The spreadsheet years taught me one thing above everything else. I am a terrible judge of how hard I have been training.
A big week feels easy if I am fresh and the weather is good. An ordinary week feels brutal if I slept badly, I am three coffees deep, and work is on fire. My sense of effort has almost nothing to do with the actual load.
Taking my gut out of it
Training Load is ulTrain’s attempt to give me a straight answer instead. It looks at your recent training, the runs and the strength work together, and puts you in one of four states.
- Fresh — you have room to push
- Optimal — the load is landing where it should
- Fatigued — back off or plan a lighter day
- High Load — you have been stacking hard sessions, be deliberate about recovery
Then it tells you why it landed there. That part matters. It is not a traffic light you have to blindly trust, you can see what is driving it.
How I use it
It is most useful when it disagrees with me. If I feel wrecked but it says Optimal, that is usually life stress, not training, and I can crack on. If I feel great but it says High Load two weeks running, that is the app noticing a pattern I am about to run straight through.
It is a Pro feature. It sits on the home screen and there is a widget for it, so I see it without going looking, which is the only way I actually pay attention to anything.
It is a number, not a verdict. But it is a better number than the one in my head.