Little Green Boxes

It’s Sunday evening. As you are getting yourself ready to start another week, you enter your comments into today’s training block in Training Peaks. You revel in the sea of green from this week’s workouts and give yourself a mental pat on the back for nailing the plan. We get it. Seeing all that green makes you feel GOOD and STRONG and proud of what you have achieved for the week. Yellow, orange, or even red boxes can often lead to feelings of self-doubt and stress that you aren’t getting the training you want or need for your next event. But are there times that not getting green boxes can be a good thing? Yes!

First, let’s break down the different color codes. This is based on a planned value in duration, distance, or TSS score.

• Green: Completed value is +/- 20% of planned values
• Yellow: Completed value is 50%-79% or 121-150% of planned values
• Orange: Completed value is more than 50% above or below planned
• Red: Workout is was not complete

*For the purpose of this blog, we are only talking about yellow and orange in terms of UNDER the prescribed workout values, although it can also mean exceeding the prescribed workout values

If you are CLOSE to what is prescribed, you are getting a green box. I’m sure we have all pushed a little harder or longer than we want because we want that green box. But there are times when following the plan can do more harm than good. How do you know when it’s time to go yellow, orange, or even red?

1. You’re sick: Why does it always seem like illness pops up at the worst time? You want to get in a big ride before Ironman or that longest run before your marathon. But then you get sick. You feel terrible and decide to skip work. But in the back of your mind you think, “maybe I can still do my workout” or “ok, I’ll rest today, then get back to it tomorrow”. We often get sick in those times because training is BIG and life is hectic. We get our sessions in at any cost and sacrifice proper recovery time. That works for a little while and then just when we think we can manage it all, boom…illness. If you try to keep pushing through illness or jump back to a full schedule too quickly, you won’t get anything out of the training sessions and you’ll keep your body compromised for longer. The solution – let go of the plan and REST until you’re feeling better. Don’t try to presume when you’ll be healthy again, just focus on getting healthy first.
2. Work is CRAZY busy and stressful (or family life with the kiddos, which is also work): If your outside of training life stress kicks up a notch, you need to pull back on your training to match. Think about stress as a pie. All the pieces of your life that cause stress make up your pie. If one slice grows, say the work piece, you need to cut back somewhere else. Otherwise your stress pie overflows and you are at greater risk for illness or injury.  Start by pulling back on the intensity levels of your workouts to lower the stress on your body.
3. Poor sleep:  There might be those few people who get a perfect night of sleep every night. But for the other 99.9% of us, things happen that disrupt our nighttime z’s. Our minds race with all we have to get done tomorrow, kids keep us up, spouses want to talk after 9PM when we have to get up at 4:45 for AM masters… whatever the reason, sometimes you just don’t get enough sleep. We can push through after a single bad night. But if poor sleep continues for 3 or more nights, adjustments need to be made to compensate. Maybe you turn off your alarm and skip morning masters. Instead of heading to your team’s track session in the evening, go home and take a nap, or opt for a recovery run instead. Try to figure out the underlying causes of your restlessness and address those as well. But back off the rigid training schedule until you are getting enough sleep at night.

If any of the above things pop up, don’t worry about green boxes. First focus on what you can do every day to avoid these common pitfalls. Here’s what we recommend to keep your stress-levels low and green boxes flowing:

• Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate
• Eat as healthy as possible – veggies are king!
• Get into bed 30min before you need to be asleep 
• Turn off devices at least hour before bed. Less exposure to screens before bed can help you get more restful sleep. It will also help your mind from racing if you don’t check your work e-mail before you call it a night.
• Limit caffeine late in the day. Sure, have your coffee in the morning. But if you regularly get tired in the afternoon go for a brisk walk instead of having another cup of joe.
• Pick up the house/apartment and prep workout clothes and meals for the next day.
• Make a to-do list for the next day and outline when/how you’ll complete each task.
• If you have to stay up late, plan to sleep in. Take your morning workout off the table so you don’t lie awake stressing about how little sleep you’re going to get.
• Meal prep on the weekends – You’ll keep those stress levels down during the week AND will help you eat healthier. No one wants to cook (or eat as healthy) when they are pooped!

If you do get sick, or life stress takes over, adjust your future training, but don’t worry if there are a few of those non-green boxes. They can help you (and your coach) identify patterns in your responses to training.  Maybe they let you know a certain weekly schedule is not manageable or show illness patterns that can help you dial in your recovery. The goal should be to move towards a schedule where you CAN get as many green boxes as possible – not because you push through when you shouldn’t, but because you have a plan that is manageable for your lifestyle.  There are a lot of coaches out there who force the athlete to fit the plan. We believe 100% that the plan needs to fit the athlete. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to work HARD to reach your goals, but it does mean you need to be smart about how you work. The next time you get a non-green box, don’t’ stress about it. Evaluate why the color isn’t what you want, and then adjust your training and schedule so you can get more green boxes down the road. If you find yourself unable to let those colors go, remember you CAN turn them off completely under your account settings in Training Peaks. Go to the section ‘Layout’, click on ‘Calendar’ and under ‘Compliance’ you can simply unclick the ‘color workout tiles based on compliance to plan’.  Ultimately you need to make your training experience as positive as possible. If the colors stress you out, turn them off and focus on consistent training that pushes you, but not that pushes you over a cliff.