Why is my Training Status on the Fitness Planner always showing as Very Tired?

Your Training Status and Form colour and number of stars provide a simple visual of two very important aspects of you as an athlete:

1. How trained are you? This is the number of stars.
2. How much training and what type of training have you be doing recently? This the colour of the stars.

Many new to Xert that have uploaded some history often find that their daily Training Status and Fitness Planner statuses consistently show them as Very tired when in fact they have more capacity to train and don’t require recovery. There are several common causes for this:

1. There isn’t sufficient recent data in the system, or
2. There are invalid/major gaps in your training history, or
3. You have many older activities without power data.

In each of these situations, Xert thinks you’re less trained that you actually are. The number of stars / Training Load total is not reflective of your real amount of training capacity.  This leads to the system thinking your recent training is more than you are capable of handling and your Training Status moves to Very tired.

For example, if you have been training for an average of 1 hour/day on a consistent basis for a number of months, you would roughly expect to have a Training Load of 60 and have just over 2 stars of Training Status. If you have less than 1 star, there is likely missing data from your data history in Xert.  Xert will think you are less fresh than you actually are.

Xert works best when you have contiguous activities without gaps in your history, with power data (or manually entered XSS).  If you have incorrect gaps or many activities without power data or XSS assigned, your current Training Load will be underestimated.

How Do I Fix This?

If you have activities with gaps before or after that are invalid, remove them.  If you have many of these activities, use the Activities Table to select them and delete them in bulk (this is much more efficient).  You should have a solid block of activities before today that correctly reflect your recent training history.  Having a contiguous, correct block of training before today allows the system to estimate your Starting Training  Load, which is the Training Load assigned to your very first activity in the system.  If you have an activity or more in the distant past with large gaps, the system’s estimate will not work correctly.

Another way to address this is to adjust your Freshness Feedback (on the Fitness Planner) to the right.  Although this works too, it does not address the underlying issue that exists with your data.