Yes, that's true.mgiven wrote:Woudln't keeping them as two activities make the "coach" calculate one extra activity, when it was really just one long one with a break AND sneak an extra 138 into my weekly EPOC SUM total?
One thing to keep in mind is that FBA is only looking at the cardiovascular load of the exercise session. The term Training Effect is misleading in this respect as it doesn't really reflect the muscular effort effort involved in the exercise session, merely the cardiovascular "effort". Clearly the two are not completely independent. For example, your two run reps with a short break will obviously have been more physically fatiguing than had you stopped after the first one, although the TE and EPOC would have been the same. The overall training load and effect on your fitness will have been greater by completing the second run, even though the cardiac stress was no greater on this occasion. What FBA suggested here is that there was no further reduction in heart rate variability during the second run. It uses this HRV as the surrogate marker for estimating cardiac fatigue.
Personally, I think that the training coach function is of relatively little use.
As others have said, where FBA really comes into its own is when compairing similar workouts, rather than analysing individual ones, and for providing an indication of when you are "overdoing things".
For example, my last row was a 10k at a pace that would normally produce a low (recovery) TE. It followed a 2 week period of training every day (obviously a mix of hard and not so hard sessions) and although the average HR was only 139 (pretty low for a 10k for me), the EPOC was 98ml/kg with a TE of 3.2. Two days previously, a 2 hour row (just over 30k) at a slightly faster pace resulted in a peak EPOC of 66ml/kg and a TE of 2.8
The 10k recovery row didn't feel at all hard physically, but clearly I was paying the price cardiovascularly for the recent heavy training load.
For me, it's things like that that make the programme very useful.