The counterintuitive relationship between training breaks and tissue vulnerability.
Noah emailed recently with a screenshot of his training data. He’d done what every sensible runner does: after a long run pushed his weekly mileage into the orange zone, he took time off to recover. His weekly mileage chart showed his acute training load shot up before reducing slowly (Figure 1A). But when he stopped going for long runs the following week his injury risk score had done something unexpected: it had climbed into the orange (Figure 1B).
Noah was surprised his risk went up as his mileage was reducing, so he emailed to ask how myTrainingForecast estimates his risk of running injury.
It’s one of those counterintuitive patterns in training data that seems to defy logic: You do the responsible thing and rest, and your injury risk goes up. What’s going on? The answer reveals something fundamental about how our bodies adapt to training, and why consistency matters more than most runners realise…
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