Training Monotony - Statistical variation in activities Training Strain - Single figure that represents the volume and variation in activities
It has long been recognised (and is fairly logical) that hard training sessions should be intermixed with easier ones or rest to allow recovery and physiological adaptations to take place. Training Monotony is one mechanism to measure this concept. This makes a statistical analysis of your activities to numerically represent the variation. Research would suggest that monotony figures below 1.5 are desirable, with figures above 2.0 as being too high.
Whilst monotony helps understand the periodisation of training and assessing recovery, the volume of training (load of training over time) also needs to be considered. Too low and training will be ineffective. Too high and you'll be moving into the realms of overtraining. Training Strain is one metric to aid with this, combining changes in load and monotony over time into one metric. The level of strain a particular athlete should be experiencing at any moment is dependent on many factors, but it can be safely said that rapid increases are bad. This would most commonly signify a rapid increase in load without adequate recovery.