So I just had three days, where my legs just felt more heavy than usually. Everything has felt harder on the bike. I’m doing nothing this weekend, so two days off. Will that be enough to get back to “normal” or am I missing something?
Yes, no, maybe……there is no way to predict it.
Rest a couple days, see how you feel. If your legs feel better, resume as normal. If they don’t rest another day or two.
I know it sounds like a stupid question, but it’s such sudden drop in performance. Just wondering if it’s common to get over that with just a couple rest days…
Generally two days is enough for me. Except when it isn’t. Hard to say, but if this is the first time you’ve felt this, I’d take 2 days off, eat and sleep well, then have an easy spin on day 3. After that see how you feel.
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First time I’ve felt such big difference (drop in performance) and feel on the bike for multiple days…
It is absolutely not a stupid question……there is just no way to tell. Everyone responds differently and we don’t know how fatigued you actually are.
There is just no way to predict it
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I have experienced something like this. If I’m getting a cold, I have heavy legs. Now my colds are not normal. I don’t get the head part. No stuffy, no snot, no sneezes. I will just feel a bit off. I can thank my grandma as she never got a cold.if she did it was without symptoms.
Perhaps it’s a reaction to illness.
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Hopefully resting up has helped you a bit!
Sometimes it can be difficult to tell where fatigue is coming from. As other athletes mentioned, it could be caused by stressors that come from your life outside of cycling – such as illness or simply from being busy in day-to-day life.
And it can be tough to tell if 2 days off is enough. Everyone recovers differently from different stressors, so the best way to know how you react is to experiment in each situation.
If you’re still feeling run down, it could be a good idea to do some easy Z1 spinning before jumping back into your training plan – or even to take another day or two off to continue recovering.
In any case, make sure you’re eating and hydrating well and getting plenty of sleep!
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Just to follow up; had two nights of great sleep. Been eating alot!
Even though I did not sleep more than 7 hours last night, I had much better legs today on my group ride, so the two days off did make a big difference!
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If you’re not following a plan I’d check your Form/TSB in intervals.icu.
I am following a plan…
before it happened, did you do something unusually hard like some all-out shorter sprints? Or a really hard group ride? Or did it just seemingly come out of nowhere?
Looking back at your calendar I can see that you had a really big block of volume in Mallorca in mid-April, and then struggled with some illness at the end of April / early May before jumping back into training.
In the past two weeks, I also see three ~2-hour long rides with an IF of .90 or higher (.93 on the 7th, .90 on the 12th, and .92 on the 14th) which is pretty crazy!
Also, each of the past 8 weeks you’ve significantly (often almost doubled) the amount of TSS you had planned for the week.
I think you might be simply doing a bit too much. 
I’d consider taking the rest of this week easy and then following the structure of your recovery week next week as best as you can. If you end up riding more than your plan calls for, do your very best to keep it all easy.
Rest up, eat some nutritious food and you’ll be back! You’ve gotta give your body time to soak it all in! 
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thank you, that was the point of my post.
I know I’m doing volume. I’I just see riders better than me (and riders on lower level) doing much more volume than I am. I know they might handle it better, and might have been building up though. I simply just do not feel like i’m doing so much. 
I also prioritize group rides alot. It probably just come with a cost…
I don’t necessarily think that you need to avoid volume in general, but I think that your recent training history could be what caused that sort of “crash” last week.
The last four weeks or so have had a lot of intensity, some illness, and a fair bit of volume. These three usually won’t play nicely together. Had you not been sick, maybe you would have never had any issues. If it weren’t for those .90+ rides, maybe you would have been fine. 
It’s hard to say, but all of the signs point toward your body simply being a bit overwhelmed by it all.
Again, volume might not necessarily be your issue. From a distance, it looks like you might be pretty used to the amount of volume you’re currently doing. I’d maybe consider taking this week a bit easier in terms of intensity and seeing how you feel after next week’s recovery week. I think your body just needs a little break to absorb all of the TSS and you’ll likely bounce back. 
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Okay. Thanks Eddie. Would love to do less intensity this week, and just enjoy riding my bike, which I love!! It also help me keeping mental stress at bay.
But know this about me; I’m sooooo afraid of doing too little. I know that I should rest hard! I would always tell people to rather do a little too little than a little too much! But I have a hard time following that advice myself! I’m so afraid that if I do not ride with intensity this week (VO2 Max today accaording to my plan and Thresshold Thursday) I suddenly lose all my fitness. I’m so afraid that if I do these two weeks without doing any dedicated VO2 Max workouts I will become less fit! I know it’s not true, but it’s an issue for me. 
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I know the feeling – trust me! 
Oftentimes athletes like you and I depend on exercise, our training plans, and workouts for more than simply becoming faster. It’s a mental thing too and it can be really hard to go without the stimulus.
It’s normal to worry about losing fitness when you’re not training hard, but we all have to rest at some point to catch up. It’s simply a part of the equation.
You’ve been really consistent with your training and losing one or two hard workouts in favor of a bit more rest and easy riding after a really hard block isn’t going to hurt anything. If anything, it’ll probably help!
It’s really hard to write down a training plan for an entire year and plan to stick to it perfectly as life doesn’t typically remain consistent for most people. When you stray from the plan and have a few really full weeks, you’ll probably have to pay that back afterward. 
Our bodies don’t know what we have planned for them, but they can sense the rhythm of what we’ve done. When your stress levels go higher than normal, your rest levels will probably also have to go up in order to balance back out. 
If you’re feeling good mid-week or later, maybe pick one of the two hard workouts on your schedule for this week and knock it out. Pay attention to how you feel beforehand, during, and afterward though. If at any point you feel like you’re struggling through it, I’d recommend pulling the plug and riding easy instead.
Then make sure you’re really following your recovery week next week!
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What I needed to hear.
I just decided to switch workouts today. I go easy today and then try doing the VO2 Max (I had planned for today) tomorrow. Then I do a full restday on thursday. If the VO2 Max workout feels hard tomorrow, I just quit the workout and go easy.
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Hitting the nail on the head here. Volume (duration x intensity) is the key driver for aerobic fitness, but it’s a long game that often falls apart when ramped up too quick or when too much intensity is mixed in. The red/green feature in TR can help prevent this (if not ignored), but learning how to listen to your body is an important skill to develop. You can also use tools that track CTL (chronic training load) and stress balance to help inform your training. Intervals.icu is a pretty simple tool that can auto-sync with Strava and give you an easy view into current ramp rates, training stress, etc. Here’s my build since ~Feb, you can see that I go well into the red a few times and this is when I’m really listening to signals from my body (sleep, grumpiness, etc.) to make sure I’m not digging too deep into a hole. I find that my legs are usually game to keep pushing even when some of these overreaching signals are popping up. Sometimes it’s hard to back it down a bit when you are feeling strong at the end of the big block, but continuing to push can really set you back.
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