Changes

For these examples we will use just a few simple workouts. Let's assume a male athlete with a [[Maximum Heart Rate]] of 180 and a [[Resting Heart Rate]] of 40, giving a [[Heart Rate Reserve]] of 140. Let's assume our hypothetical athlete does his easy runs at a 9 min/mile pace and heart rate of 130. We'll use only one of the type of workout, a tempo run his easy runs at a 7 min/mile pace and heart rate of 160. This gives us some TRIMP^exp values for some workouts

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|Easy ||4||Easy 4||36||11,132

Here is a sample week's workout with three harder workouts, a 4 mile tempo, a 10 mile mid-long run and a 20 mile long run with four mile easy runs on the other days. This is 50 miles, total TRIMP^exp of 145K, Monotony of 1.35 and a Training Strain of 197K.

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|Tuesday||Easy 4||11,132

If we give our athlete a single day's rest on Sunday, we reduce the mileage by 4 miles to 46 miles, total TRIMP^exp goes down 9K to 134K, but the Monotony of drops more significantly to 1.14 and a Training Strain to 154K. So the mileage has dropped about 9%, but the Training Strain has dropped by 28%.

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|Tuesday||Easy 4||11,132

A further rest day on Tuesday drops the Training Strain by a further 27%.

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|Tuesday||Rest||0

If we compare this with an extreme example of a monotonous training plan, we have a slightly lower mileage (46 v 50), and a considerably lower total TRIMP^exp (128K v 135K), but the monotony is remarkably high at 4.7 and the training strain is more than three times higher (601K v 197K). In practice, there would be greater day to day variations, even within the same 6 mile easy run, so the results would not be quite so dramatic.

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|Tuesday||Easy 6||16,699