Monotony and strain: why the same week every week can hurt
Training hard every day at the same level leaves no room to recover. Foster's ideas of monotony and strain explain why variety in your week matters.
Coach Lucian · · updated · 3 min read
Imagine two climbers who both log the same total load in a week. One trains moderately hard every single day. The other has two hard days, two moderate days and some genuinely easy or rest days. On paper their weekly load is identical. In practice, the first climber is far more likely to feel flat, stale and run down.
That difference is what Carl Foster tried to capture with the ideas of monotony and strain.
Where the ideas come from
Foster (1998) looked at athletes' daily session-RPE loads and noticed that weekly load alone did not fully explain who got ill or performed poorly. The pattern of the week also mattered. Weeks where every day looked much the same seemed to be harder to tolerate than weeks with clear hard and easy days, even at similar totals.
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