The former . . .

Yes my radar is a bit off, I couldn't tell honestly at the start.

TSS and other TP stuff are just a few of many tools available to athletes, nobody is putting a gun to anyones head. I think you also see people adapting and using TSS in ways that maybe weren't originally intended, but useful to some. IE some are using TSS as a year over year metric during certain phases. If people want to use it then great, if they don't or use some sort of hybrid model that works for them then great.

Who cares? I think it's normal to assume that for a given power you will have different levels of stress, for different external conditions…. and should govern yourself accordingly.

Maurice

If you want to measure training load/stress, you have options, in approximately decreasing order of estimation of reality:

hours - the data is a hard fact but doesn't reflect training load well. A 4 hour road race would be the same as a 4 hour cruise smelling the flowers. Obviously insane

miles - the data is a hard fact and has built in some notion of how hard you were going, but still doesn't reflect training load well. A windy ride for an hour would look like less training load than a windless day for an hour, when the opposite would be true. Group ride would get more miles simply because of drafting. Moving to a place with smoother roads, all your mielage stats go up even if you didn't actually work any harder.

kilojoules - the data is a hard fact about how much energy you spent, so this is *really* good. But it still doesn't account for the fact that say, alternating 100 and 300 watt intervals is a lot harder than just averaging 200 watts. So, it is still an estimation of reality.

TSS or BikeScore - takes into account that the stress at a given power is nonlinear. Not going to be perfect, but then neither are any of the above methods. It shouldn't ever be more misleading than kilojoules is. Even a "NP buster" workout where NP ends up way above what you can do for a 40k will be less misleading than kilojoules about how 'hard' the ride was.

I'm not a coaching expert, I know people who are, that think TSS is stupid. They mostly express that on twitter with sarcastic comments that are too short to reveal good reasons why. They may have them good reasons though. I imagine ultimately that they just reject the notion of trying to quantify training load/stress in the first place, and prefer to approach it qualitatively. Given that nobody knows what the perfect pattern of training is anyway, a smart person approaching it qualitatively may indeed be no worse than trying to track it quantitatively.

I'm just rambling here sorry.

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Kat Hunter reports on the San Dimas Stage Race from inside the GC winning team
Aeroweenie.com -Compendium of Aero Data and Knowledge
Freelance sports & outdoors writer Kathryn Hunter

Have you considered kilojoules or watts and heart rate. Heart rate is used successfully to track training in other sports and it even automatically increases and hangs and stays higher after very hard efforts. In fact you could say it normalises.

So you have a measure of performance in watts and heart rate which is simple to measure and record and reliably tracks how hard your body is working to produce the power.

Over the past 30 years my maximum heart rate has dropped a few beats, but rowing, running or cycling my maximum sustainable heart rate has remained stable but power output has been very variable depending on fitness.

Using heart rate to track training stress is simple and you don't need to keep resetting FTP.

Heart rate is pretty good, I might rank it 2nd best. It might even be plain best, but it too is subject to noise and variation from heat, cold, caffeine, bike position, stress, etc.

heart rate is a physiological indicator but not the absolute truth about how hard your body is working either. You can sometimes even get more fit yet heart rate goes up at a given power.

As for resetting FTP, that hasn't ever been a big deal for me. I don't even need to test for it. It clearly arises out of race and group ride and training data. And neither I more my wife have any crazy FTP difference on road vs tt bike.

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Kat Hunter reports on the San Dimas Stage Race from inside the GC winning team
Aeroweenie.com -Compendium of Aero Data and Knowledge
Freelance sports & outdoors writer Kathryn Hunter

as long as most of the energy contribution is aerobic, than yeah, it's probably a good one.

but as we all know, cycling, especially road racing and track racing, taps into anaerobic and neuromuscular energy sources as well, and HR does a horrendous job of accounting for those

I agree it is possible to get fitter yet find heart rate at a given power has decreased but this normally only happens over short durations where the anaerobic contribution is great. I have not seen it over longer durations of say over 15 minutes. You can only get your sustainable heart rate so close to your maximum heart rate, sooner or later you are going to run out of heart rate, and then the only way to increase power is to improve power:heart rate ratio.

This is why I use power and heart rate in conjunction.

It might do ok if you kept recording AFTER the ride until you return to baseline =)

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Kat Hunter reports on the San Dimas Stage Race from inside the GC winning team
Aeroweenie.com -Compendium of Aero Data and Knowledge
Freelance sports & outdoors writer Kathryn Hunter

Even without the longer term issues, heart rate is not an absolute indicator of how hard someone's working. I've mentioned before that shortly after getting a power meter I did a climb two ways. First, I climbed a mile at a constant heart rate at steady effort around what would now be called FTP (the concept didn't exist at the time). Power was pretty much steady for the effort. I then climbed the next mile at the same heart rate but varying power first below then above the average for the first effort so that heart rate remained constant (I'd ridden enough by heart rate that I had a good sense of how hard or easy I could go before heart rate changed). The average power for that second effort was well below the first. That told me that there isn't a one-to-one correspondence between effort and heart rate even under identical conditions.

If you ride at a constant power at the start your heart rate will be low and gradually increase then level off, then in time it will increase a little more as you fatigue and or get hotter. So it isn't surprising your power was down on the 2nd effort for the same sort of heart rate.

Try doing 2 x 20 min at threshold. You will find average heart rate will be higher for the 2nd effort.

Have you considered just focussing on improving your performance, and letting your physiology take care of itself? It seems to have worked rather well for these people:

Not to mention all the other useful things you can learn from using a powermeter.

So this whole thread boils down to the fact that you don't like TSS? Okay. Good to know. So use something else and stop complaining. Plenty of people have been successful using TSS and what you believe are inaccurate assessments of 1-hour thresholds.

The best part about this whole thread is that after all your complaints, you still haven't provided a valid alternative to the systems you are complaining about.

Except this was two miles (8 minutes) in the middle of a ride. I wouldn't expect significant cardiac drift in such a short time. But be that as it may, you seem to be making the case against heart rate if it isn't a reliable measure of effort even over the course of less than ten minutes.

Heart Rate is a valid alternative. Using power but not using NP and TSS is valid. I use both power and heart rate with Feel or RPE.

No I don't like NP or TSS, I'm entitled to that opinion and to express it.

Which will be an estimate, and since you aren't quantifying it, and can't, it is an estimate subject to all the usual errors of human perception.

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Kat Hunter reports on the San Dimas Stage Race from inside the GC winning team
Aeroweenie.com -Compendium of Aero Data and Knowledge
Freelance sports & outdoors writer Kathryn Hunter

The watts are not estimated, the heart rate is not estimated. Feel is subjective.

The whole idea you can describe training load based on one number, TSS, is plain daft.

As andrew himself has said,
"" A greater limitation to the entire concept, though, is that the
basic premise – i.e., that you can adequately describe the training load
and the stress it imposes on an individual based on just one number
(TSS), completely ignoring how that “score” is achieved and other
factors (e.g., diet, rest) – is, on its face, ridiculous. In particular,
it must be recognized that just because, e.g., two different training
programs produce the same weekly TSS total, doesn’t mean that an
individual will respond in exactly the same way. Nonetheless, I believe
that TSS (and IF) should prove useful to coaches and athletes for
evaluating/managing training.""
http://lists.topica.com/...ort=d&start=9353

What you get with Andrew's system is garbage in gospel out.

The relationship between heart rate and power output during cycling competitions
2006-07-11
Ericsson, Fredrik, Dalarna University and Björklund, Glenn, Mid Sweden University

Conclusion
Our results suggest that the drift in the relationship between heart rate and power output, CV drift, is not as pronounced during cycling competitions as in the laboratory. The reasons for the difference in our results compared to those from the laboratory are not clear but the airflow around the cyclist during outdoor riding is a very likely factor.

If there are sub-optimal calibrations of the power meters this would most likely result in a overall too high or too low power output recording. Since we are foremost interested in the relationship between heart rate and power output and the within session drift in the power values, even if they were very off from the beginning, is most likely non significant.

We found no significant changes during the first 120 minutes of road race competition or during 35 minute long time trials. After 120 minutes we have observed an upward drift of the heart rate in relation to power output in the range of 5 beats, in competitions lasting 240 minutes. CV drift can be a result of many different mechanisms and it is impossible to draw any conclusions to which mechanisms that have induced the drift we observed.

Most (older) versions of the SRM™ system collect the heart rate data from un-coded chest straps. It is therefore possible, that when riding in a peloton, the meter can pick up heart rates from other chest straps than the one on the cyclists producing the power output. This could theoretically mean that the power output and heart rate data come from different riders at times during the race. This is luckily not very likely during individual time trials.

We conclude that during competitions of <120 minutes heart rate is a valid and reliable predictor of exercise intensity and energy expenditure. For competitions of <240 minutes heart rate will increase by <5 beats/min relative to workload and therefore over predict exercise workload and energy expenditure.

Oh, Oh, let me, let me, please?

"You're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts."

Even before Dr. Coggan stepped in to clarify some of these points, it was apparent to any reader that you were on a crusade of some kind, dogmatically opposed to TSS/FTP among other things, attempting to appear smart, and attempting to start a fight.

Nothing you have said is new in any way. Nothing you have said clarifies or is helpful, and none of it is not already common knowledge. It's obvious, as was pointed out to you, that FTP is just an estimate, it's obvious that HR is important, and it's obvious to anybody who applies these training principles if your FTP is set wrong (e.g. 2x20 feeling "easy").

But by all means, please continue to post, it's amusing at least. Certainly not productive, though-- sorry to burst your over-inflated bubble.

-Eric

Right so basically you imagine some athlete who only looks at TSS, and plans their training only with that, and imagine how that couls be stupid. But nobody does that. Anyone who does do that would be just as incompetent at combining heart rate, kilojoules, and "feel" in their head to drive their training.

It is like when Kraig Willet goes on about "the gold being in the files". Yes Kraig, I am also looking at the files.

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Kat Hunter reports on the San Dimas Stage Race from inside the GC winning team
Aeroweenie.com -Compendium of Aero Data and Knowledge
Freelance sports & outdoors writer Kathryn Hunter

That was prescient of me, wasn't it?

Some people apparently can't imagine being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

Nothing new there.