There are some who say, if I’ve understood them correctly, that big TSS numbers are somewhat of a waste of time/resources. Personally, I’m inspired by others’ big weeks/numbers, and feel that high volume is quite effective so long as one is recovering. When today’s workout gets finished I’ll have put together my highest TSS score for a seven day period. Given that so many posters here have power measuring devices and train for long distance competitions, I’d be interested to see what some of those on the board have put up for a max week (or other chosen length of time…single day…one month…one year) for their TSS score. Or, if you know of any elites’ numbers, that’d be fun to gawk at as well. Don’t be shy.
I don’t recall seeing that high TSS scores are a waste of time and energy. What I’ve seen is the thought that achieving TSS scores with somewhat shorter duration and higher intensities might make more effective use of training time than longer durations at lower intensity. That said, I think it’s dangerous to look at high TSS scores over some limited period (like a week) out of context of the time leading up to and following that week. I know for myself, I’ve had some large TSS weeks this year, but they were invariably followed by recovery days or weeks so the average over the extended period was, well, average. This makes sense since one of the things TSS measures is the total training load and therefore the recovery needed. By doing a period of high TSS, I was essentially running a recovery deficit and this had to be made up later bringing the TSS for the high and recovery period back to average. I believe It has been postulated that there is a maximum average TSS that can be maintained over an extended period (subject to normal differences in individuals) and that the distribution of training stress can be manipulated but not the overall total.
Finally, because TSS normalizes out the absolute value of power, I would expect the highest TSS scores wouldn’t necessarily be produced by the most elite riders, but by those riders with enough time to train and recover fully from their training. That sounds like a dedicated masters racer who is retired. (except on further thought, what makes elite riders elite, might be their individual ability to withstand high TSS levels of training)
Well, that certainly sounds logical now doesn’t it? Past six days…
218.7 (Felt great - Normalized 254w)
218.3 (Felt good - Normalized 240w)
222.7 (Felt OK - Normalized 232w)
76.7 (Totally flat, knew it was a mandatory recovery day when I woke up - Normalized 182w)
236.7 (One of my best workouts ever - Normalized 245w)
232.4 (Another of my best workouts ever - Normalized 250w)
That third day it was really obvious the previous three days had taken a toll and I needed a recovery ride. Thankfully, I’m not too proud to ride super slow/easy and the next two days I was feeling really good. I’m feeling pretty amped up today, and have tommorrow built in as a recovery ride already.
That’s a pretty solid week! Very consistent which is good to see, good work with the rest day. My biggest TSS week to date was around 1300, i don’t have the data with me but if I recall correctly somewhere around there. That was a 450 mile week so it makes sense. If you are training a lot there is no reason why your tss score wouldn’t be near or at what the pros are because it is based on your LT I believe, so put in the hours and intensity and you get a big number.
I have found that weekly TSS works great for periodization and recovery weeks. 600-700-1000-350 for instance.
Well, that certainly sounds logical now doesn’t it? Past six days…
218.7 (Felt great - Normalized 254w)
218.3 (Felt good - Normalized 240w)
222.7 (Felt OK - Normalized 232w)
76.7 (Totally flat, knew it was a mandatory recovery day when I woke up - Normalized 182w)
236.7 (One of my best workouts ever - Normalized 245w)
232.4 (Another of my best workouts ever - Normalized 250w)
That third day it was really obvious the previous three days had taken a toll and I needed a recovery ride. Thankfully, I’m not too proud to ride super slow/easy and the next two days I was feeling really good. I’m feeling pretty amped up today, and have tommorrow built in as a recovery ride already.
It can be very difficult to sustain that kind of training stress. It could be that your threshold power is grossly underpredicted. The beauty of TSS is that it doesn’t matter if you’re Lance Armstrong or the weekend warrior - it’s tailored to you and because it’s normalized to you, everyone tends to share a common ceiling. The going assumption these days puts that at around 900-1000 TSS points/week based on the ability to replace glycogen stores. Get out and do another 60 minute effort and bump those threshold powers up!
OK, what the hell is a TSS #?
toxic shock syndrome
Change those tampons regularly.
Total Sums of Squares.
Training Stress Score. Developed by Andrew Coggan.
“It can be very difficult to sustain that kind of training stress. It could be that your threshold power is grossly underpredicted. The beauty of TSS is that it doesn’t matter if you’re Lance Armstrong or the weekend warrior - it’s tailored to you and because it’s normalized to you, everyone tends to share a common ceiling. The going assumption these days puts that at around 900-1000 TSS points/week based on the ability to replace glycogen stores. Get out and do another 60 minute effort and bump those threshold powers up!”
Well, maybe you are right. I have it set at 315w for my threshold. My actual measured highest over a 53.5min period is 306w. However, I went out too hard (328w…chasing Bjorn…after a 7.5 minute “warm up”) the first 20 minutes and paid for it over the next 35 minutes. It was during a climb from 3900 up to 6850, so of course that would be a factor as well, but I train at that same altitude levels, more or less, so I didn’t want to adjust it. Basically, I really didn’t want to set my threshold at a level I’ve never actually attained. I’ll have to TT Baldy soon, but it just takes a lot of mental focus to sustain a CP60 test, and I think basing it off of a 2 x 20 workout is bullshit, especially for someone like myself that is strongest, relative to others, over a 4-8 minute period.
By the way, the week ended up as…
218.7 (Felt great - Normalized 254w - IF .807)
218.3 (Felt good - Normalized 240w - IF .761)
222.7 (Felt OK - Normalized 232w - IF .738)
76.7 (Totally flat, knew it was a mandatory recovery day when I woke up - Normalized 182w - IF .579)
236.7 (One of my best workouts ever - Normalized 245w - IF .779)
232.4 (Another of my best workouts ever - Normalized 250w - IF .795 )
245.2 (Best three day stint ever - N 257w - IF .817)
So, total TSS was 1450.7 with an average IF (intensity factor, which is Normalized/Threshold…I think) of high .7x excluding the recovery workout. Again, I’ll try to get over to Baldy and lay it down next week. 900-1000 sounds low, I’ll report back again after doing the threshold test and seeing what I can sustain for TSS over this summer.
Anybody else have any opinions on optimal TSS?
Another thing that could influence the high normalized power and give you the ability to keep the intensity up is the type of ride and terrain. Were those tempo rides done on hills courses? I live in a pancake flat area, so a tempo ride for me yields a normalized power very close to average power (a watt or two difference). 254 W average for 2:40 or so (sounds about like what that first ride of yours was) is WAY more difficult than the same normalized. I can routinely get 3 hour normalized power on group rides that kill me if doing 2 hours solo at constant power.
Optimal TSS appears to be in the 750-900 range.
I ride in the mountains and my average wattage is routinely about 10-15% (as high as 20% if I’m doing VO2 work, but that’s kind of rare) lower than my normalized wattage. It’s impossible to hold those wattages while bombing a twisty mountain descent; I’d fly off the side of the road.
You really need to get a handle on your LT/FT if you’re going to use TSS. The whole point of the system is how it weights suprathreshold efforts exponentially. You may think the 2 x 20 is BS or whatever, but it doesn’t matter if you are “strong” at 4-8 min, because your threshold is your threshold, whether you stronger than others at 4-8 min or not. If you don’t have your threshold nailed, relative to you, TSS is not much better than another system and can actually be worse due to the exponential weighting.
With regard to “optimal” TSS, that probably depends. Optimal for a full time athlete, or optimal for weekend warrior? I know Coggan has proposed optimal yearly numbers that you could then use to come up with optimal weeks, but the optimal TSS need to be fit within the context of your fitness, training background, and other activities.
My point of saying that I’m strongest at shorter efforts, especially with a rest period like a 2 x 20 has, is that it would seem to skew a projected longer effort, no? Last all-out effort I did was on 4/6/05. Again, I’m now planning on fitting another effort in soon, this time up Mt. Baldy which I know will take more than 60 minutes, unlike the last nearly 60 minute effort which was actually only 53.5’.
I’m talking optimal for a full-time athlete that has been told by a few people, “You live in a bubble.” You see, I work 15-25max hours a week (did 1,000 hours almost on the nose last year), never wake up to an alarm clock, don’t pay rent (live with parents in the SoCal mountains) or for the majority of my food. I have no children, no wife/girlfriend, and almost no obligations at all. I have almost no social life, in that I hang out with friends about once every month or two, or three. I travel about an hour each way to my workout because I feel it’s the optimal locale, and I’ve been doing so for nearly a year and am not getting burnt out on it. I’m quite serious about this gig. Unless my threshold number is way off (which of course would be awesome!), I can’t imagine top cyclists are putting in 750-900 TSS type weeks. For certain, nobody claiming to be “on my bike for six hours a day!” is under 1000 for their TSS.
My fitness relative to myself is very high, meaning I’ve never been more fit in my life. I put about 26 hours(6x4hrs. + a 2hr. recovery ride) in last week and it felt great, and I believe it to be repeatable, though the next few weeks/months will of course tell for sure.
Thanks for responding, I’m interested to hear back from you, and others who have a little bit of conviction.
That’s great that you put in that much time on the bike last week and I know how you feel about being the fittest you have ever been in your life. I’m not going to be the one to tell you to throttle down because that’s against my philosophy too but be careful because you can burn yourself out or overtrain before you even know what’s going on, it can come up on you that quickly.
So just listen to what your body tells you and employ the slowtwitch community to help interpret because sometimes we don’t want to listen.
"My point of saying that I’m strongest at shorter efforts, especially with a rest period like a 2 x 20 has, is that it would seem to skew a projected longer effort, no? Last all-out effort I did was on 4/6/05. Again, I’m now planning on fitting another effort in soon, this time up Mt. Baldy which I know will take more than 60 minutes, unlike the last nearly 60 minute effort which was actually only 53.5’. "
According to your report on your estimate of FT though, it was a very uneven effort, starting very hard, and fading. The key to getting a good LT/FT estimate is to do a constant effort. Typically, if you start very hard and fade, the ave effort, based on power, is low relative to your “true” LT/FT. So, I would use caution in basing LT/FT on that 4/6 effort.
"I’m talking optimal for a full-time athlete that has been told by a few people, “You live in a bubble.” You see, I work 15-25max hours a week (did 1,000 hours almost on the nose last year), never wake up to an alarm clock, don’t pay rent (live with parents in the SoCal mountains) or for the majority of my food. I have no children, no wife/girlfriend, and almost no obligations at all. I have almost no social life, in that I hang out with friends about once every month or two, or three. I travel about an hour each way to my workout because I feel it’s the optimal locale, and I’ve been doing so for nearly a year and am not getting burnt out on it. I’m quite serious about this gig. Unless my threshold number is way off (which of course would be awesome!), I can’t imagine top cyclists are putting in 750-900 TSS type weeks. For certain, nobody claiming to be “on my bike for six hours a day!” is under 1000 for their TSS.
My fitness relative to myself is very high, meaning I’ve never been more fit in my life. I put about 26 hours(6x4hrs. + a 2hr. recovery ride) in last week and it felt great, and I believe it to be repeatable, though the next few weeks/months will of course tell for sure. "
Ahh the follies of youth;) Needless to say, I’m a bit jealous of your lack of committments and available time for training and recovery, not to mention your location. I personally don’t have enough data of my own to make an affirmative statement, but taking all of your points in context, I know Coggan has mentioned ~40 k optimal yearly TSS as a point of reference for a pro-type cyclist. So, assuming max dedication and training/racing 50 weeks/year, that would work out to an average of 800 pt/week for those 50 weeks. Of course, some weeks will be greater than others, but you get the idea.
Now your comment about the “on my bike for 6 hr/day” not being under 1000 pts, it depends. Again, because TSS is exponentially weighted around FT, if you do 6 hr @ 50 % of FT, that only gives you a TSS of 150 pts. So, you could conceivably ride six hr/day, six days/week and only end up with 900 pts. That is a very extreme and pretty unlike scenario though. Still, it illustrates how you can derive a certain training effect from a ton of garbage miles. OTOH, if you do most of that at tempo pace, you could end up with 1800 pts, but if done on a regular bassis, you’d likely be well on your way to an infection or a crap season.
Hope that is what you were looking for
The Master speaks!!!
Since I have no plans or goals but derive pleasure from crunching numbers, I notice that evryone is talking about weekly totals and averages. Would it be more reasonable to use some kind of a rolling 7-day average? Or shorter? Or longer?
Good question.
Just count your lucky stars that you have descents to bomb down, eh? Some of us have to make do with the rare favorable tailwind.
dammit. is this one of those “enter a graduate program and endure years of servitude to a PhD to find your answer” kind of question?