Golden Cheetah PMC charts

Triathlon Forum
1

I wanted to start using a program (besides Garmin) to track and analyze my training. I did the WKO4 trial and at the same time began using Golden Cheetah to see if WKO4 was worth the extra $$ to me. At this time I have decided to stick with GC and see if I am feel like I am missing anything in a couple months. Anyway…

I have been using the PMC charts to watch my ramp rate and try to ‘quantify’ my stress. Before anyone jumps up on a soap box screaming about the other thread where people debated whether TSS, RPE, HR, number of gels consumed, etc are useful ways to quantify stress, I am using just these as another tool and not a sole dictation on my training. Because I have just begun using GC I only was able to easily retrieve and import my .fit files since March. I seeded my CTL at 40 since I think that is approx. what WKO4 showed (as it imported all my Training Peaks Data)

Down to the question:
I have the PMC Coggan, PMC TriScore, and PMC TRIMP charts. The TriScore and TRIMP both have my CTL 85-90, ATL around 120-125 and TSB about -30 to -35. The Coggan has my CTL at 39, ATL at 23, with a TSB of +13.

Why is there such a large discrepancy? Is there a setting or metric that I do not have correctly (I know, hard to tell without seeing my setup, but maybe some obvious setting that I should check)? Does the Coggan not account for some workouts that the other two do?

I am sure they use different formulas, but there is a significant deviation and I would even say that within the past few days the Coggan PMC CTL/ ATL are trending down whereas the other two are trending up.

Thanks for the insight.

2

An excellent rule-of-thumb is to always go by the original source. In this case, that means that either GoldenCheetahR is stuffing up the PMC calculations, or (more likely) the various values are not based on the same (appropriate) data. However, since you have chosen to utilize free-ware/share-ware to analyze your data, I can’t really help you any more than that (i.e., I have no idea where things have gone so badly off the tracks).

3

Down to the question:
I have the PMC Coggan, PMC TriScore, and PMC TRIMP charts. The TriScore and TRIMP both have my CTL 85-90, ATL around 120-125 and TSB about -30 to -35. The Coggan has my CTL at 39, ATL at 23, with a TSB of +13.

Why is there such a large discrepancy?

TRIMP uses HR data, TriScore uses HR and Power Data, Coggan just uses Power Data.

So if you have lots of HR based workouts with no power (e.g. run/swim) then there will be a big difference between the three.

Mark