What does TSS tell you? Please not too scientific…I am blonde and a girl. Thx
what it might tell you depends a lot on if your ftp is set correctly, assuming you are tlaking about cycling and not some hybrid TSS
mine does not tell me much, other than how long long/how much effort a particular ride might have been
.
What does TSS tell you? Please not too scientific…I am blonde and a girl. Thx
Go workout for an hour. If you go all out, 100% and are falling over exhausted after that 1 hour, you get 100 TSS points. If you work out at 70%, you get 70 points. Those points are used to calculate your chronic training load (fitness, based over a length of time), acute training load (short term, fatigue level).
It’s basically a way to gauge how much you are training, and if you need to take a break. Trainingpeaks has explanations for all of it and how it relates to each other.
John
It’s a way to quantify your workout. If you did a 1 hour session at the maximum effort that you could sustain for that hour, then that would give you a score of 100 TSS. Go harder, easier, longer, shorter and the TSS score would reflect that.
There is a lot more to it but that’s it in very simple terms.
Think of it as a way to quantify you training rides. 100 TSS = 1hr at FTP. Of course you need to know what your FTP is.
Once you test and establish what your FTP is, you can use it to compare rides, track training loads etc. A 1hr TT will yield about 100 TSS, a 2 hour easy ride might give you 90, a 5 hour ride with a lot of climbing and intervals might give you 317. Now you know how those rides stack against each other. Your weekly TSS allows you to see what sort of training load you are doing.
I wrote several blog posts about how to use the Performance Management Chart in wko. I think I’ve done some TSS blog posts as well.
http://support.trainingpeaks.com/athlete-edition/training-stress-scores.aspx
It’s just a way to measure overall training load. You could say, I biked/ran x miles last week - but that doesn’t take into account intensity.
TSS uses your threshold pace (1 hour race pace) as the baseline metric to establish how difficult your other workouts are, and assigns a value to them.
What does TSS tell you? Please not too scientific…I am blonde and a girl. Thx
Good info here:
http://home.trainingpeaks.com/articles/cycling/what-is-the-performance-management-chart.aspx
very useful for cycling training. Harder to use for triathlon but the principles can be applied at least in part.
Hmm? 70% gets 70 points? Some might say 70% gets 49 points.
TSS is a measure of how hard you work in terms of how it will impact your fitness and recovery.
Physiologists think the impact is non-linear, that is, going twice as hard hurts more than twice as much.
Other relevant information relates to recovery. 100 points or less, you should be ready to train again the next day.
More than 200 points might take another day before you can do another quality workout. YMMV.
TSS is mostly applied to cycling based on information from power meters. The calculations to get TSS depend on you testing to determine your FTP - the average power you can generate in a very hard hour long ride.
If you work out at 70%, you get 70 points.
Nooope!
Non linear!
Hmm? 70% gets 70 points? Some might say 70% gets 49 points.
TSS is a measure of how hard you work in terms of how it will impact your fitness and recovery.
Physiologists think the impact is non-linear, that is, going twice as hard hurts more than twice as much.
Other relevant information relates to recovery. 100 points or less, you should be ready to train again the next day.
More than 200 points might take another day before you can do another quality workout. YMMV.
TSS is mostly applied to cycling based on information from power meters. The calculations to get TSS depend on you testing to determine your FTP - the average power you can generate in a very hard hour long ride.
This is pretty much how I use it and typically use it mainly for my longer Saturday ride. I use it to helpful guide in a training session with consideration to what I want to do the next day(s) and how much that training load will impact those days. It is not exact, but it does give me a good idea and there are other things to consider like ongoing residual fatigue.
I know about what is typical for me to hit TSS wise for a 4 to 5 hour ride and will adjust my IF during that ride so that I do not exceed roughly that amount (~260 TSS+). By doing this it allows me to typically do another lower end of the SST range type of ride the next day. It has been rather helpful to have these metric real time now on the Garmin and takes some of the guess work out. But as you mention it is not exact and varies per person. My weekday indoor training time is limited so I rarely get more than 90 TSS in a session.
I use it as a BS detector. I check out the PM manager and see what kind of TSS I have been doing the last few days, or the last ride I just did.
Maybe you thought you did a 4 hour ride and got a good workout in? Nope, TSS shows you that you were just coasting around all day wasting your time. DOH! Get back out there!
TSS is a measure of how hard you work in terms of how it will impact your fitness and recovery.
Physiologists think the impact is non-linear, that is, going twice as hard hurts more than twice as much.
My mistake. I thought it was a linear relationship.
John
I use it as a BS detector. I check out the PM manager and see what kind of TSS I have been doing the last few days, or the last ride I just did.
Maybe you thought you did a 4 hour ride and got a good workout in? Nope, TSS shows you that you were just coasting around all day wasting your time. DOH! Get back out there!
So true…I like to call it the Truth O Meter. It humbles me everyday…ugh.
…My mistake. I thought it was a linear relationship…
Nahhh, TSS = IF^2hours100
So TSS is proportional to the square of intensity.
To the OP, as mentioned above TSS serves the role of overall workload tracking metric. Over the years lot’s of folks have tracked miles or hours of exercise or some track estimated calories or measured kilojoules of work as overall training load metrics. TSS is another and perhaps more sophisticated version of those metrics as it gives you a bit of extra credit for very hard punchy work well above your sustainable power on the premise that those sort of punchy bursts create more stress on your body than steady riding. Not everyone buys into that premise but many of us do find the metric useful with some limitations related to what happens when you pad hard workouts with some very easy rest pace riding or other situations that seem to inflate TSS a bit.
But like all overload workload metrics, TSS does not tell you exactly how those workouts were performed. So just like tracking miles does not directly tell you whether you did the best workouts to meet your needs or just rode a lot of junk miles, TSS does not tell you by itself if you’ve trained in ways that best meets your needs. So like the other overall workload metrics you want to keep an eye on both the forest (TSS, hours, etc.) and the trees (specific interval days, training with a purpose on the more important days, skills workouts, etc.).
-Dave
What does TSS tell you? Please not too scientific…I am blonde and a girl. Thx
TSS = how much did it hurt
Conversation goes like this.
Friend : “I did a really hard Sufferfest video last night”.
Me : “How hard ?”
Friend : “92 TSS points in an hour”
Me “Ouch”
Friend “That’s nothing, I did 700 points on the bike, 400 on the run and 300 on the swim last week”
Me “I better get to training, you’re gonna whip my a$$”
TSS has a time and intensity factor and is related to your fitness.
A pro doing a 150TSS effort should be like my 150TSS effort/
It’s a training suffer score.
I rarely care about my TSS numbers for any given ride (maybe I should?), but where I do find value is in the tracking of it’s changes over time - ATL and CTL, and the difference, TSB. Over time I’ve learned what various TSB values feel like for me, so now I have a rough idea of how to use that to make decisions.
When my TSB gets too negative, I get grumpy because I’m really exhausted, start dreading workouts because they’re too hard and have trouble staying awake during the day being so tired. Now when my TSB starts getting close to that range, I back off a bit, maybe take a day or two off or switch a hard workout for an easier one.
I use it as a BS detector. I check out the PM manager and see what kind of TSS I have been doing the last few days, or the last ride I just did.
Maybe you thought you did a 4 hour ride and got a good workout in? Nope, TSS shows you that you were just coasting around all day wasting your time. DOH! Get back out there!
And that is why a lot of athletes ‘feel’ like they need 120 miles or 6-6.5 hours for IM training. If you dork around, it takes that amount of time to get a similar amount of work. A lot of sciencey types like to write it up fancy and all!!
ha!
So if you don’t have a powermeter, DON’T DORK AROUND
If you do have a powermeter, don’t dork around. Unless you just really want to go on that coffee shop/social/whatever ride.
We will need your picture to determine the best answer.