Average Weekly TSS?

What's your score? Where do you reach meltdown (overreaching)?

Messed that poll up! Missed 600-800! Sorry.

I've been 600-700 for the past 3 weeks with no loss of motivation or performance.

700-900 pretty much every week for 3 months. I know that doesn't really fit into the categories as they are defined but that's my "sweet" spot.

Without sounding stupid what is TSS?


I am new to this game (not cycling just power)

TSS stands for "training stress score." It is a measure of the overall physiological load placed on the body during a period of cycling, based on the "intensity factor" (IF) computed via normalized power and the duration of the session. Dr. Coggan's paper explains it in detail and is great reading:

http://www.midweekclub.ca/articles/coggan.pdf

Berend

Individual rides are 250-300. Only 4 rides/wk now, so only 1000-1200/wk. Will increase to 1500+/wk after 1/1.

That's some serious volume! I hit 1200 pts one week last year when I did a training camp in AZ. I rode somewhere around 20 hours that week.

Lately my 7 day total is 600-700.

I recently wrote an article on TSS if anyone cares to critique it.
http://tinyurl.com/bhzjo

I have to wonder if the LT power you've define is accurate in this case.

Those are hard, long rides!

I can do a 1 hr trainer ride (2x20) and get a TSS of 60 (lower in Z4). My hardest 4 hour ride outside hammering the hills scores 260( I am a Cat 2). Maybe mine is too low!

Not having a power meter on the CX bike makes it difficult to score accurately, but based on 1 hour threshold efforts I'd guess 400 in a week: Off season, short hard rides, racing cross only. My weekly hours are down to six right now.

I agree. I'm also new to this so could be off base, but from what I've gathered first hand and read, 800 TSS is pretty high. Obviously 1500 is something extreme. I was professionally tested just a month ago and came up with a Power at AT of 290 and using same can see how I might be able to do 700 a week, but I expect not much more without overtraining. Course I'm pretty old for this group (race age 48) so have to factor that in.

That may be, but my rides are designed in advance for NP and total minutes by training level (L4-L6). In fact, in the near future I will be able to design my training rides to achieve a number of goals very specifically. My rides are non-traditional. They are on varied terrain with L4-L6 intervals (and recoveries) integrated throughout the ride where appropriate. The main reason my TSS scores are high is the combination of duration and intensity. I recently analyzed my training rides and concluded that they were too easy. They are no longer easy (e.g., NP ~90%FT).

Since the TSS calculation simplifies to "TSS = IF^2 x duration in hours", you'll get a lot more TSS through *long* rides than you will through *hard* rides. If you ride 3-4 hours at a time, several times a week, you can easily exceed 1000 TSS/wk even if you don't ride very hard. On the other hand, if all of your rides are interval sessions on the trainer, then 500-600 TSS/wk will probably feel like you're killing yourself.

To be fair to the TSS concept, it's important to remember that TSS attempts to quantify the body's need for recovery, and not what "feels hard" while you're actually doing the exercise.

It's exactly the opposite, frenchyge, isn' t it? IF has a squared effect on TSS, while duration has a linear one.

Berend

Not IMO, possibly because the IF's are normalized to FT, whereas the durations are raw, rather than being normalized to the power vs. sustainable duration curve (another exponential function).

For example:
A level 1 ride (IF=.7) produces ~50 TSS/hr, where as a L4 ride (IF=1.0) produces ~100 TSS/hr. By this relationship, a 2-hr recovery ride at Level 1 should produce about the same training stress as a 1-hr ride at FT, and that just doesn't seem to match my experiences. Maybe the 2 rides do require about the same amount of physiological recovery and rejuvenation, I certainly don't have any data to suggest otherwise besides my own impression. That was the basis of my statement that it's "easier" to generate higher TSS numbers through longer rides than through harder rides.