Cyclingpeaks TSB Questions

To the Performance Manager Guru's

I'm a new cyclingpeaks & PT user and was curious as to the relationship between TSS and TSB and overtraining? I'm sure allot of this will be covered in Hunters and Andys webinars

Here are my questions:
1. It appears to be totally normal for TSB to be mostly negative in the off season but how low should you let TSB get ? Is there a bottom ?
2. How long can you or should you let TSB remain in the cellar ? before overtraining ?
3. While preparing for an A event how long before the event will you start to taper your TSS in order to raise TSB ? 2 weeks out 1 week ? Or does it depend on how low you are before the taper ? Since I'm new to training with Power (Only 1month) It seems that the only thing that raises my TSB is taking a zero day or an L1 ride.. Is this normal ? So far my TSB has been hovering around -25 to -50 The rides that have pushed my TSB in the toilet are L2-SST and some 1x20 L4 intervals.. Mainly for testing and for me to have a good starting point.

Thanks in advance

 

Rob,
For starters I wouldn't put to much faith in your exact PMC numbers with only a month of data. I see you seeded the ATL/CTL values which helps and you seem to have chosen your seeds well since you stabilized near those values quickly. But still with the default CTL time constant of 42 days the data will become more meaningful when you've got a bit more of it.

Yep, TSB is normally negative during training and generally stays that way during early season build unless intentionally come up for air or life interrupts with something like a sudden business trip. I generally hover between -12 TSB and -25 TSB this time of year. If I take a complete day off it moves a bit more positive but doesn't rise to zero or above. Later in the season it will look different with racing and tapers and more varied training. My TSB lowpoint last year was roughly -50 and I didn't get sick or over train but I did follow that up with some rest. I don't really think it's as much a matter of absolute values of TSB as much as sustained negative values which can also be viewed as fast CTL ramp rates that leads to over training.

Again I view that in terms of CTL ramp rate. I suspect it changes between individuals with things like age, experience, and sustained load before you started using this tool. But personally I feel real solid with a CTL ramp rate of 5 to 8 TSS/day/week. When I've gotten above 8 TSS/day/week I've felt pretty worked and though I haven't hit real over training or illness since starting with the PMC over a year ago I try not to hit 10 TSS/day/week since I predict my breaking point is somewhere in that range.

Again, I expect tapers need to be tailored to the individual rider but I try to plan my tapers to get into low positive TSB values (+4 to +10) for the event and to include an openers ride the day before. I use a spreadsheet that uses the same ATL and CTL time constants but with a simpler sliding window averaging approach to make forward looking estimates. It does depend in part on how low your TSB is before you taper and doing some forward looking PMC estimation can help you decide how much load to drop during your taper.

While your CTL is fairly low, you'll find that a relatively low TSS ride is enough to drop your TSB. IOW if you're hovering around 40 TSS/day then a relatively easy ride of say 60 TSS will cause your ATL and CTL to rise and your TSB to drop or stay negative. When your CTL gets higher to say 80 or 100 TSS/day it will take a harder or longer workout to keep it rising and even some moderate workouts will allow your TSB to rebound. Basically if your TSS for a certain training ride is above your current CTL you'll tend to drive your TSB negative, when that TSS is below your current CTL your TSB will rebound. It's not quite that simple with ATL and CTL time constants, but if you want CTL to rise you need to work harder than the average.

-Dave

 

I think you can pretty much stay at a slightly - TSB indefinitely. As you start to get very low (for me, much below -20) the quality of your workouts goes downhill so you're pretty much forced to pop back up pretty quick unless you force the issue with lots of long, easy rides. I also thing it's really hard to overtrain: any time my TSB drops to low I either get too tired to train effectively, or get sick, both of which force a little break, allowing TSB to rise before you I training again.

Taper length has a lot to do with the nature of your event and how high you want your tsb (the two are very related, of course). For example, if I were targeting a 4k pursuit I'd start tapering 4-6 weeks out by very gradually trading CTL for TSB, while gradually increasing the intensity and specificity of my workouts. By race day I'd hope to be at +15-20 tsb with the previous 4-6 weeks consisting of mostly l5 and l6 work along with a smattering of l3-4 maintenance. On the other hand, if i were tapering for a long road race or a 40k tt, I'd just take 2 or so days easy, followed by an "opener" day, then race with a TSB of somewhere around +5.

 

That all depends on how much you come off the gas this time of year. If you took a week or two off completely and your CTL plummets 40 points, you're going to be negative while building CTL back up. My PMC for the last 6 months:



My last "transition" period was back in June right at the beginning of the chart, but since then it has been regular training.

I don't keep my TSB in the cellar completely for any real length of time. It'll go low, but I don't see it as a necessary thing to keep it in the cellar. You can still maintain a good CTL ramp rate and not plunge the CTL into the cellar at all. Proper management of training load is pretty critical to this - as is timing of workouts throughout the week.

Completely event dependent. I've raced strongly this year with 2 days of taper (for short crit/circuit events), and I've raced strongly with 2 weeks of taper (for long road races). One of my best efforts (1st place, A priority) this year was a 2 hour circuit race that I "tapered" 2 days for. If the event you're racing for is 45 minutes long, and your CTL is over 100, you probably don't need the 2 week taper.

Remembering that CTL is your training load - I like to think of CTL as "generally" the training stress I should be able to handle on about a neutral TSB at any given time without increasing the fatigue. That may not be what the technical definition of it is, but if you think about it - it makes sense. If your TSB is 0, CTL is 100, and you do a 100 TSS workout, your CTL will remain 100, TSB remain 0, and ATL (fatigue) not increase. (Remembering that more than your aerobic/FTP fitness determines performance on game day)

Welcome to the world of power training. Be patient and read, read, read. It will take a bunch of months to get a good feel for your fitness/abilities in relation to the PMC concepts. Once you get a good handle on it though, it will be invaluable.