Estimating TSS?

[mac_220]

Hi Everyone,

I have a question regarding estimating TSS. I recently purchased a copy of WKO+ and am happily learning about the PMC and how to use it. The problem i have is that i only have a turbo training which measures power and when i ride on the road use a polar 720i to record my training time/heart rate/distance etc. The PMC doesn't get a TSS value for my outside training sessions which is affecting the graph/results , especially as i do a 3-4 and 4-5 hour group ride on a saturdays and sundays respectively.

Is there a way of estimating TSS values for the rides i do outside?

Regards,

Mac

P.S. i'm saving up for a bike mounted power meter so this won't be a problem next season.......

 

[rmur17]

Hi Everyone,

I have a question regarding estimating TSS. I recently purchased a copy of WKO+ and am happily learning about the PMC and how to use it. The problem i have is that i only have a turbo training which measures power and when i ride on the road use a polar 720i to record my training time/heart rate/distance etc. The PMC doesn't get a TSS value for my outside training sessions which is affecting the graph/results , especially as i do a 3-4 and 4-5 hour group ride on a saturdays and sundays respectively.

Is there a way of estimating TSS values for the rides i do outside?

Regards,

Mac

P.S. i'm saving up for a bike mounted power meter so this won't be a problem next season.......

Hi Mac,
well I think you have a problem without the outdoor PM. This time of year I often have one outdoor ride per week on the m/b for which I don't have PM data and estimate my TSS for those rides. The catch is that I have 3-4 yrs of outdoor ride data versus terrain, route, PE etc. and as a backup I do monitor avg. HR for the rides. I estimate ride IF (NP/FTP), then manually calculate TSS using 100*Duration*IF^2.

Now if I didn't that history to fall back on it's really guess-timation. For longer rides taken at a brisk pace you could take an IF range of 0.70 to 0.85 and estimate overall ride IF within that range based on PE.

Taking the low-end you'd score about 50 TSS pts/hour and at the high end about 70 TSS pts/hr. Multiply by the ride duration and you have an estimate that's probably within 20% of actual.

20% off on one ride per week wouldn't be a big deal (especially if non-biased) but if you estimate ALL your in-season rides .. well you may be way off in the short-term and longer term PMC view.

In short, I think it's reasonable to fill in some data manually but perhaps a waste of time to estimate weeks and months of data for PMC. GIGO as they say.