Why do more than L3?



Roadie_scum said:
It might be a rough way to look at it and one that needs to be done sensibly. Clearly there is not going to be a crossover between L2 and L6, whatever the TSS (you are already onto this from your previous post I see, but just to make my viewpoint clear). I think, however, and I could be wrong, it should be a reasonable proxy around similar intensities. Since TSS is the building block for CTL and CTL is positively predictive of fitness/form when the TSS building blocks are appropriately composed, there has to be at least some equivalency doesn't there?

I'd say that's the appropriate way of viewing the situation.

BTW, Dr. Dave Martin told me that the AIS has attempted to quantify the "dose" of training based on the notion of "radiating spheres of influence", e.g., while training at level 4 would be most effective at raising functional threshold power, it would also tend to raise VO2max, just as training at level 5 would be most effective at raising VO2max, but would also tend to increase functional threshold power. Things quickly became so complicated, however, that it was impossible to interpret what the tea leaves were trying to say. By comparison, TSS is a far simpler and cruder approach, but sometimes that's exactly what you need to get the job done...
 
acoggan said:
My take is this: while there is clearly a trade-off between intensity and duration, we really don't know the precise nature of the interaction, so it is difficult to derive any sort of overall score that perfectly reflects the results of different training sessions. Moreover, TSS is primarily meant to be a measure of stress (and hence the resultant strain), not a measure of adaptation. For example, you could achieve the same TSS in the same period of time by performing either an isopower or highly variable workout, but in terms of the adaptations induced the two would not be the same, even if the overall stress/strain/residual fatigue were in fact comparable.
That was my overall gut feel on this. It's a pretty big leap of faith to say that two workouts that result in the same overall load necessarily produce the same positive adaptation when performed at different intensities. I suppose the closer the intensities and the closer the VI the more useful TSS could be for estimating Intensity/Duration tradeoffs but my instinct was that comparing a 95% IF workout to an 82% IF workout using TSS to create equivalent effective durations was a big leap.

BTW, Dr. Dave Martin told me that the AIS has attempted to quantify the "dose" of training based on the notion of "radiating spheres of influence"....
Ever since I got my head around the concept of a training continuoum where focus on a given level has spillover to adjacent levels I've been thinking this would well modeled with fuzzy logic. Basically instead of a binary sort of true/false system(which is sort of what I see with RDOs parsing approach where 9'58" does not count as L4 but 10' does.) you'd model each training level as a distribution (probably Gaussian for lack of a better idea and based on central limit theorem) with the peak of the distribution representing the target work effort and the tails extending some training effect into adjacent zones. 'course the next question is what are the SD's for these distributions and then how do you tally the net effect to each level (straight sums?). Anyway, seems like Dr. Martin has been working on a similar idea, too bad it looks to be overcomplicated.
 

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