Its not TSS as Im sure your are aware and based on heart rate.
Its based on an estimate of Excess Post-excerise Oxygen Consumption, EPOC, from heart rate data (not power)
The idea is it gives an indication of the degree of impact an activity has on your body.
If you compare with power data or dont have (accurate) heart rate data for certain activities you can get some very odd results / values you wouldnt expect.
I loosely watch strava instead, or just go on how I feel these days.
That certainly is effective for day to day training.
I am guessing Joe is looking back at data from a few years ago to try spot any correlations between training load and performance.
It may provide an useful insight, although it can also be misleading if consideration of what else was going on at the time outside training isn’t considered. Sometimes what worked previously doesnt work as effectively in the present or future.
One thing seems to be a constant,…
consistency over the longest time you can tends to reward with improved performance.
That’s exactly the word I was landing on to understand it
Yeah what I seem to have found in bike data, tss, is a training load that is more cost for no benefit. I’m trying to do the same with running data, but I recorded hrTSS for a while, then I got a Garmin in ‘21 and Load data appears in June, then I stopped centralising run tss, then I setup power based run tss….you get the picture.
I see my best run results in 2021, my first and highest vo2 summer of 21, and it’s just steadily declined from there. So I’m thinking Load is my consistent data on impact of training since then if I want to find insights.
Equally your highest threshold seems to be when your 6 week average TSS is at its highest (without exception.) Only you can assess the cost to you verses the benefit, or you view it as no benefit.
I assume that in 2024 you acquired most TSS from activities that dont tend to have a significant impact on threshold. I guess there was more time but less quality. Was most TSS from longer Z2 outdoor rides without efforts? And less from threshold and above compared with other years?
As I said above, there is much value in considering the other facts that allows one to absorb the training, load is useless if it has no impact.
I suspect that if you analysed your training load looking at kJs (or TSS) above and below threshold you’d see a clearer picture of how training load impacts your performance.
WKO5 has Aerobic and Anerobic TIS, Training Impact scores, which is much more revealing than TSS or kJs in my opinion.
So this is about the rate of increase, not the end state.
So getting from 245 to 270 happens no faster if I’m at 200-250 or 300-350 TSS.
Spending four months at 300-350 is reasonable to conclude as a waste of effort.
Whether I then will continue to improve at 200-250 TSS at the same rate or will need to increase to 350+ to get higher than 270 is not supported by my data.
I think my data also supports that other training does not affect this correlation. I didn’t see any particular correlation in kjs which did surprise me a little.
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Running is a different story, again it’s easy to see what would improve my running, but it’s not clear what the minimum/optimum would be as the data is not so consistent.
A pattern emerging does look like a lot less than I thought - consistently applied - will get me back to my best. I’m still trawling through various data pools with this aim in mind…then I’ll move on to swimming.
But “improve” and your TSS number are different, right? Assuming you are retesting at least every now and then?
If your threshold power is increasing then you are clearly improving, even if TSS stays static, seeing as TSS is a function of FTP.
It’s more than conceivable to hold TSS at your c.270 figure for a long time, yet see FTP moving up and down. When it’s going up, you’re getting fitter. It’s back tk the same discussion about CTL not being equivalent to fitness. You can have a comparable CTL score heading into an A race of 120 in two consecutive years, but if your FTP was 50w higher in the second year, you’re clearly fitter in year 2. Yet would not see that in the CTL peak, or potentially TSS numbers.
Slightly aside, sounds like a new 975 is imminent. Can’t imagine there’ll be much to justify moving from a 965