I think this scenario might sound familiar to many of us-
You sit down to create the perfect training plan, you come up with the most optimistic/unrealistic volume you could ever possibly accomplish, pick your plan, but then wonder why you’re failing workouts or falling short of the TSS target. You then blame the plan type, workout makeup, or a misspelled comment from Chad as the reason you failed.
Just me?
Either way, it seems like it would be useful to have a Personal Records type tool to evaluate 6-week TSS averages. Like to be able to see the highest 6-week rolling TSS you were able to maintain for a given time period.
A classic TR plan is 22 weeks long between Base, Build, and Specialty and I’m willing to bet that very few of us haven’t seen a significant drop in TSS during some period in that 22 weeks, assuming we even complete the overall plan in the first place.
This tool might help us to pick a more realistic and attainable volume for our training. After all, the TR coaches and pretty much any coach will tell you that the best plan is the one you can actually complete.
If anything I think this would tempt people to pick higher volume plans. Highest TSS numbers for me have invariably been when I’ve had lots of time on my hands and have used that time to go do a lot of fairly unstructured aerobic riding. Unfortunately as I discovered fairly quickly with TR, the ability to rack up >700 TSS/week doing 15+ hours of riding with lots of z2 and tempo does NOT translate to an ability to handle <500 TSS/week doing 9 hours of high volume sweet spot base!
I guess I’m a lot more likely to look at it through the lens of “even during what was maybe the least “life” heavy period of training I was still only able to sustain x TSS for a handful of weeks so why would I set myself up for failure by trying to match that for 22 weeks?”
I can see how this could be useful (for you: make yourself a spreadsheet!) for comparisons like 2022 Base vs 2021 Base vs 2020 Base. Or 2022 Build vs 2021 Build. Not so much for comparisons across different training phases though, as the law of not all TSS being created equal applies.
While not searchable, this information is right at the top of the Calendar screen on the web. Not hard to scroll back through recent seasons and see what you did.
Yes and yes, to an extent. Across an individual workout for sure but I’m willing to bet comparing the actually accomplished 22-week Base, Build, Specialty plan TSS from say last offseason or the last two offseasons would make sense.
You’re also wanting to compare apples to apples. If I’m comparing past BBS volumes to potential future ones it’s going to account for your “not all TSS is created equal” comment (which I’m in total agreement on) because you’re comparing the last base vs. this base, last build vs. this build, etc.
Yeah but without making a spreadsheet as someone mentioned it’s not easy to effectively see your 10 or 20 or even 30-week rolling TSS average. My point is too often we look at our best 6-week average (or so) and then pick a plan based on that. Taking the average of that 6-week average over a loooonger chunk of time is going to give us a far more achievable target to shoot for.
It would also allow us to perhaps do the season match thing across multiple 10 or 20-week TSS windows, see where, when, and why the dropoffs in TSS occurred, and then try to address those barriers. I know for me if I can set myself up for success by assuming the same things are going to go wrong (because they always do) then I’m a lot more likely to hit my target and all the better if it’s a realistic one because I factored in what I’ve actually accomplished in the past.
It’s also probably a fairly basic tool to create for TR, given they already have the TSS data so adapting power records and season match style expression ought to be fairly straightforward (says the guy who asks for help with pdfs sometimes).
Right?! I don’t know, and neither does anyone else without a decent amount of digging. That’s sorta what this tool would give you but be searchable across various durations just like the power records chart.
Sorta perhaps. I feel like having the ability to use their season match with my hypothetical TSS records chart would allow me to say compare October through January of this offseason to October through January of last or the one before in a way that CTL wouldn’t easily capture.
That being said, all of this is certainly just a different angle or lens on data we can already collect, but I think it could be one more and perhaps a better than existing way of helping to identify what volume you actually ought to pick.
I like the idea of having an adherence metric that would help you objectively reflect on the training volume that is sustainable for you. I will pass this on to the team!
As with all feature requests, introducing something like this will depend on our bandwidth and how it fits in with our current priorities.
As @admill mentions, at the moment, you can view your current and historical 6-week average TSS using the Training Stress chart on the website, as shown below:
