Power Mentor Group with Shane & Marc - Closed. (Page 30)

Originally posted by WaterRat

Here is my TSS. Seems to match up to what Marc was saying. 221 fro the week with the breakdown being...

Threshold 1: 67
Threshold 2: 59
Sweet Spot: 95

Have a great day,
Ron

Originally posted by marcag

Now that we have done a week of training, let’s talk TSS.

TSS stands for training stress score.

Look at your 3 workouts from last week

The sum of the TSS you did is you weekly TSS. This week that will grow. Shane is very carefully growing our TSS score week over week.

What was the TSS for the various workouts you did ? Post it here. Let’s see if there is anything that stands out. For example if someone did a TSS of 90 in threshold 1, that’s a sign….of doping….I mean your CP is too low.

Sweat spot had a TSS of 95.

Originally posted by gsmacleod
Wait,I thought you were a social scientist?

Originally posted by dtoce

I would love to hear some conversation about selection of cadence. I know we should all 'find out optimal cadence'. Is it worthwhile to redo 5 or 20 minute tests with cadence 5 above and 5 below so see if you can help identify if one is more a 'masher' or a 'spinner'? Should we be trying to force cadence a bit to help with efficiency to try to spin at 90?

Cadence on the bike isn't the same as running and with no landing shock, there is much less injury risk by a slower cadence, so I'm wondering if this is a case where less could actually be better or does it just depend on your own muscle makeup...Hmmmm.

Originally posted by marcag

Now that we have done a week of training, let’s talk TSS.

TSS stands for training stress score. Although I also call it suffer score ?

Using the intensity and duration of a workout a score is given. This score can give “an idea” of how hard a workout is and can also be accumulated over days/weeks/months to guage overall training load.

Quick explanation of how it is calculated using your FTP. 1hour at 100% of FTP yields 100 TSS points.

When riding lower or higher than 100% you take the square of the intensity relative to FTP. So if you are riding at 80% of FTP that’s’ .8 squared = .64 x 100 = 64TSS points per hour. 70% would give .7 squared x 100 = 49TSS points per hour

So you can see that riding at 70% yields about half of the points of riding at 100%.

Go above 100% and you accumulate lots of TSS points. 120% squared = 1.44 so you would get 144 TSS points per hour. You can’t ride at 120% for an hour, but doing say 120% efforts for 30 seconds gets you points at a rate of 100pts/60min or .833 pts/30sec

Week 2 Threshold 1 theoretically gave 69TSS point
Week 3 Threshold 1 should give 74 TSS points. You can see why, look at the intensity and duration increases of some of the intervals

Look at your 3 workouts from last week

The sum of the TSS you did is you weekly TSS. This week that will grow. Shane is very carefully growing our TSS score week over week.

What was the TSS for the various workouts you did ? Post it here. Let’s see if there is anything that stands out. For example if someone did a TSS of 90 in threshold 1, that’s a sign….of doping….I mean your CP is too low.

Sweat spot had a TSS of 95. This one is higher mostly because it’s a 90min workout vs 60.

We’ll come back to “not all TSS is equal”. This is true, but I think it’s good for people to get a feel for what TSS is.

TSS will be the basis for the performance charts we will eventually look at.
TSS can be used to establish a budget for long distance racing. For example imagine a IM at 70% of FTP for 5h30hours. That .7^ * 100pts/hr * 5.5hr = 270TSS points.

There was a table that showed that a good age grouper with good preparation had a "budget" of 270TSS points, to be spent based on the duration and intensity (% of FTP).



We will discuss the other terms IF, NP, VI...bla bla bla....but for now, it's to get a feel for what TSS is and how different intensities rack up TSS points.
Get a feel for what a 70TSS point workout feels like. See the difference between Week 2 threshold 1 and week 3 threshold 1.

Originally posted by littlewj

Very interesting chart. It really shows how small the margin is you have to work with. Is there a similar chart for HIM's by chance? Sorry if this has been asked before, but when I start my half training in April, what weekly TSS score should I be targeting? I realize that at this point we are basically at the build stage.

Originally posted by RunningJoke

My TSS for the week were

Threshold 1 57
Sweet Spot 77
VO2 max 1 41

Are we getting different numbers because some of us are not holding the right power during the intervals? I thought I was following the workouts pretty accurately but my numbers look a lot smaller!
Jaime

Originally posted by marcag



Very much a personal opinion here. The whole cadence thing, unless you are in cooky ranges is overblown. There is literature about how fast/slow twitch make a difference, how one depletes glycogen faster.....but my personal opinion is you should ride in what is comfortable and be ready to ride in all ranges.

What I know from experience is that I tend to gravitate much higher on higher efforts. I was at 100 during testing. I use a computrainer which keeps me at a fixed wattage, so the cadence is very much a natural selection. Without a computrainer I would have to speed up/slow down cadence to hit a wattage if the wattage happened to be between two gears. But when I slow down my cadence it appears harder for me.

However, I think it's important to be able to ride at different cadences because terrain and gearing will force us there. As Tom found out, riding at 110-120rpm is sometimes necessary. So is climbing at 60-70

Also, on perfect flats, perfect gearing, I need to change cadence just to switch things up. Pedaling at a constant wattage/condtant cadence for 2.5hrs on a HIM is grueling. I go up and down.

I naturally tend to be very close to 90 on the run. 88 on slower runs, 92-93 if I step it up a bit.

Originally posted by RunningJoke

I got the numbers out of Golden Cheetah.

OK, I just used Trainer Road (where I actually did the workouts) to calculate the TSS and I got slightly different numbers. But Threshold was the one where my rest intervals were low, so this still seems pretty screwy.

Threshold 62
Sweet Spot 83
VO2 max 44

Originally posted by ligersandtions

Week 2 TSS for me looked like:

Threshold 1 - 75

VO2 1 - 58

Sweet Spot - 102

 

Then I did Sufferefest's Angels ride (at 90% on TR) and got another 77....and this ride felt really hard to me for some reason, though the TSS wasn't particularly huge

And then this afternoon, I did Week 3's Threshold 1 for an additional 80....and this ride felt MUCH better than yesterday's Angels.  Go figure....

 

Originally posted by dtoce
Have you seen this website that allows you to guesstimate your time on various courses?
http://www.cyclingpowerlab.com/PopularEventModels.aspx

Originally posted by marcag  Post the rides if you can

Originally posted by ligersandtions

Week 2 TSS for me looked like:

Threshold 1 - 75

VO2 1 - 58

Sweet Spot - 102

 

Then I did Sufferefest's Angels ride (at 90% on TR) and got another 77....and this ride felt really hard to me for some reason, though the TSS wasn't particularly huge

And then this afternoon, I did Week 3's Threshold 1 for an additional 80....and this ride felt MUCH better than yesterday's Angels.  Go figure....

 

Originally posted by marcag sorry I meant just attach the tcx files not screen shots

Originally posted by ligersandtions

Hah, I was actually wondering if the screen shots were going to be at all useful....let's see if I can figure out how to attach files...