Tuesday 31 December 2019

TSS? No way! TSSchippz!

Cyclists follow a plan based on certain values. They put their ftp watts, their workout avg watts and then the IF (Intensity Factor) appears (workout watts / ftp watts). From this value you get the TSS (Training Stress Score), a number that tells you how much intense your training was.

However, i didn’t like how those “points” are calculated, so i called my points as TSSchippz (like my nickname).


Then you collect every TSS of every workout in the week and you count your weekly TSS. After a few weeks you will have tons of data and values and you can calculate your ATL (Acute Training Load), CTL (Cronic Training Load) and your TSB (Training Stress Balance). Those three values means your 7-days-workload, your 42-days-workout and your level of freshness.

It’s crazy!
So many things can be calculated just writing your time and watts for every single workout you do!

The most important thing about this is that those values are something every (well, the most experienced, maybe, or every coach) cyclist follows.
Very interesting.


However, i didn’t like how those “points” are calculated because they weren’t fair to me. I trained on running, and studied it, for years and it wasn’t clear how a super easy, almost no sweat, ride could give more points than a few shorter all-out-do-or-die bursts.

A little math: 60’ very easy ride gives me about 33 TSS.
5 minutes all-out at mmp5’s PR gives me around 14 TSS.
That 60 minutes super-easy is something everybody can do every time. Instead, 5 minutes all-out effort isn’t so common and you cannot get the same points even if you do the hard effort twice (and doing it twice on a single workout is something nearly impossible)!
So i thought about a different method. I liked this system, but those TSS are off for me. They should be revisited.

I had a few discussions with other, real-outdoor, cyclist about those points and they said that i was wrong, that in the long term those added points from easier workouts will pay a lot more benefits compared to a short-harder program. Hence, the slow-longer gets more points than the fast-shorter.
I still didn’t like this, so i come up with my own TSS.

I called my points as TSSchippz (like my nickname).


TSSchippz follows the same calculation of regular TSS, but has a multiplier based on the MMP rode.
So, from mmp30’ to mmpmax (so every watt PR from 30 minutes to all-out max wattage) there is a multiplier on the calculator.
In order to clarify this thing i rewrite the example using my TSSchippz: 60’ very easy ride gives me about 33 TSSchippz.
5 minutes all-out at mmp5’s PR give me around 83 TSSchippz.
Slow, steady, sub-ftp efforts have the same calculation, but hard-over-ftp efforts have a certain multiplier (the shorter and harder, the higher).


I didn’t know if this new calculation would be of any utility but i liked this idea and i started creating a program, trying to estimate the future TSSchippz in order to see what kind of progress on the workload i can get.

Also, even gym exercises had a certain calculation based on number of sets, reps, kg and a multiplier the higher the near you are from your 1-RM.



To be continued on
.....my road from non-cyclist to Zwift Rank A+ (A. Gobbetti)

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