Content counts

Submitted by Mark EWERS on Thu, 09/28/2006 - 8:45pm
Mark EWERS's picture

An interesting and illustrative question on the wattage list today. Someone made the following statement:

[Paraphrased] If I do 3 weekly 30 TSS rides, that is 90 TSS points/week, I end up with the same TSS that would be produced by a single 90 TSS L4 session on the trainer per week. My PMC would look exactly the same...

Well, not exactly. I did a quick bit of spreadsheet work to show that Performance Manager doesn't calculate TSB quite that way. Performance Manager gives your most recent workout the heaviest weight in calculating ATL, CTL and thus TSB.

Hence the title. With training, it's not just how much training you do but also how you train.

Lynda Wallenfels had a great reply that pretty well captures the effects of two different training programs which create the same CTL.

A CTL of 100 built with L4/5 work will produce a different rider than a CTL built purely on L1-2 work. Content counts.

Spot on.

ooh I'm flattered to be

LyndaW (not verified) wrote 5 years 32 weeks ago

ooh I'm flattered to be quoted :-) I had quite a few off-list comments on that post of mine...

Mark EWERS's picture

Rule #1

Mark EWERS wrote 5 years 32 weeks ago

Sometimes the obvious things elude us until they smack us in the face. The longer I train and watch what happens with my performance the more I realize there aren't many hard and fast rules to the higher performance game. The corollary is those few rules matter, a lot.

Rule number 1: Spend your TSS wisely.

Mark Ewers
I may not be fast, but I'm 2 old 2 go slow