Is managing recovery/fatigue just by TSS accurate enough?

First of all, the answer is no. Second of all, as I’ve said many times, even inexperienced cyclists intuitively know this is true.

For instance, imagine three cyclists that want to achieve a CTL of 100. They each adopt a differenct strategy. Cyclist A goes out every day and rides at 115% of FTP until Cyclist A accumulates 100 TSS. Cyclist B goes out every day and rides for 1 hour at FTP. Cyclist C goes out every day and rides at Z2 until cyclist A accumulates 100 TSS.

Which cyclist is more likely to achieve the 100 CTL mark? I would argue that really only Cyclist C has a shot at success. The reason is: not all TSS are created equal. VO2max work requires more recovery than Threshold work. Threshold work requires more recovery than Z2 work.

Every cyclist intuitively knows this is true. Even TRIMP (which TSS/CTL was copied from) contemplated this fact. We only kid ourselves with uniform TSS as a matter of convenience.

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