“Is there another/better way to measure training stress other than TSS? I.e. in showing TSS did not accurately measure stress, how was the training stress measured to know TSS was not accurate?”
DaveWhelan, there are a lot of interesting answers to THAT question, for sure! I am not qualified to comment on most of them probably.
But do consider the approach that TR has taken to this problem (probably without knowing it), which is to apply a notch filter to TSS. In other words, the bulk of training stimulus TR guides it’s user base to is in a pretty narrow range of intensity factor. If we all focus most of our training on a sweet spot intensity we can be more confident that Rider A’s 350TSS week is a pretty similar training stress to Rider B’s 350TSS week.
On the other hand, if Rider A does 90% of his riding in Zone 2 while Rider B focuses on a sweet spot intensity…Rider A’s 350TSS week is going to be a very different training stress to Rider B’s 350TSS week.
In reality, it seems to me that 70% of all debate about training regiment stems from the fact that TSS UNDERreports training load at higher intensities and OVERreports training load at lower intensity. And most folks who use TSS for any period of time implicitly understand this is true. If I told you I regularly do back-to-back-to-back 600+ TSS weeks the first thing you might suspect is that I’m just spinning around in Z2/recovery for a lot of hours…because you understand that 600+ TSS at a sweet spot intensity is a LOT of training load but 600+ TSS at a Z2 intensity, while still a lot of training load, is easier to achieve.
I know for sure that Bannister published but I only have his work on an ancient medium called a ‘photocopy’.