I’m a two sport 65yr old master (cycling of course, and martial arts). When I train at the dojo, the workouts are pretty intense, sometimes north of a (loosely) calculated TSS of 100 based on Garmin’s EPOC load. My question: is there any thought of somehow integrating sports outside of cycling in order to get credit for other-sport workouts? Thanks in advance and forgive me if this is already known.
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Why are you hoping for TSS credit for martial arts? To what end? To see a CTL number go up?
When you start mixing a bunch of different sports using a metric that was designed for cycling, then modified for swimming and running, the CTL number becomes less and less meaningful the more “stuff” you’re trying to represent with it, especially so if you’re not consistent with it.
I’ve answered this same question relative to weight lifting/strength combined with cycling, and my advice would be to keep cycling TSS separate and monitor the impact of your other sports separately, particularly sports that aren’t particularly useful towards cycling fitness specifically.
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I’d say it’s less about credit and more about fatigue management - TR will find it useful to know you are recovering from a mad session in the dojo when the plan is for a hard bike session. Try putting in an RPE 10 on your activity and see how the plan adjusts. Our running affects TR workouts without TSS being recorded.
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Not an option on any of the “other” activities. You can assign a tss but no rpe.
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Fun exercise for you: put a run on your calendar with RPE 1 recovery and find and set the duration just so that it triggers a yellow day (and 10 minutes less won’t trigger yellow). Then edit that run to 10 minutes less and set the RPE to 10. If you expect a yellow or red, you might be disappointed.
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Yeah, it definitely isn’t managing runs properly. I have a VO2 ride on Tuesday that triggers a yellow day on Wednesday, which is a run day. Thursday is an Endurance ride and has no traffic light. If I make my Wednesday run 1:45 minutes long and rate it a 10 (All Out), all that triggers on Thursday is a yellow day and a shortened Endurance ride. I would expect VO2 followed by a 1:45 ALL OUT run to trigger a red and probably cancel that next ride.
Nate did say in the Beta that they want to address running in the future.
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I’ve been trying to figure this out a bit too. I race my bike but also play soccer on Thursdays and Sundays which is a lot of Vo2 max sprinting and muscle damage on those days. I’ve been trying to figure out how much volume/intensity I can do on the bike working my TR plan in but when I put my soccer activities on the planning calendar it doesn’t change anything on my plan. For example this Thursday I have an 1.5 hour Anaerobic 5.5 PL workout on the calendar, I added my soccer and it stayed exactly the same, but if I do that full workout before my game I would be absolutely cooked. Going to keep experimenting and I’ve kind of figured out what I can manage but it does take some manual adjustment.
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I know what you’re saying, friend. I am coming to the realization that TR is not the place for a sports outside of cycling, running, and perhaps swimming (and that’s ok, you can’t be all things to all people). I feel like I should just look to Garmin for overall fitness and concentrate on TR for cycling fitness, but nothing more. If I track my rides through TR and my overall fitness load through Garmin (also not perfect) I should get a relatively complete picture.
Quick question for you… do you also track your hrv across your various disciplines?
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Yeah, Garmin is what I’ve been primarily using to track load as well. Intervals.icu also seems to incorporate load from my other activities well and gives me another way to look at the data and make sure things are tracking the same. I do track HRV across everything and just monitor my overall feeling of fatigue. Things have been going well though, since I started structured training again my Vo2 max and FTP have been increasing so I think I’m figuring it out. I just want to make sure I don’t overdo it and between races and games the main thing I still need to figure out is how to incorporate my recovery weeks efficiently.
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I also use intervals but I’m very new to it - like 2months. Quite complex! One of my issues is I’m very pigheaded and after years of martial arts I tend to not know when to stop (thanks Sensei!). It gets me in trouble for sure, which is why I want to be able to micromanage my efforts. After reading a number of posts to my question (thanks y’all - this is a great forum!) I can see that “one ring to rule them all" is probably not realistic at this point.
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I’m finding TR pretty hard to use as multisport user. I swim, run and ride but I think TR is giving too much TSS/load to swim and run which seems to distort my fatigue scores.
I’m tempted to just delete all other sports and only use it for cycling. It feels a bit counter productive though.
@Frankb @Sidi FWIW, I only put non-cycling activities in TR if it’s going to impact m riding. Cycling is my primary cardio activity, so I prioritize it, but I try to run once a week. I definitely add my runs in TR since I usually take the following day off from all cardio, or do a very easy spin. A couple of weeks ago we did a fairly aggressive 3 1/2 hour hike, so I added that. I use Training Peaks (paid) to schedule all of my activities and list the TR workouts so I have a complete picture of my week. Maybe not ideal but works. Intervals.icu is another great option and is free. I’m sure there are others that can do the job, too.
Yeah, but again, like with weight training, TSS is developed for aerobic endeavors, not explosive movements. Even using HR TSS doesn’t track fatigue from strength training or martial arts well enough to be useful. It’s using a screwdriver to hammer in a nail.
I always felt things were most accurate when I tracked running and cycling TSS, let swimming just be swimming (no TSS estimations), and marked my intense or hard swims otherwise and kept fatigue management at a more subjective level when incorporating swimming and strength training.
TSB worked pretty well with running and cycling combined, but beyond that the more stuff you put into it, the less useful it becomes until it’s just meaningless. Believe there are experts out there, perhaps even Coggan himself, that have stated that TSS by HR will always underestimate exertion/fatigue from strength training and other explosive endeavors.
Anyway, YMMV but over the course of 25 years of doing this stuff, I was never able to meaningfully use TSS to track anything outside of running and cycling, and in my coaching I largely use it as a weekly “check sum” and a longer term retrospective of training loads rather than an actual planning tool. The more “crap” you put into that, the less useful it becomes.
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@sidi @kurt.braeckel You’re both pretty much right. Cycling is cycling, MA is MA, soccer is soccer etc. TR isn’t equipped to measure sports outside of it’s small circle of influence (which is fine) and trying to wedge other sports into it is like pounding square pegs into round holes. Doesn’t work and really probably shouldn’t. Hard to use a measure based on power (TSS) in a sport that doesn’t have a way to measure power. Garmin seems to think they have it sorted but I think the jury is still out on that. Think I’m gonna take what appears to be the overarching suggestion: manage different sports differently and always use rpe and fatigue to gauge your training load across ALL your disciplines. Just don’t be an idiot like me and train when you so obviously need some rest lol!
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I run, cycle and strength train—no major goals this year other than continuing to build general fitness and hopefully progressing endurance abilities. At the moment, I’m using TR for sweetspot workouts once or twice a week, running easy mileage three to four times a week, and strength training twice a week.
Should I create a plan or stick with TrainNow?
May I respectfully suggest you start a new thread? This particular thread is about using TR to track other sports outside of cycling, running,.and swimming. You’re enquiring about the virtues of using a plan vs. TrainNow. Different subject…
The thread title doesn’t help(!) But Frank is right.
@nialljf
A plan saves you effort thinking what to do and how to progress.