Some people also apparently believe that COVID-19 is caused 5GE.
I discovered this last year when I noticed SSB TSS training ravaging my body much more than equivalent TB TSS. So, I am nodding in agreement with your contention, I would say we should think more in terms of IF and duration. The general statement (we often hear see in this community) I can tolerate X tss/week is less informative than many think it is.
In a given block it is informative but no more so than duration. I am guessing many of us even the more knowledgeable are pushing the TSS idea past its true usefulness.
For any given time period there are new cyclists that start training, start considering TSS, and eventually find out that TSS accumulated at or near threshold is different from TSS accumulated at or near VT1 which is different than TSS accumulated at or near anaerobic capacity.
Why? Because the human body has three energy systems (or about) and TSS has only one equation. 
So that’s a basic flaw of TSS as it’s most commonly defined. It would be better if it were scaled based on what energy system was primarily employed in the workout. I’m not smart enough to figure out how to do that for the general case & so far nobody else has been smart enough, either.
TSS and it’s derivatives work better w/in the scope of TR because TR concerns itself primarily with training at or near threshold. One of the advantages of sweetspot training is that it keep intensity within a narrower range so it’s easier to compare last year’s TSS with this year’s TSS.
I don’t think disconsider is a word. But, still, I like it. If we all agree to use it at least once a day maybe we could get it on the books by this time next year.
If being exposed to 5g signals caused some disease, I would well and truly be dead by now.
I mean, this is kinda how TSS is calculated. It even takes into account that power over FTP will have a larger impact than power below but including IF^2 in the formula.
It’s definitely not perfect but it does attempt to take into account a lot of what people are mentioning here.
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How about instead of insulting me you put your cards on the table. What do you believe fitness is???
I’m sorry, I didn’t know that you believed that hoax?
Fitness can be measured many ways. FTP is one, but CTL is not.
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But TSS = IF (squared) x duration?
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Yes, but as is well acknowledged information gets lost in the combination. Most of the derivatives we use, we tend to push too far and TSS is definitely one of them.
You’re still afraid to actually say anything. What is fitness?
As I said, fitness can be measured many ways. 1 RM, for example, would be a good measure for a strength athlete. For cyclists, though, FTP is the most important and accessible way of quantifying fitness.
Nope, person A is fitter! I don’t know anybody who would even attempt to argue differently. Fitness is a measure of your ability to perform a specific task or role. If the task is cycling then person A is fitter. With a few possible exceptions like maybe person B is a better sprinter, or weighs a lot more therefore has a higher total FTP and so may have the edge on a flat TT.
Now maybe at some point in the future person B’s extra training will mean they’re fitter. But it might also be the case that they’re extremely inefficient with their training. Or they have bad sleep habits. Or they eat a lot of crap and are 30kg overweight. Or maybe person A is an ex-pro with awesome genes and 20 years of doing huge training volume which means they’re never going to drop below 3W/kg however little training they do. CTL/TSS doesn’t tell you any of that.
Where I come from, disconsider is a perfectly cromulent word.
TSS, I contend, is more useful when trying to compare open road (sub in your favored riding) rides where we are generally exposed to a wider variety of power challenges. So an understatement of high IF demand is washed out by overstatements of demand during low IF efforts.
When we are training in a narrow IF range, time by itself should be sufficient.
Isn’t that what TiZ does? Establish your zones [dominant energy systems] and calculate. Or even be clever and weight each zone by the proportional contribution of each energy system; then you would have TiES [time in energy system] for each system.
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Also what TrImp Zone & TrImp Exp did. Nothing new under the sun, I guess. Never seemed to catch on.
I think it’s a good idea! Practical application seems to be challenging, though. Maybe because there is significant individual variability in scale factors for various zones. Probably also because zones aren’t distinct but overlap substantially. Or maybe I should say primarily because zones aren’t distinct and overlap substantially.
I’ll actually agree with you. That wasn’t the best example because yeah I’ll take an undertrained rider with 3W/kg over a 2W/kg rider over pretty much any course. But that point I was (poorly and that’s on me) trying to make is that CTL correlates to fitness as does FTP.
Perhaps a better way to explain my thinking is that because FTP is not the end of the story, we have to figure out a way to relate it to the specific training we’re doing as well. In a race there are lots of things that can affect performance. FTP doesn’t tell you what a rider’s power curve looks like, thus how they might be able to cover attacks or go solo off the front.
If a rider has been training a lot (high CTL) I think it’s pretty safe to say they will be more effective in utilizing that FTP specific to the way they have been training. A rider who is more effective in using their FTP specific to their event will have better performance results in a race. And regardless of how you define the word “fitness” you would think that the "fitter’ rider will have better performance results.
I don’t think CTL = “fitness” by any definition. I don’t think FTP = “fitness.” I don’t think FTP * CTL = “fitness.” But I do think that CTL and FTP both correlate to “fitness” albeit coming at it from different angles. Therefore think is that CTL * FTP will correlate better than either of those two metrics together, especially when compared with the same athlete training for the same or similar events.
True, but CTL doesn’t either! FTP at least gives you a pretty good idea of what the power curve looks like between maybe 15 and 45 minutes. And if you want to know what the rest of the power curve looks like then the simple answer is…go look at your power curve for the season. CTL is a measure of how much work you’re doing to get fit, it’s not a measure of how fit you are.
Hi all,
I’ve launched that questions because in this pandemic I saw this TSS talk raising exponential and wonder if I was missing something but after reading my colegues comments I realized that is not the case.
We’ve got addicted to those numbers but for me the only use I see would be for modeling and now I’ve got assured we still don’t have such a tool.
A training plan is imperative but forget you will get a prediction of what your fitness level will in X weeks due the fact all tools I’ve seen are based in TSS and unless you keep rising it week after week (which I know to be impossible) you won’t see that desired CTL curve going up.
A simple hour&Zone (IF) plan is all we need. Like the generic on bellow where of course you do adjust it to attend your specificity.
Great are the threads where everyone spends a bunch of time arguing and just like politics and religion, no one really has their opinion’s changed. That said, I will throw my unconvincing $.02 into the mix 
Take twins identical in every way with the same genetic capacity and off the couch FTP.
One does nothing for a decade.
One trains for a decade.
After 10 years the untrained twin has a CTL of 0.
The other has a CTL of > 0 but the number itself is arbitrary.
While they both have an identical genetic capacity, the trained twin would be more fit, which by the definition of the word fitness would be more, “physically fit and healthy.”
This fitness would be expressed numerically in some capacity through the fit/trained twin’s higher CTL relative to its sibling which would have a decade long CTL of 0.
While CTL may nor may not be “the best measure” of fitness, it is absolutely “a measure” of fitness. Otherwise, both twins would have the same CTL either sitting on the couch or training for a decade.
I will await the responses telling me how this is incorrect 
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