I’d like to ride z2 or recovery between training days, is there a way to know TSS that will not trigger adaptation?
It may trigger a yellow or red day but that’s just sort of an advisor and nothing is adapting unless it’s a red that triggers a rest day, but you still have a choice. It doesn’t seem like a z2 ride would do that so nothing to worry about.
If you’re a PL 3 and you do a PL 3.4 but your next z2/endurance ride was a PL 3.2 that may trigger an adaptation but again unless you have it set to automatically accept all you can just ignore it. Or since you can do it just accept.
Neither is specifically TSS related as far as triggering so there is no number anyone can give you to avoid it.
I understand that the adaptation changes are not made for no reason and that they take my current load into account. I want to adjust the load so that it does not affect my training in any way.
Load is only a small portion of what it is looking at for adaptations so there isn’t any number or single factor you can use to measure whether its going to impact your plan or not.
Your training will be impacted no matter what you do, whether that is good or bad depends on the type of work it is and the rest of what you are doing.
I tried different options: a ride in zone 1–2 with a TSS of 10–15 almost never triggers adaptation, especially if there is a rest day after it. On the other hand, a ride with the same intensity but a TSS of 100 does trigger adaptation, even if there is a rest day after it. I would like to know the exact number, and if adaptation depends not only on TSS, then what else does it depend on?
There is no exact number.
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Hey @ztsv 
Well, we can’t give out the secret sauce on what goes into our fatigue management system, can we? haha
As @mrtopher1980 mentioned, there isn’t an exact number as it can change day to day. The system takes into account your training history to make those decisions, so a ride that triggered a Red Day tomorrow may not trigger it a few weeks down the road.
The idea with fatigue management is to prevent long-term fatigue to keep your training productive, thus bringing with it more fitness. So as you train, recover, and get fitter, the amount of TSS you can take on changes, and so do the Yellow/Red Days.
You can experiment with your easy rides in between interval days and see what triggers a Yellow/Red Day for you, but it would be impossible to give you an exact number.
Also, these are recommendations, so you can make the call on accepting them or not. Of course, we recommend always accepting them, but there may be others that you will decide to decline, based on feel.
All this makes training by TSS quite confusing. For example, when using TRIMP-based training I can always calculate TRIMP to keep the ATL/CTL ratio slightly below zero. I’m almost certain that you calculate the planned weekly TSS and then adapt the workouts to reach the target TSS with a predictable intensity factor. It’s a pity you don’t publish the calculation details, I think the formulas would be relatively simple.
It’s definitely not that, as you can follow a plan and still get yellow and red days and adaptations.
Whether the formulas are simple or not, they have chosen not to share them. It’s not about complexity.
While following the plan, they can compare metrics (such as heart rate and cadence) during exercise blocks with similar blocks from past activities and measure performance. They can also analyze RPE and compare it with other users and past activities. In other words, the data for analysis is available and easy to compare. When doing an outdoor workout not from the TrainerRoad plan, they simply have nothing to compare it with, and I think everything depends entirely on TSS & IF.