@Jonathan it would be good to have a follow up on how to ramp into big rides.
Based on stats last year my Saturday club ride is around 240 TSS, my Sunday is around 300 TSS. My six week avg TSS is… … …236!
I have been holding off this year until now, but now it’s May I can’t hold back much more. So last week I joined them only for 1h, 2h20 total ride with 142 TSS and completed the next hard Anaerobic workout on Tuesday no problem but skipped the Thursday endurance ride, albeit due to long working hours.
Perhaps a follow up analysis on what happens if these big rides become regular weekly rather than one off..?
I had to back down the Z2 rides a while ago and have been happy since. .75 IF is too much to recover from day in day out. Maybe it would make more sense for the person doing 5-8 hours a week but I’ve been consistently 10-12 the last 2 months and it was burying me.
So having listened and learned, I did an even longer ride today. Burned out at the cafe stop and crawled the last 25km home. However, I have discovered a way to avoid Jon’s very concerning issues - my power meter died at 57km out of 105. So half the TSS!
The hard anaerobic session on Tuesday will now be a breeze - phew.
Joking aside, if a weekend ride is 240 TSS, then to stay under the 50% rule then I need to be doing 480TSS during the week - have I got that right?
The 50% seems like a reasonable guideline, but I think it also matters how that tss was generated. A chill 300tss endurance ride is going to leave a very different mark compared to a 300tss ride with lots of intensity. Not all tss is created equal, etc. And it also probably depends on how trained you are for the type of effort. If that big ride includes your first proper vo2 max efforts of the season, it’s going to leave you more wrecked than if you just wrapped a block of vo2 max.
The 50% thing is a good ballpark estimate. I would point out that there are situations where you’ll wanna break it though.
The reasoning that a longer ride increases the risk of missing the next hard workout, relies of the assumption that the hard ride (some shorter interval session) is more important than the long ride to meet your training goals.
While this is usually true even for ultra oriented riders, there are times and periods in my training where the main goal is get used to being on the bike all day. In these periods, the long ride is the hard ride for the week, and I’ll drop intensity out to facilitate it.
The analysis afaik didn’t look at endurance rides. So big rides in this context is JUST big rides with a lot of SS and above.
It’s pretty easy to smash for a long group ride and end up with an unproductive amount of time in these zones.
It’s less common someone schedules themselves excessive amounts of intervals.
I would have really liked to see some data including endurance rides to see how that differs. I’d assume you can recover from much higher volumes of easy z2 than of harder rides. This is why it’s traditionally been so key in building volume.
I can’t remember if he explicitly mentioned the criteria, but I recall the discussion being based on TSS. So, if you do a ride that is over 50% of your weekly TSS, that’s the rule. It doesn’t care how that TSS was generated. Probably good enough for general guidelines, but I think the intensity matters. Doing a big TSS day of endurance will be a lot of hours on the bike, but doesn’t result in the same level of fatigue as a hard day with similar TSS (in my experience). TSS is a metric that attempts to normalize training stress across different zones, but it’s far from perfect.
I also wonder about the impact races had on the analysis. I would think it would be fairly common for a low volume athlete to exceed the 50% rule any time they had a big race day (gravel, marathon MTB, etc.). And I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s a race or just a long weekend ride if both are affecting future workouts. But at that point, do you really want to skip a fun B/C race to make sure you are fresh for intervals the following week? Maybe, but at some point the racing has benefits beyond the physiological training aspect. And fun races can help break up the grind of structured training. I think the main theme here is that trying to quickly build fitness by cramming a bunch of extra work into a short period is usually not going to end well.
Maybe this is caused by people riding their “endurance” rides right at 75%?
Just finished a 900tss week with a 400 and a bit tss ride and legs feel perfectly fine. But the intensity was below 65% with no real spikes and fueling was >100/hr.
I guess I thought that all of the analysis that they did were scoped similarly to the 1st one, where they explicitly stated SS and above was in scope.
Looking at the 2nd analysis, it included “340k hard workouts.” Inflection point was found at a single ride at or above 50% weekly TSS, and impact was increased skip likelihood of next “hard session”
If we assume that they’re changing up which rides are included for each study, its ambiguous as to whether or not the 340k included rides included any easier long rides. “hard workouts” could mean either workouts with big TSS, or if could mean workouts with high enough IF and a big TSS.
After looking at it again, it still reads to me that the rides they selected in scope would have been the later, meaning (approximately) SS and above. “hard workouts” and “hard session” seem synonymous.
It also more strongly supports their conclusion that you don’t want to over-do a single ride, if you exclude endurance. Common knowledge has been that hard interval workouts have a much higher fatigue cost. So if you’re doing an analysis on fatigue cost, higher intensity rides would be where you’d expect to show the biggest impact.
I’d love a clarification though, I can see how people would interpret the results different me.
The 340k rides included in that analysis was not filtered for zone. This allows us to be able to see those big endurance rides
The hard rides that were or were not skipped thereafter were part of the 340k total that were analyzed, but we of course had to filter those for SS and above to make sure they were hard rides.
Each analysis had a different total number of rides analyzed due to filtering criteria necessary for the context of the analysis.
Not sure I agree with this. A chill ride of 300 TSS is like 7+ hours, where an intense ride could be 4. The chill ride also has by definition significantly higher kjs. This is probably an unpopular opinion, bit I think the whole idea of TSS is to be able to say that rides of varying durations and intensifies ARE created equal.
I got to thinking about this with your post because I realized that both scenarios you offered up would equally (and totally) wreck me.
Just my thoughts based on my own data. n=1. For me I’ve found I’m not ready for long rides or races unless I work up to long rides and races.
If I roll out of bed after and ride a 100%+ weekly TTS ride after a few months of a TR plan that never has a ride over 2.hrs and really 95% are 1.5 hrs or less it’s a huge shock to the system. Of course I’m more likely to skip a workout. I’m suffering and need lots of real revovery. The nature of TRs plans to this point this is a logical result. Dynamic endurance is new, and largely and unexplained add on. Jonathan proves the point with the data. Elimination of endurance rides from the data set just amplified the conclusion.
I don’t think it’s an unpopular opinion, the entire concept of TSS is to normalize training stress across different types of efforts. It does a decent job of it and that’s how most of the tools/metrics look at TSS, but it’s far from perfect and it’s a very individual thing. I do a lot of volume in my training and a lot of that is long easy rides. They don’t leave much of a mark when I’m really trained/fit. I’m not saying a 6-7 hour ride at .7IF isn’t going to create some fatigue, it’s just very different that going out and doing 4 hours at .85IF (despite the 4 hours being a little lower TSS). I’d be pretty wrecked after pushing that hard for 4 hours and would certainly not be fresh the next day. At least that’s my experience. And while not everyone would agree, I often hear people say “Not all TSS is created equal” and I know that’s how it works for me.
