Trying to understand structured trainings

[iLLucionist]

@bobw

TSS is just a metric to show that there’s an increased workload from week to week in the plans, it doesn’t equate to whether that workload is relevant to what you want to achieve, as the refrain goes: “not all TSS is equal”, some stress can come from work or relationship problems. You could make gains on a weekly TSS of 300 if that comes from the right workouts.

Thanks. Yes, it is difficult for me to gauge whether I am “on track” in terms of training and recovery. So far, it is really easy for me to do the trainings. As in, the training itself is just about right, feeling that I am really “done with it” after the training, but I feel fit again for the next training. So I think that is ok.

@bobw

It’s perhaps more useful to look at it if you begin to feel tired and start to quit workouts and/or reduce the intensity of them. It helps to keep a diary, even just making notes in the provided field on each workout can help, then you can look back and figure out your maximum effective TSS. Indoor training could be summarised as: “do something very effective then recover properly”. Just adding more workouts, indoor or outdoor, can eat into that recovery.

Thanks, that’s really informative. So far good. Most difficult part for me is getting enough sleep, I track my sleep now with Sleep Cycle, averaging about 7h22m of actual sleep over the last month. Hopefully that will be more close to 8h over time.

@bobw

It seems typical that people don’t see much improvement over SSB1, a little over SSB2 but then get all the gains in Build.

Thanks, I was wondering about that.

@bobw

Your Strava fitness score might just be naturally levelling off - there’s nothing to say it has to increase all the time.

It actually declined significantly since I shifted from outside riding to inside riding and structured workouts on my Tacx Neo 2. But I think this says more about strava than about TrainerRoad. It is not really clear how exactly fitness is calculated, except that something is done mathematically to average power and “relative effort” (heart rate?). So I trust TrainerRoad more than I do Strava.